Joel Mowbray
http://www.FrontPageMag.com
October 2, 2006
Heading into November, Democrats potentially have a story that ought to be both feel-good and helpful in appealing to a small, but growing constituency. The Democratic Congressional candidate for Minnesota’s very blue Fifth District is on the verge of becoming the first-ever Muslim elected to Congress.
But embracing the candidate poses enormous risks. Keith Ellison has a disturbing history with the Nation of Islam and has received financial and other help from a self-identified supporter of Hamas.
Over the next two months, the Democrats will need to embrace or distance itself from Ellison. Democratic credentials on national security could be undermined if they fail to denounce a candidate closely allied with someone that a senior Democrat described as having “intimate connections to Hamas.”
Known for months has been that Ellison was involved in the 1990’s with the Nation of Islam, which even he now concedes is racist and anti-Semitic. In a letter of apology to the local Jewish community, Ellison claimed that he was never a member of the NOI and thus didn’t realize until later the organization's ugly ideology. But according to press accounts at the time, Ellison served as NOI spokesman at a 1997 public hearing where he defended—in his own words—“the truth” of a government official’s supposed comment that “Jews are the most racist white people.”
Only learned recently and far more troubling is Ellison’s seemingly tight connection with Nihad Awad, co-founder of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), whom he met almost two decades ago at the University of Minnesota.
Ellison’s campaign obviously has downplayed the affiliation with Awad. But here are the facts: Awad headlined a fundraiser last month that the campaign estimates netted $15,000 to $20,000, and in July, and it appears that CAIR's co-founder bundled contributions totaling just over $10,000. (The campaign issued a terse denial on the latter point, though it refused to explain away overwhelming evidence to the contrary.) The campaign has gone so far as to suggest that Awad did all this without having any contact with someone he’s known since the late 1980’s.
The Democrat’s supporters have taken a different tack. Rather than defend Awad or downplay his connections to the candidate, Ellison partisans have attempted to paint attacks on the candidate as overtly partisan or even bigoted. A Minneapolis Star Tribune columnist, for example, recently suggested that Ellison is under attack solely for being Muslim.
But it is top Democrats that have issued some of the most stinging rebukes of CAIR. Dick Durbin of Illinois, the Senate’s second-leading Democrat, has said that CAIR “is unusual in its extreme rhetoric and its association with groups that are suspect.” Sen. Charles Schumer of New York, who chairs the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, has stated flatly that CAIR “has ties to terrorism.” Sen. Schumer has special disdain for Awad and CAIR’s other co-founder, Omar Ahmad, saying in a 2003 hearing that both men have “intimate connections with Hamas.”
The words most damning to CAIR, though, have been uttered by its co-founders. At Barry University in Florida in 1994, Awad declared, “I’m in support of the Hamas movement.” Addressing a youth session at the 1999 Islamic Association of Palestine convention in Chicago, Ahmad glorified suicide bombers who “kill themselves for Islam”: “Fighting for freedom, fighting for Islam, that is not suicide. They kill themselves for Islam.” (Transcript provided by the Investigative Project.)
Despite representing the Nation of Islam and currently affiliating with Awad, Ellison has received the unabashed support of the Minnesota Democrat-Farm-Labor Party and its activists. He won the party’s official endorsement in May, then won what was essentially a three-way primary last week with 41%. Praise has not yet poured in, however, from national Democrats.
While Democrats need to win every seat possible race in order to take control of the House, distancing the party from Ellison likely would not cost him the victory in a district Kerry won with 71%. Which means that Democrats could give Ellison an ultimatum to sever ties with CAIR and Awad without risking losing the seat.
Even if cold-shouldering Ellison could result in a win-win, the party would risk alienating Muslims, a small, but potent voting bloc in several key states. Democrats might well prefer to bask in the glow of “first Muslim in Congress” stories that are sure to start running even before November.
Right now, Democrats in Washington appear divided. The Democratic National Committee referred this columnist to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and that organization dodged questions about the candidate, offering only this platitude: “We feel confident that Minnesota families will decide to send him to Congress this November.”
At a certain point, especially if controversy surrounding Ellison and his affiliations mounts, national Democrats likely will respond decisively. But even if they choose to remain silent, his welcome on Capitol Hill if he wins, particularly what committee assignments he receives, could be scrutinized not just by Republicans, but even many Democrats.
No wonder national Democrats are taking their time.
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Joel Mowbray is author of Dangerous Diplomacy: How the State Department Threatens America’s Security.
Monday, October 02, 2006
Sunday, October 01, 2006
Jonathan Last: Post-9/11 Conflicts Rooted in History
It's not just Afghanistan, Iraq and a "war on terror." It's the West vs. the Islamic world, a clash that has never abated.
By Jonathan Last
The Philadelphia Inquirer
October 1, 2006
Soon after 9/11, the Bush administration labeled the conflict into which it plunged this country the "war on terror." But this is no more descriptive than calling the fight in Iraq a "war on IEDs." The more pressing question is: Are we, or are we not, engaged in a larger clash of civilizations?
If the answer is "We are," the clash long predates 9/11, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and George W. Bush. It predates America itself. It is a clash between Western civilization and the Islamic world.
Harvard professor Samuel Huntington first made this case in 1993, in his famous article "The Clash of Civilizations" in the journal Foreign Affairs. "Conflict along the fault line between Western and Islamic civilizations has been going on for 1,300 years," he wrote. After the founding of Islam, Muslims spread their faith by the sword. Islam conquered North Africa and pushed into Europe, where it ruled in Sicily, Spain, Portugal, and parts of France. Twice, the forces of Islam laid siege to Vienna. For 1,000 years, Islam advanced and Christendom retreated.
As Pope Benedict XVI explains in his book Without Roots, the very concept of "Europe" emerged as a reaction to the surge of Islam. Not until the failure of the second Turkish siege of Vienna in 1683 did the Islamic tide recede definitively. For the next 300 years, Western civilization was ascendant and the Islamic world stagnated.
But the conflict between the two cultures never fully abated. Throughout the 20th century, Western countries tussled with Islamic states or their non-state proxies. And, as columnist Mark Steyn points out, when you gaze at conflicts around the globe today, the one constant is Islam. Muslims are fighting, or have recently fought, Jews in the Mideast, Hindus in Kashmir, Christians in Nigeria, atheists in Russia, Buddhists in Thailand and Burma, Catholics in the Philippines, and Orthodox Christians in the Balkans.
Some argue that these conflicts arise not from a clash of civilizations, but from specific grievances, such as the West's support of Israel. This is an unsatisfactory argument. In his 1990 essay "The Roots of Muslim Rage," professor Bernard Lewis pointed out: "The French have left Algeria, the British have left Egypt, the Western oil companies have left their oil wells, the westernizing shah has left Iran, yet the generalized resentment of the fundamentalists... against the West and its friends remains and grows and is not appeased."
The cause of conflict is not what the West does, but what the West is. Lewis gives two examples. When Israel was first founded, U.S. support was less than wholehearted. Instead, it was the Soviet Union that, through its proxy Czechoslovakia, sent Israelis arms to defend themselves in their first war. In 1956, the United States intervened to help force the British and French out of Egypt. Still, through the '50s and '60s, the Muslim world joined with the Soviets in resenting America.
In November 1979, Islamic terrorists took control of the Great Mosque in Mecca. In Islamabad, a Muslim mob was outraged. The response was to attack and burn - the U.S. Embassy. If Western opinion on the clash is divided, many Islamic voices are quite candid on the subject.
"The war with Israel is not about a treaty, a cease-fire agreement, Sykes-Picot borders, national zeal, or disputed borders," Ayman al-Zawahiri explained this year. "It is rather a jihad for the sake of God until the religion of God is established."
Zawahiri, of course, is an al-Qaeda leader. But the views of other Islamic leaders sound similar.
"Let the entire world hear me. Our hostility to the Great Satan is absolute," Hezbollah's Hassan Nasrallah said in 2002. "Death to America will remain our reverberating and powerful slogan."
Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad proclaimed in 2005: "[We] will soon experience a world without the United States, and Zionism and will breathe in the brilliant time of Islamic sovereignty over today's world."
"It is not the world against Iraq. It is the West against Islam," wrote Safar Al-Hawali, dean of Islamic Studies at Umm Al-Qura University in Mecca. This last quote, however, is not from 2003 - it is from 1990, and Hawali was speaking about the first Gulf War.
Two lessons and three caveats here. Lesson one: When we face horrors such as the Beslan school massacre, the assassination of Theo van Gogh, the bombings in Bali, or the beheading of Daniel Pearl, we are seeing not a response to this policy or that action, but the latest episode in a long, historic struggle. Second: No matter how frightening, sometimes you must take your adversaries at their word.
First caveat: Appearances can deceive, and even the wise can be wrong. Second, even if this is a clash, it still could be short-circuited via unforseen events (such as the invention of a hydrogen fuel cell, or the rise of a great Muslim teacher who persuades millions to reject fundamentalism).
Finally, as Lewis writes:
"There is something in the religious culture of Islam which inspired, in even the humblest peasant or peddler, a dignity and a courtesy toward others never exceeded and rarely equaled in other civilizations."
If we accept that this is a clash between civilizations, two questions face us: How does this change our thinking? And the painful one: What do we do about it?
Contact Jonathan V. Last at jlast@phillynews.com.
By Jonathan Last
The Philadelphia Inquirer
October 1, 2006
Soon after 9/11, the Bush administration labeled the conflict into which it plunged this country the "war on terror." But this is no more descriptive than calling the fight in Iraq a "war on IEDs." The more pressing question is: Are we, or are we not, engaged in a larger clash of civilizations?
If the answer is "We are," the clash long predates 9/11, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and George W. Bush. It predates America itself. It is a clash between Western civilization and the Islamic world.
Harvard professor Samuel Huntington first made this case in 1993, in his famous article "The Clash of Civilizations" in the journal Foreign Affairs. "Conflict along the fault line between Western and Islamic civilizations has been going on for 1,300 years," he wrote. After the founding of Islam, Muslims spread their faith by the sword. Islam conquered North Africa and pushed into Europe, where it ruled in Sicily, Spain, Portugal, and parts of France. Twice, the forces of Islam laid siege to Vienna. For 1,000 years, Islam advanced and Christendom retreated.
As Pope Benedict XVI explains in his book Without Roots, the very concept of "Europe" emerged as a reaction to the surge of Islam. Not until the failure of the second Turkish siege of Vienna in 1683 did the Islamic tide recede definitively. For the next 300 years, Western civilization was ascendant and the Islamic world stagnated.
But the conflict between the two cultures never fully abated. Throughout the 20th century, Western countries tussled with Islamic states or their non-state proxies. And, as columnist Mark Steyn points out, when you gaze at conflicts around the globe today, the one constant is Islam. Muslims are fighting, or have recently fought, Jews in the Mideast, Hindus in Kashmir, Christians in Nigeria, atheists in Russia, Buddhists in Thailand and Burma, Catholics in the Philippines, and Orthodox Christians in the Balkans.
Some argue that these conflicts arise not from a clash of civilizations, but from specific grievances, such as the West's support of Israel. This is an unsatisfactory argument. In his 1990 essay "The Roots of Muslim Rage," professor Bernard Lewis pointed out: "The French have left Algeria, the British have left Egypt, the Western oil companies have left their oil wells, the westernizing shah has left Iran, yet the generalized resentment of the fundamentalists... against the West and its friends remains and grows and is not appeased."
The cause of conflict is not what the West does, but what the West is. Lewis gives two examples. When Israel was first founded, U.S. support was less than wholehearted. Instead, it was the Soviet Union that, through its proxy Czechoslovakia, sent Israelis arms to defend themselves in their first war. In 1956, the United States intervened to help force the British and French out of Egypt. Still, through the '50s and '60s, the Muslim world joined with the Soviets in resenting America.
In November 1979, Islamic terrorists took control of the Great Mosque in Mecca. In Islamabad, a Muslim mob was outraged. The response was to attack and burn - the U.S. Embassy. If Western opinion on the clash is divided, many Islamic voices are quite candid on the subject.
"The war with Israel is not about a treaty, a cease-fire agreement, Sykes-Picot borders, national zeal, or disputed borders," Ayman al-Zawahiri explained this year. "It is rather a jihad for the sake of God until the religion of God is established."
Zawahiri, of course, is an al-Qaeda leader. But the views of other Islamic leaders sound similar.
"Let the entire world hear me. Our hostility to the Great Satan is absolute," Hezbollah's Hassan Nasrallah said in 2002. "Death to America will remain our reverberating and powerful slogan."
Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad proclaimed in 2005: "[We] will soon experience a world without the United States, and Zionism and will breathe in the brilliant time of Islamic sovereignty over today's world."
"It is not the world against Iraq. It is the West against Islam," wrote Safar Al-Hawali, dean of Islamic Studies at Umm Al-Qura University in Mecca. This last quote, however, is not from 2003 - it is from 1990, and Hawali was speaking about the first Gulf War.
Two lessons and three caveats here. Lesson one: When we face horrors such as the Beslan school massacre, the assassination of Theo van Gogh, the bombings in Bali, or the beheading of Daniel Pearl, we are seeing not a response to this policy or that action, but the latest episode in a long, historic struggle. Second: No matter how frightening, sometimes you must take your adversaries at their word.
First caveat: Appearances can deceive, and even the wise can be wrong. Second, even if this is a clash, it still could be short-circuited via unforseen events (such as the invention of a hydrogen fuel cell, or the rise of a great Muslim teacher who persuades millions to reject fundamentalism).
Finally, as Lewis writes:
"There is something in the religious culture of Islam which inspired, in even the humblest peasant or peddler, a dignity and a courtesy toward others never exceeded and rarely equaled in other civilizations."
If we accept that this is a clash between civilizations, two questions face us: How does this change our thinking? And the painful one: What do we do about it?
Contact Jonathan V. Last at jlast@phillynews.com.
Mark Steyn: At Gitmo, detainees get La-Z-Boys, pastries
October 1, 2006
Chicago Sun-Times
'This is not just a bad bill," said Sen. Patrick Leahy, ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee. ''This is truly a dangerous bill." And it's not just a dangerous bill. It's also "unconstitutional" and "unconscionable" and represents the loss of the nation's "moral compass."
Wow! That's quite a lot for a humble bill on military trials for terrorist (OK, "alleged terrorist") detainees. But Vermont's lefty colossus wasn't done yet in his excoriation of the Bush administration. "Even they cannot dismiss the practices at Guantanamo as the actions of a few bad people," he continued. "Before they just did it quietly, and against the law, on their own say-so, but now they are obtaining license to engage in additional harsh techniques that the rest of the world will see as abusive, as cruel, as degrading and even as torture."
Hmm. I should say a word about "the practices at Guantanamo." As it happens, I've just got back from Gitmo. (That glitch on my green card was finally straightened out.) I've visited several prisons in several countries over the years and never seen anything like this one. Granted, most of what I know about enemy detainee camps comes from what Rear Adm. Harry Harris, who runs Guantanamo, calls "bad movies and worse TV shows," and from a distance very little seems to have changed: the basic look -- barbed wire and watch towers -- would be recognizable to any World War II POWs. But, close up, pretty much everything else has been flushed down the toilet of history. Indeed, even the toilet has been flushed down the toilet of history: In the interests of cultural sensitivity, Gitmo cells were fitted with "Asian-style toilets," because "that's what the detainees prefer." Given that much of the matter that should be going down there ends up being flung over the guards, it seems that this sensitivity over choice of bathroom fixtures is not always appreciated. When visitors like yours truly swing by, the camp likes to serve them the same meal the prisoners get. This being Ramadan, Adm. Harris was particularly proud of the fresh-baked traditional pastries his team had made for the holy month.
And he was right: The baklava was delicious. "Baklava" is said by some linguists to come from the Arabic for "nuts" -- and, indeed, in that sense this entire war can sometimes seem like one giant baklava. There was a film out earlier this year called ''The Road To Guantanamo,'' and the poster showed the usual emaciated prisoner hung by shackles against a dungeon wall. No doubt the actor in question did the full Robert De Niro and lost 40 pounds to get himself looking that cadaverous.
If they've got anything like that going on at the real Gitmo, they must be doing it behind the confectioner's sugar at the back of the pastry chef's cupboard. If you're hoping to hear about the old wooden chair under a bare lightbulb swinging on its cord, here's the reality: The detaineeare interrogated on either a La-Z-Boy recliner or a luxuriously upholstered sofa -- blue plush with gold piping.
As for being emaciated, it's the only death camp in history where the soi-disant torture victims put on weight. In contrast to the undernourished thesp in the movie version, the average gain at Gitmo is 18 pounds. The Afghan detainees were the chunkiest Afghans I've ever seen. If they ever make it home, their old comrades -- the lean wiry warriors of the Hindu Kush -- will wonder why a party of Florida retirees has suddenly shown up. These Pushtuns are pushing a ton.
And, if you do start losing weight suddenly, don't worry. As one of the camp's medical staff explained, they offer free colon-cancer testing for jihadis over 50. If President Hillary decides to have another crack at socialized medicine in 2009, there are worse slogans than "Every American should have the right to the same health-care plan as a Sudanese terrorist who put his arm out stabbing a prison guard."
Perhaps this is what Senator Leahy means by "abusive," "cruel," "degrading" "torture." If you're used to the Afghan health system, no doubt it's profoundly humiliating to be offered free colonoscopies every time you bend down to use the prayer mat. Nevertheless, it surely requires a perverse genius to have made the first terrorist detention camp to offer homemade Ramadan pastries a byword for horror and brutality. If I had to summon up Gitmo in a single image, it would be the brand-new Qurans in each unoccupied cell. To reassure incoming inmates that the filthy infidels haven't touched the sacred book with their unclean hands, the Qurans are hung from the walls in pristine surgical masks. It's one thing for Muslims to regard infidels as unclean, but it's hard to see why it's in the interests of the United States government to string along with it and thereby validate their bigotry.
When I put this point to Adm. Harris, he replied, "That's an interesting question," and said the decision had been made long before he arrived. He explained that they had a good working system whereby whenever it became necessary to handle a Quran -- because a weapon or illicit communication had been concealed in it -- a Muslim translator would be called to the cell to perform the task. But I wasn't thinking of it in operational so much as psychological terms: What does that degree of abasement before their prejudices tell them about us? Mulling it over since I got back, I'd go further: It seems to me that one sign this war is over is when Muslims are grown-up enough not to go to full-blown baklava nuts over other folks touching their Qurans.
Of course, for the likes of Sen. Leahy, not only is the war far from over, it hasn't even begun. Almost every argument in this area isn't "about" the war so much as whether there even is a war. As the Washington Post reported, "The Senate joined the House in embracing President Bush's view that the battle against terrorism justifies the imposition of extraordinary limits on defendants' traditional rights in the courtroom."
Well, they're only "extraordinary" if you regard these men as traditional "defendants." If you regard them as traditional wartime detainees -- rather than OJs in turbans -- the only "extraordinary" aspect of this is the kid gloves with which not just their Qurans but the jihadists themselves are handled. This is the only war in American history in which enemy detainees have been freed before the end of hostilities. Of those released, at least 22 are known to have returned to the battlefield in Afghanistan, Pakistan and elsewhere. The ones who remain are dangerous men, no matter how "sensitive" you are. They unscrewed the foot pads from those Asian-style toilets and used them as bludgeons to attack the guards. After listening to Pat Leahy's contribution to the debate, I wonder if the Gitmo medical facility's lavish team of mental health experts might not be more usefully deployed to the U.S. Senate.
©Mark Steyn 2006
Chicago Sun-Times
'This is not just a bad bill," said Sen. Patrick Leahy, ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee. ''This is truly a dangerous bill." And it's not just a dangerous bill. It's also "unconstitutional" and "unconscionable" and represents the loss of the nation's "moral compass."
Wow! That's quite a lot for a humble bill on military trials for terrorist (OK, "alleged terrorist") detainees. But Vermont's lefty colossus wasn't done yet in his excoriation of the Bush administration. "Even they cannot dismiss the practices at Guantanamo as the actions of a few bad people," he continued. "Before they just did it quietly, and against the law, on their own say-so, but now they are obtaining license to engage in additional harsh techniques that the rest of the world will see as abusive, as cruel, as degrading and even as torture."
Hmm. I should say a word about "the practices at Guantanamo." As it happens, I've just got back from Gitmo. (That glitch on my green card was finally straightened out.) I've visited several prisons in several countries over the years and never seen anything like this one. Granted, most of what I know about enemy detainee camps comes from what Rear Adm. Harry Harris, who runs Guantanamo, calls "bad movies and worse TV shows," and from a distance very little seems to have changed: the basic look -- barbed wire and watch towers -- would be recognizable to any World War II POWs. But, close up, pretty much everything else has been flushed down the toilet of history. Indeed, even the toilet has been flushed down the toilet of history: In the interests of cultural sensitivity, Gitmo cells were fitted with "Asian-style toilets," because "that's what the detainees prefer." Given that much of the matter that should be going down there ends up being flung over the guards, it seems that this sensitivity over choice of bathroom fixtures is not always appreciated. When visitors like yours truly swing by, the camp likes to serve them the same meal the prisoners get. This being Ramadan, Adm. Harris was particularly proud of the fresh-baked traditional pastries his team had made for the holy month.
And he was right: The baklava was delicious. "Baklava" is said by some linguists to come from the Arabic for "nuts" -- and, indeed, in that sense this entire war can sometimes seem like one giant baklava. There was a film out earlier this year called ''The Road To Guantanamo,'' and the poster showed the usual emaciated prisoner hung by shackles against a dungeon wall. No doubt the actor in question did the full Robert De Niro and lost 40 pounds to get himself looking that cadaverous.
If they've got anything like that going on at the real Gitmo, they must be doing it behind the confectioner's sugar at the back of the pastry chef's cupboard. If you're hoping to hear about the old wooden chair under a bare lightbulb swinging on its cord, here's the reality: The detaineeare interrogated on either a La-Z-Boy recliner or a luxuriously upholstered sofa -- blue plush with gold piping.
As for being emaciated, it's the only death camp in history where the soi-disant torture victims put on weight. In contrast to the undernourished thesp in the movie version, the average gain at Gitmo is 18 pounds. The Afghan detainees were the chunkiest Afghans I've ever seen. If they ever make it home, their old comrades -- the lean wiry warriors of the Hindu Kush -- will wonder why a party of Florida retirees has suddenly shown up. These Pushtuns are pushing a ton.
And, if you do start losing weight suddenly, don't worry. As one of the camp's medical staff explained, they offer free colon-cancer testing for jihadis over 50. If President Hillary decides to have another crack at socialized medicine in 2009, there are worse slogans than "Every American should have the right to the same health-care plan as a Sudanese terrorist who put his arm out stabbing a prison guard."
Perhaps this is what Senator Leahy means by "abusive," "cruel," "degrading" "torture." If you're used to the Afghan health system, no doubt it's profoundly humiliating to be offered free colonoscopies every time you bend down to use the prayer mat. Nevertheless, it surely requires a perverse genius to have made the first terrorist detention camp to offer homemade Ramadan pastries a byword for horror and brutality. If I had to summon up Gitmo in a single image, it would be the brand-new Qurans in each unoccupied cell. To reassure incoming inmates that the filthy infidels haven't touched the sacred book with their unclean hands, the Qurans are hung from the walls in pristine surgical masks. It's one thing for Muslims to regard infidels as unclean, but it's hard to see why it's in the interests of the United States government to string along with it and thereby validate their bigotry.
When I put this point to Adm. Harris, he replied, "That's an interesting question," and said the decision had been made long before he arrived. He explained that they had a good working system whereby whenever it became necessary to handle a Quran -- because a weapon or illicit communication had been concealed in it -- a Muslim translator would be called to the cell to perform the task. But I wasn't thinking of it in operational so much as psychological terms: What does that degree of abasement before their prejudices tell them about us? Mulling it over since I got back, I'd go further: It seems to me that one sign this war is over is when Muslims are grown-up enough not to go to full-blown baklava nuts over other folks touching their Qurans.
Of course, for the likes of Sen. Leahy, not only is the war far from over, it hasn't even begun. Almost every argument in this area isn't "about" the war so much as whether there even is a war. As the Washington Post reported, "The Senate joined the House in embracing President Bush's view that the battle against terrorism justifies the imposition of extraordinary limits on defendants' traditional rights in the courtroom."
Well, they're only "extraordinary" if you regard these men as traditional "defendants." If you regard them as traditional wartime detainees -- rather than OJs in turbans -- the only "extraordinary" aspect of this is the kid gloves with which not just their Qurans but the jihadists themselves are handled. This is the only war in American history in which enemy detainees have been freed before the end of hostilities. Of those released, at least 22 are known to have returned to the battlefield in Afghanistan, Pakistan and elsewhere. The ones who remain are dangerous men, no matter how "sensitive" you are. They unscrewed the foot pads from those Asian-style toilets and used them as bludgeons to attack the guards. After listening to Pat Leahy's contribution to the debate, I wonder if the Gitmo medical facility's lavish team of mental health experts might not be more usefully deployed to the U.S. Senate.
©Mark Steyn 2006
Selena Roberts: Football Grows, and Students Go the Way of the T. Rex
SELENA ROBERTS
The New York Times
Published: October 1, 2006
True, it was a reputed cupcake course. But as an English major at Rutgers University, the honors student Robert Andersen couldn’t just curl up with Chaucer or Twain. The guy needed a science credit.
It was in a geology course called Dinosaurs where Andersen discovered the extinction of the Rutgers student athlete.
Outside the classroom door, Andersen witnessed paid attendance takers, who functioned as nannies, as they waited patiently for athletes, usually football players, to walk up and utter the magic password, “I’m here.”
Check, the player went to class. Check, the coach is happy. Check, the program has integrity.
“It’s just a sham,” Andersen, a senior, said Friday. “Are you truly a student athlete if there is someone who has to make sure you go to class?”
The definition gets narrower by the budget cut. At a university besieged by a fiscal crisis — with shortened library hours, staff reductions and canceled classes — Rutgers is eliminating six sports, including crew, fencing and swimming, to save $1.2 million. Nearly equal to the salary of the football coach, Greg Schiano.
“One of the saddest parts,” said Norman Levitt, a math professor, “is that some of the people getting hurt the most are the student athletes — and I’m talking about the student who gets up at 3 a.m. to row.”
“Rutgers,” he added, “is turning into a standard-issue football factory.”
It’s industrial athletics. All around the country, the quaint notion of a student athlete has been stored in a hope chest amid a fool’s-gold pursuit of big-time football.
Officials are lining up to sell their souls to join the arms race of Division I-A, right down to the Rev. Jerry Falwell, the founder of Liberty University. As Forbes recently reported, the Liberty student handbook warns of “witchcraft, séances or other satanic or demonic activity.” (And yet the football program plans to leap to I-A from Division I-AA, anyway.)
Big football is a faith-based proposition. Athletic directors go rah-rah when they talk of their revenue-producing team as if to cleverly conflate it with profit-making. They are not the same.
Almost all Division I-A football programs bleed money in school colors. In the fuzzy math of college accounting, it is difficult to tell the depths of the red because many football teams put, say, laundry, outside the athletic budget ledger.
Whatever the exact total, the Scarlet Knights lost at least $3 million on football last year. As officials will say, this is the price for winning. For the first time since 1976, Rutgers is in the top 25, a ranking bound to surge after the team’s tense victory Friday night against the South Florida Bulls — a football team since 1997. For South Florida, a little-known commuter college, football was born as a branding tool.
“I would rather say it’s a rallying point, not a branding tool, for us,” Robert E. Mulcahy III, the Rutgers athletic director, said by telephone Thursday. “We’re a research university that stands on its own as an academic institution.”
Football has put that identity at risk. Campus computer labs shut down early to conserve money, but the football machine churns on with game films rolling across what has been described as a 42-inch plasma television in the locker room.
“We have a television in the locker room,” Mulcahy said. “I can’t tell you what it is. I don’t know.”
Rutgers’s recruiting money for academically distinguished students with stellar SAT’s has been slashed, but the football budget will increase next year along with Schiano’s salary. “It’s demoralizing to the faculty,” Levitt said.
It’s not as if the bandwagon has square wheels at Rutgers. It’s not as if Rutgers is a campus full of football curmudgeons.
“When Rutgers was horrible at football, students tailgated but never went into the game,” Andersen said. “Now they tailgate, but a larger majority of kids actually go into the game.
“They’re doing well, but it’s like, at what expense?”
The cost is to Rutgers’s intellectual capital. How can the university square its football excess with a fiscal demand for academic austerity? Just what kind of student is wooed by the siren song of a supersize football program? As Andersen said, it appears the university is in search of “kids who want to paint their faces and scream and yell at football games.”
There is another aspect to Rutgers’s football strategy: provide rich boosters with a business perk and an incentive to give. Ply them with victories, with luxury amenities for clients, a winner’s identity for themselves, and watch the money roll in. Last year, Mulcahy said, the Scarlet R Club, the fund-raising arm of the athletic program, collected a record $5.8 million in donations.
The amount doesn’t touch the $20 million-plus raised by organizations like the Gator Boosters from Florida. But even at universities with deep-pocketed donors, the money doesn’t cover the football debts.
This is a sucker’s game. The sport is a money pit and, often, a magnet for corruption. As seen throughout college football, booster influence creates conflicts and opens the way for chicanery.
As it traverses this slippery slope, Rutgers seems oblivious to cautionary tales.
So football expands. Let the fencers fall on the sword with the rest of Rutgers.
“Everybody has to decide what’s important,” Mulcahy said. “Just because we have budgetary concerns doesn’t mean we have to stop having a vision for the future.”
Mulcahy is doing his job. But the vision is just as much of an illusion as the attendance by some football players in a certain cupcake class.
“Halfway through, a few at a time, they’d walk out the back,” Andersen said.
At Rutgers, the disappearance of the authentic student athlete is embodied by a course called Dinosaurs — a study in extinction.
E-mail: selenasports@nytimes.com
The New York Times
Published: October 1, 2006
True, it was a reputed cupcake course. But as an English major at Rutgers University, the honors student Robert Andersen couldn’t just curl up with Chaucer or Twain. The guy needed a science credit.
It was in a geology course called Dinosaurs where Andersen discovered the extinction of the Rutgers student athlete.
Outside the classroom door, Andersen witnessed paid attendance takers, who functioned as nannies, as they waited patiently for athletes, usually football players, to walk up and utter the magic password, “I’m here.”
Check, the player went to class. Check, the coach is happy. Check, the program has integrity.
“It’s just a sham,” Andersen, a senior, said Friday. “Are you truly a student athlete if there is someone who has to make sure you go to class?”
The definition gets narrower by the budget cut. At a university besieged by a fiscal crisis — with shortened library hours, staff reductions and canceled classes — Rutgers is eliminating six sports, including crew, fencing and swimming, to save $1.2 million. Nearly equal to the salary of the football coach, Greg Schiano.
“One of the saddest parts,” said Norman Levitt, a math professor, “is that some of the people getting hurt the most are the student athletes — and I’m talking about the student who gets up at 3 a.m. to row.”
“Rutgers,” he added, “is turning into a standard-issue football factory.”
It’s industrial athletics. All around the country, the quaint notion of a student athlete has been stored in a hope chest amid a fool’s-gold pursuit of big-time football.
Officials are lining up to sell their souls to join the arms race of Division I-A, right down to the Rev. Jerry Falwell, the founder of Liberty University. As Forbes recently reported, the Liberty student handbook warns of “witchcraft, séances or other satanic or demonic activity.” (And yet the football program plans to leap to I-A from Division I-AA, anyway.)
Big football is a faith-based proposition. Athletic directors go rah-rah when they talk of their revenue-producing team as if to cleverly conflate it with profit-making. They are not the same.
Almost all Division I-A football programs bleed money in school colors. In the fuzzy math of college accounting, it is difficult to tell the depths of the red because many football teams put, say, laundry, outside the athletic budget ledger.
Whatever the exact total, the Scarlet Knights lost at least $3 million on football last year. As officials will say, this is the price for winning. For the first time since 1976, Rutgers is in the top 25, a ranking bound to surge after the team’s tense victory Friday night against the South Florida Bulls — a football team since 1997. For South Florida, a little-known commuter college, football was born as a branding tool.
“I would rather say it’s a rallying point, not a branding tool, for us,” Robert E. Mulcahy III, the Rutgers athletic director, said by telephone Thursday. “We’re a research university that stands on its own as an academic institution.”
Football has put that identity at risk. Campus computer labs shut down early to conserve money, but the football machine churns on with game films rolling across what has been described as a 42-inch plasma television in the locker room.
“We have a television in the locker room,” Mulcahy said. “I can’t tell you what it is. I don’t know.”
Rutgers’s recruiting money for academically distinguished students with stellar SAT’s has been slashed, but the football budget will increase next year along with Schiano’s salary. “It’s demoralizing to the faculty,” Levitt said.
It’s not as if the bandwagon has square wheels at Rutgers. It’s not as if Rutgers is a campus full of football curmudgeons.
“When Rutgers was horrible at football, students tailgated but never went into the game,” Andersen said. “Now they tailgate, but a larger majority of kids actually go into the game.
“They’re doing well, but it’s like, at what expense?”
The cost is to Rutgers’s intellectual capital. How can the university square its football excess with a fiscal demand for academic austerity? Just what kind of student is wooed by the siren song of a supersize football program? As Andersen said, it appears the university is in search of “kids who want to paint their faces and scream and yell at football games.”
There is another aspect to Rutgers’s football strategy: provide rich boosters with a business perk and an incentive to give. Ply them with victories, with luxury amenities for clients, a winner’s identity for themselves, and watch the money roll in. Last year, Mulcahy said, the Scarlet R Club, the fund-raising arm of the athletic program, collected a record $5.8 million in donations.
The amount doesn’t touch the $20 million-plus raised by organizations like the Gator Boosters from Florida. But even at universities with deep-pocketed donors, the money doesn’t cover the football debts.
This is a sucker’s game. The sport is a money pit and, often, a magnet for corruption. As seen throughout college football, booster influence creates conflicts and opens the way for chicanery.
As it traverses this slippery slope, Rutgers seems oblivious to cautionary tales.
So football expands. Let the fencers fall on the sword with the rest of Rutgers.
“Everybody has to decide what’s important,” Mulcahy said. “Just because we have budgetary concerns doesn’t mean we have to stop having a vision for the future.”
Mulcahy is doing his job. But the vision is just as much of an illusion as the attendance by some football players in a certain cupcake class.
“Halfway through, a few at a time, they’d walk out the back,” Andersen said.
At Rutgers, the disappearance of the authentic student athlete is embodied by a course called Dinosaurs — a study in extinction.
E-mail: selenasports@nytimes.com
Thomas Boswell: After So Long, So Long
[One of the best of all time writes about one of the best of all time. - jtf]The Washington Post
Friday, September 29, 2006; E10
A few hours after learning that he would not be the manager of the Washington Nationals next season, Frank Robinson entered the dugout, the place that has been his home for so much of the last 51 seasons. Every other Nat, driven away by a steady rain, had retreated to the clubhouse.
But Robinson had an appointment to keep two hours before game time. He'd promised to speak with a college journalism class. For Robinson, few days in his life have been harder than yesterday, when he had separate meetings with team president Stan Kasten and General Manager Jim Bowden. "Not as hard as hitting the slider," Robinson said of those meetings, one of which included tears. "Not as hard as managing a baseball team." But, at 71, about as hard as they come.
Yet, at a time when Robinson had every right to sit in his office and argue with the walls, he made time for the George Washington University students. After being introduced to the class as "Dr. Frank Robinson," because of his honorary doctorate from GW, the manager had the whole group laughing at his stories within minutes. For a quarter of an hour in the dugout, he chatted them up, answered their questions, sold his sport, educated a new generation and fulfilled all his responsibilities.
The students left with smiles. Baseball, what a wonderful game, and that dignified Dr. Robinson, how impressive. They didn't know that he had just learned that he would probably never wear a uniform again, never hold a game in the palm of his hand, never be the boss, never feel the pulse of a pennant race and have a whole city cheer for him, as he did just one year ago.
The reason they never guessed the state of his heart is because Robinson has decided to go out with class. Or, more likely, that's just the nature of the man. Whatever conflicted feelings he no doubt has, he expressed no bitterness and harnessed his pride.
After he finished with the students, he perched on the dugout's back row, watched the rain and talked for half an hour. "I've been fortunate for 51 years," said Robinson, the National League rookie of the year in 1956. "You only get so many chances [to manage]. I felt I'd had my chances. So, I thought, 'Let someone else who's younger have a shot.' Then I got this offer to manage the Expos -- for only one year, I thought.
"And look how it's turned out," Robinson said proudly. On top of his Hall of Fame career and his status as the first black manager, he has now added a dignified and significant Last Act to his eminent résumé. He's been the face of the franchise for a team that returned baseball to Washington after 33 lost seasons. These two brief seasons at RFK now "rank very highly" in Robinson's pantheon of achievements. "Unique and special, very special memories," he said.
However, Frank doesn't want those memories, this new connection with a baseball-hungry city, to end. "If the ballclub would like to have me [next year], I would definitely consider it," he said.
"It would depend on whether the position had real responsibilities. If it does, you got me."
But when he looks at the Nationals current front-office structure, what does he see? "It's pretty full," he said.
"I understand that my role would change as I get older. I may not be as sharp. Some people don't think I grasp that, but I do," Robinson said. "I may want to enjoy life more at some point.
"You have to separate yourself from the game over time. I've been lucky. It hasn't happened abruptly to me -- 51 years," he says, surprised at the number. "That's pretty amazing, especially in this game." He doesn't quite say "cutthroat" game.
"I've always told my players, when your time is over, that's it. The game doesn't owe you anything," he said. "If something is offered, that's a plus."
For Robinson, something of substance absolutely must be offered, no matter how it is carved out. The best quality of the current Nationals -- the cussedness that has allowed them to win 70 games in an injury-devastated season that easily could have produced 100 losses, is almost entirely a reflection of Robinson.
"Frank won't let you quit," catcher Brian Schneider said. "He had a meeting in Colorado [after four straight losses this month] and he talked about how the game has to be played. We came out and started winning.
"Believe me, you don't want to get called into that office."
This week, when an infielder nonchalantly missed a one-hop smash, Robinson called a mound meeting not to chastise the pitcher but to pointedly ask the infielder: "Are you okay? You didn't go after that ball very hard. Are you hurt?" Those words are code: Do it again and I'll jerk you right off the field in the middle of the inning.
"Oh, I've seen him do it," Schneider said.
Robinson chuckles at that recent memory. "If I ask them for the effort, then I've got to give the effort, too, even if it's the last week of the season. All season, the effort has been there. I'm very proud of 'em."
Some players don't respond to Robinson, but those who do are fiercely loyal. "That's very, very sad for him and a lot of us," second baseman Jose Vidro said when he heard the news. "He was here in the hard times and always kept his head up. He thought, with new owners, that he'd have an opportunity to be on the same level with everybody else. . . . I'm a little bit shocked.
That's business."
But now the part of it that includes wearing a uniform is over. The thought of this made Robinson feel "different" and "strange." But he described himself as "at ease," although there was moisture in his eyes when he said it.
"Well, it's time to go," he said at a pregame news conference at which no official announcement was made, but not a shred of doubt was left. Robinson raised his fists like a boxer as he spoke and shadow-punched for a second, as if with his fate. "Just got a bad call from the umpires. They didn't want to reverse it." He meant it, but spun it as a joke.
Asked by the media if he'd been "disrespected" he said, "No, no," emphatically.
In the last half-century there has been no finer baseball man than Frank Robinson. There have been others who deserve a tie with him. His distinction is not that he won MVP of both leagues or managed more than 2,200 games or any of the other standard accomplishments, mountainous though they are in his case.
Robinson's defining distinction was his glowingly upright character, his authentic, often uncompromising integrity. Like his high school basketball teammate and lifelong friend Bill Russell, Robinson always thought out his opinions, whether on baseball or social issues, then spoke them bluntly and defended them consistently.
To describe a baseball manager as "a man of character" would, in many cases, seem ludicrous. Machiavellians and pragmatists, those who hedge their words and cover their backs, often do best in the job. But Robinson chewed out players when he thought it necessary. General managers and owners knew where he stood whether they liked it or not. As Robinson sat and watched the rain in the dugout, he didn't think about himself. He kept talking about the Nats -- the newly acquired speed of Felipe Lopez, Bernie Castro and Nook Logan, the chances of re-signing Alfonso Soriano, the impressive start by rookie Beltran Perez and the unique "makeup" of Ryan Zimmerman. Next year. Robinson only wanted to talk about next year. You can't stop him. His guys are going to be a lot better than people think. Watch and see. If the Nats make Soriano an offer that's "in the ballpark," he thinks the left fielder will be back.
It's clear that, given half a chance to stay near the core of the Nats, Robinson's heart isn't going anywhere.
With a little luck, a little negotiation and common sense, the Nationals and Robinson may actually pull this off. Can the end be graceful?
"Contrary to what some people think, yes, it can," he said.
© 2006 The Washington Post Company
Nationals Officially Part Ways With Robinson
[Frank Robinson was one of the greatest players of all time...his 586 home runs were not enhanced by any drugs and most of them came against pitchers throwing off mounds fifty percent higher than today's 10 inches. His intensity, perspective, and greatness will be missed. - jtf]
Trailblazing Career Is Likely at an End
By Barry Svrluga
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, October 1, 2006; A01
In 1975, when the Cleveland Indians needed a replacement for Ken Aspromonte as manager, owner Ted Bonda took what was, at the time, a bold step. He named Frank Robinson to the position, the first African American to manage a major league club.
Yesterday afternoon, as he formally was removed from a manager's job for the last time in his storied career, Robinson reflected on that status, one that always will be by his name: first black manager.
"And," Robinson said, making light of the situation, "the first one to be fired four times."
The official announcement that Robinson -- a 71-year-old Hall of Famer -- would not be asked back as manager of the Washington Nationals finally came yesterday, and the occasion was marked by remembrances not only of his role in bringing baseball back to the nation's capital, but with nods to his significance in the history of the game. When the Nationals took the field against the New York Mets in their penultimate game of the season, Robinson's counterpart in the visitors' dugout was another African American, Willie Randolph.
"I probably wouldn't be here if it wasn't for Frank," Randolph said.
Yet Robinson's absence will leave the club's most prominent faces -- owners Theodore N. Lerner and his son, Mark; President Stan Kasten; and General Manager Jim Bowden -- all white in a city that is majority black, at a time when baseball is desperately trying to spark interest among young urban African Americans.
Robinson has strong views on the importance of black participation in baseball, ones he occasionally expresses. Yet as much as Robinson has served as the face of the franchise since it came to the District last year -- he certainly was its most notable name -- the team didn't promote him as an icon. He admitted that he didn't get out in the city much, traveling between the ballpark and his apartment on Connecticut Avenue NW. His participation in civic affairs largely was low-key, mostly centered around Holy Comforter-St. Cyprian Roman Catholic School on Capitol Hill, where he spoke occasionally and participated in various activities.
Nationals officials did not go into detail about what qualities they will pursue when the search for Robinson's replacement officially begins tomorrow. But Bowden said the club is well aware of the issue.
"There'll be diversity in this entire organization from top to bottom," Bowden said. "It doesn't matter if it's scouting, player development, managers, coaches, players. This organization is all about diversity."
The ousting of Robinson as manager after five seasons -- three in Montreal, the last two in Washington -- was, Bowden and Kasten admitted, an awkward situation, largely because of Robinson's standing in the game. He ranks sixth on the career home run list, is the only man to win the most valuable player award in the American and National leagues, and has held nearly every position in baseball -- all-star player, coach, manager, front office member, Major League Baseball executive.
Robinson was told of the decision on Thursday, in part because he had requested advance notice so that he could, as he said, "say goodbye." The Nationals are planning to pay tribute to Robinson before, during and after today's season finale at RFK Stadium, and they will host a "Frank Robinson Day" next season. Though Robinson and Bowden have discussed the possibility that Robinson would take another job within the organization, no decision has been made. Robinson has been adamant that he would want a job only if it had real, decision-making power.
For two days, Robinson had danced around the questions about his future, his eyes watering from time to time. Yesterday, sitting next to Bowden at a news conference in a small room in the bowels of RFK, he tried to sound content.
"It's been a good ride for me," he said. "Fifty-one years. . . . I never walk away from anything. When I'm hired to do a job, I do the best I can as long as I can."
Robinson managed for parts of 16 seasons for four franchises -- Cleveland, the San Francisco Giants, the Baltimore Orioles and the Montreal Expos, who became the Nationals. He never won a division title, and he finished with a winning record just five times.
Neither Bowden nor Kasten would discuss the reasons behind the decision, other than to say "it was in the best long-term interest of the franchise," as Bowden put it. But several Nationals officials felt for some time that Robinson didn't keep up with modern statistical analysis and he didn't communicate enough with his players. Robinson, in turn, defended himself as he pursued the opportunity to stay on beyond this season.
Robinson has long said he wouldn't truly reflect on his accomplishments until he was out of baseball completely. Now, that time could be here.
"I want it one day to [be] where an African American or minority manager is hired, and there's no mention of" race, he said. "I think that's when we'll have achieved what we've been trying to achieve all these years in baseball as far as managers are concerned."
He understands, though, that Washington is a special case. Alphonso Maldon Jr., a former official in the Clinton administration, is a minority partner in the Nationals' ownership structure, the senior vice president for external affairs. He and Kasten have participated in community meetings in all eight wards in the District, and while he has no say in whom the next manager will be, he said the franchise is acutely aware that the racial makeup of the club's leadership will be noticed in the community.
"We are going absolutely as far as we have to go to make sure that everyone has an opportunity to experience the Nationals," Maldon said.
When Major League Baseball sold the Nationals to the Lerner group earlier this year, it did so only after the group expanded to bring in more racial minorities, and MLB officials at the time said they put such stress on the issue because of Washington's population.
"I think you have to feel the heartbeat of the city," said third base coach Tony Beasley, an African American who spent his first year in the majors this season. "I know it was a really important issue when they were talking about the ownership. I would think it would be something that would be in the forefront as far as coaches and things of that nature.
"You have to do your homework on each one of those decisions, but you also have to recognize who your fan base is -- and who you want it to be."
Last night, such thoughts were far from Robinson's mind. He had been pondering the end for most of the previous week, if not most of the entire season.
"Anytime you're looking at the end, it'll be emotional," he said. "How much? I don't know. That's not something you can think about or you can rehearse. They might all pffffff ," and he took his mammoth hands and waved them away from his body, as if the emotions were spewing out.
Before the first pitch, Robinson turned to the crowd and tossed out some baseballs. He will do the same again today, when he pulls on a baseball uniform for the final time. He is unsure of what comes next. He knows only one thing for sure.
"As far as I'm concerned, in my heart and my head, this is it," Robinson said. "Plain and simple."
© 2006 The Washington Post Company
Trailblazing Career Is Likely at an End
By Barry Svrluga
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, October 1, 2006; A01
In 1975, when the Cleveland Indians needed a replacement for Ken Aspromonte as manager, owner Ted Bonda took what was, at the time, a bold step. He named Frank Robinson to the position, the first African American to manage a major league club.
Yesterday afternoon, as he formally was removed from a manager's job for the last time in his storied career, Robinson reflected on that status, one that always will be by his name: first black manager.
"And," Robinson said, making light of the situation, "the first one to be fired four times."
The official announcement that Robinson -- a 71-year-old Hall of Famer -- would not be asked back as manager of the Washington Nationals finally came yesterday, and the occasion was marked by remembrances not only of his role in bringing baseball back to the nation's capital, but with nods to his significance in the history of the game. When the Nationals took the field against the New York Mets in their penultimate game of the season, Robinson's counterpart in the visitors' dugout was another African American, Willie Randolph.
"I probably wouldn't be here if it wasn't for Frank," Randolph said.
Yet Robinson's absence will leave the club's most prominent faces -- owners Theodore N. Lerner and his son, Mark; President Stan Kasten; and General Manager Jim Bowden -- all white in a city that is majority black, at a time when baseball is desperately trying to spark interest among young urban African Americans.
Robinson has strong views on the importance of black participation in baseball, ones he occasionally expresses. Yet as much as Robinson has served as the face of the franchise since it came to the District last year -- he certainly was its most notable name -- the team didn't promote him as an icon. He admitted that he didn't get out in the city much, traveling between the ballpark and his apartment on Connecticut Avenue NW. His participation in civic affairs largely was low-key, mostly centered around Holy Comforter-St. Cyprian Roman Catholic School on Capitol Hill, where he spoke occasionally and participated in various activities.
Nationals officials did not go into detail about what qualities they will pursue when the search for Robinson's replacement officially begins tomorrow. But Bowden said the club is well aware of the issue.
"There'll be diversity in this entire organization from top to bottom," Bowden said. "It doesn't matter if it's scouting, player development, managers, coaches, players. This organization is all about diversity."
The ousting of Robinson as manager after five seasons -- three in Montreal, the last two in Washington -- was, Bowden and Kasten admitted, an awkward situation, largely because of Robinson's standing in the game. He ranks sixth on the career home run list, is the only man to win the most valuable player award in the American and National leagues, and has held nearly every position in baseball -- all-star player, coach, manager, front office member, Major League Baseball executive.
Robinson was told of the decision on Thursday, in part because he had requested advance notice so that he could, as he said, "say goodbye." The Nationals are planning to pay tribute to Robinson before, during and after today's season finale at RFK Stadium, and they will host a "Frank Robinson Day" next season. Though Robinson and Bowden have discussed the possibility that Robinson would take another job within the organization, no decision has been made. Robinson has been adamant that he would want a job only if it had real, decision-making power.
For two days, Robinson had danced around the questions about his future, his eyes watering from time to time. Yesterday, sitting next to Bowden at a news conference in a small room in the bowels of RFK, he tried to sound content.
"It's been a good ride for me," he said. "Fifty-one years. . . . I never walk away from anything. When I'm hired to do a job, I do the best I can as long as I can."
Robinson managed for parts of 16 seasons for four franchises -- Cleveland, the San Francisco Giants, the Baltimore Orioles and the Montreal Expos, who became the Nationals. He never won a division title, and he finished with a winning record just five times.
Neither Bowden nor Kasten would discuss the reasons behind the decision, other than to say "it was in the best long-term interest of the franchise," as Bowden put it. But several Nationals officials felt for some time that Robinson didn't keep up with modern statistical analysis and he didn't communicate enough with his players. Robinson, in turn, defended himself as he pursued the opportunity to stay on beyond this season.
Robinson has long said he wouldn't truly reflect on his accomplishments until he was out of baseball completely. Now, that time could be here.
"I want it one day to [be] where an African American or minority manager is hired, and there's no mention of" race, he said. "I think that's when we'll have achieved what we've been trying to achieve all these years in baseball as far as managers are concerned."
He understands, though, that Washington is a special case. Alphonso Maldon Jr., a former official in the Clinton administration, is a minority partner in the Nationals' ownership structure, the senior vice president for external affairs. He and Kasten have participated in community meetings in all eight wards in the District, and while he has no say in whom the next manager will be, he said the franchise is acutely aware that the racial makeup of the club's leadership will be noticed in the community.
"We are going absolutely as far as we have to go to make sure that everyone has an opportunity to experience the Nationals," Maldon said.
When Major League Baseball sold the Nationals to the Lerner group earlier this year, it did so only after the group expanded to bring in more racial minorities, and MLB officials at the time said they put such stress on the issue because of Washington's population.
"I think you have to feel the heartbeat of the city," said third base coach Tony Beasley, an African American who spent his first year in the majors this season. "I know it was a really important issue when they were talking about the ownership. I would think it would be something that would be in the forefront as far as coaches and things of that nature.
"You have to do your homework on each one of those decisions, but you also have to recognize who your fan base is -- and who you want it to be."
Last night, such thoughts were far from Robinson's mind. He had been pondering the end for most of the previous week, if not most of the entire season.
"Anytime you're looking at the end, it'll be emotional," he said. "How much? I don't know. That's not something you can think about or you can rehearse. They might all pffffff ," and he took his mammoth hands and waved them away from his body, as if the emotions were spewing out.
Before the first pitch, Robinson turned to the crowd and tossed out some baseballs. He will do the same again today, when he pulls on a baseball uniform for the final time. He is unsure of what comes next. He knows only one thing for sure.
"As far as I'm concerned, in my heart and my head, this is it," Robinson said. "Plain and simple."
© 2006 The Washington Post Company
Saturday, September 30, 2006
A Perspective On Democratic Outrage Over Mark Foley
From Captain's Quarters:
The Republican leadership in the House has plenty for which to answer over their laissez-faire treatment of Mark Foley when allegations of improper contact with underage pages first came to their attention. Despite knowing of Foley's "inappropriate" behavior this spring, Majority Leader John Boehner did nothing about it, after hearing that the parents of the page wanted the matter dropped. Regardless, the actions of Foley reflected badly on the GOP and the House, and action should have been taken at the time to punish Foley. Surely, the Republicans could at least have removed him from the House Caucus on Missing and Exploited Children.
However, Democratic protestations on this matter seem rather hypocritical, given the history of their party and page scandals:
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), who introduced a privileged resolution friday night to require an ethics probe, criticized Republican leaders, who she said, "have known of the egregious behavior of Congressman Mark Foley, yet were prepared to adjourn tonight without an Ethics Committee investigation."
"The investigation must determine when Mr. Foley sent the inappropriate emails, who knew of them, whether there was a pattern of inappropriate activity by Mr. Foley with pages or former pages, when the Republican leadership was notified, and what corrective action was taken once officials learned of any improper activity," she added.
This is true, and Pelosi is right to demand an ethics probe, to which John Boehner immediately agreed and the House supported unanimously. However, let's please recall the case of Gerry Studds and his sexual relationship with a 17-year-old page in 1983. This didn't involve a few e-mails and explicit instant messaging; Studds started a sexual relationship with a minor, and then announced in a press conference that people should mind their own business about his private life. The House censured Studds (he turned his back on them as the censure was read), but the Democrats endorsed Studds for five subsequent elections. The only reason he no longer serves in the House is because he retired. He didn't even lose his chair on the House Merchant Marine and Fishing Committee until 1995, when the Republicans took over and abolished the committee.
I agree that the Republicans have some 'splaining to do. However, Democrats hardly covered themselves in glory when running the show for the last decade they controlled Congress in a situation that was objectively more serious than Foley's pathetic cyber-sex efforts.
NOTE: Daniel Crane (R-IL) also got censured at the same time for a sexual relationship with a 17-year-old female page, and apologized to the House. He got defeated in his re-election bid.
Posted by Captain Ed at 09:03 AM Comments (24) TrackBack (0)
Jon Pareles: Inside the Museum, Dylan's Youth Goes on Display
Exhibition Review 'Bob Dylan’s American Journey'
JON PARELES
The New York Times
Published: September 29, 2006
On Nov. 4, 1961, after working in Greenwich Village clubs, Bob Dylan made his New York City concert debut at Carnegie Chapter Hall (now the Kaplan Space, used for rehearsals). It held 225 people; fewer than 55 showed up. Less than two years later, he was the reigning star of the protest-song movement and the folk revival. Another two years, and a generation would be arguing over whether it was right for him to go electric — not that he would pay any attention.
“Bob Dylan’s American Journey, 1956-1966,” an exhibition at the Morgan Library and Museum through Jan. 6, revisits Mr. Dylan’s headlong trajectory through the early 1960’s, giving visitors a close-up view of a writer and songwriter at work.
The exhibition, which originated at the Experience Music Project in Seattle, doesn’t challenge conventional wisdom. “Born into changing times, Bob Dylan shaped history in song,” it announces, and there’s no caviling or second-guessing through each phase, up to Mr. Dylan’s 1966 motorcycle accident and reclusion. For context, there are segments on the folk revival, McCarthyism and the civil rights movement.
It’s the same era covered by the Martin Scorsese documentary “No Direction Home,” with roughly the same perspective: that Mr. Dylan soaked up everything instantaneously, intersected briefly with the well-meaning folk revival, but was always on his own path. “People often say first time that this isn’t folkmusic,” he told Izzy Young from the Folklore Center in Greenwich Village for program notes at the Carnegie Chapter Hall concert. “My songs aren’t easy to listen to.”
Where “No Direction Home” echoed the tumult of the 1960’s, the museum show allows contemplation instead. There’s a listening station offering that 1961 concert, which has never been officially released; a self-effacing but clearly confident Mr. Dylan yodels gleefully through “Freight Train Blues.”
Listening stations also offer illuminating comparisons: Woody Guthrie’s “1913 Massacre” alongside the same melody in Mr. Dylan’s “Song for Woody,” and Mr. Dylan singing “No More Auction Block,” the melody he would extend for “Blowin’ in the Wind.” A video station has clips from “Don’t Look Back,” the documentary of Mr. Dylan’s 1965 tour of England, and from the rarer, unreleased “Eat the Document,” made a year later.
The exhibition includes staples of rock museumcraft: instruments, discs, posters. A map of Greenwich Village shows how six square blocks held the folk-revival universe. Pictures of Woody Guthrie and Arthur Rimbaud reveal the sources of iconic Dylan poses.
A few explanatory labels draw overreaching conclusions, including one about Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, a Woody Guthrie disciple like the young Mr. Dylan: “Elliott was so well established playing Guthrie songs that Dylan realized he would need to write his own songs to make an impression.” (Mr. Dylan might have become a songwriter anyway.) A Turkish tambourine owned by the New York studio musician Bruce Langhorne is cited as one inspiration for “Mr. Tambourine Man,” but it’s just a round drum, with nothing to jingle-jangle.
The exhibition’s most telling artifacts are the manuscripts: songs in progress, written or typed on whatever paper was at hand. They reveal how Mr. Dylan sharpened every line. “Gates of Eden,” crammed in small, neat lettering on the back of a sheet of Holiday Inn stationery, wasn’t finished yet: “All men are kings inside the gates of Eden,” it reads, later to be changed to the grimmer “There are no kings inside the gates of Eden.”
A page of “Like a Rolling Stone,” famously a torrent of words before it was distilled into the song, has only the phrase “How does it feel” from the eventual lyrics. An early version of “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” was just called “It’s All Right,” and in its margins Mr. Dylan was trying to decide between “Allright” and “All Right.”
Like “No Direction Home,” the exhibition is full of reminders of how seriously music was treated at the time. For the folkies, each song was a manifesto, each change a matter of high stakes. An account of Mr. Dylan’s epochal 1965 Newport Folk Festival appearance in the folk music magazine Sing Out! was far from uncomprehending: “ ‘The people’ so loved by Pete Seeger are ‘the mob’ so hated by Dylan,” Jim Rooney wrote. The folkies, he continued, “seemed to understand that night for the first time what Dylan has been trying to say for over a year — that he is not theirs or anyone else’s.” He concluded: “He shook us. And that’s why we have poets and artists.”
The only one taking it lightly, or trying to, was Mr. Dylan himself. The exhibition’s postscript is a video outtake from “Eat the Document”: Mr. Dylan in a London alley, making Dadaist poetry out of a dog groomer’s advertising sign. Inspired and silly, a genius even when he’s goofing around, he cracks himself up.
“Bob Dylan’s American Journey, 1956-1966” continues through Jan. 6 at the Morgan Library and Museum, 225 Madison Avenue, at 36th Street; (212) 685-0008.
JON PARELES
The New York Times
Published: September 29, 2006
On Nov. 4, 1961, after working in Greenwich Village clubs, Bob Dylan made his New York City concert debut at Carnegie Chapter Hall (now the Kaplan Space, used for rehearsals). It held 225 people; fewer than 55 showed up. Less than two years later, he was the reigning star of the protest-song movement and the folk revival. Another two years, and a generation would be arguing over whether it was right for him to go electric — not that he would pay any attention.
“Bob Dylan’s American Journey, 1956-1966,” an exhibition at the Morgan Library and Museum through Jan. 6, revisits Mr. Dylan’s headlong trajectory through the early 1960’s, giving visitors a close-up view of a writer and songwriter at work.
The exhibition, which originated at the Experience Music Project in Seattle, doesn’t challenge conventional wisdom. “Born into changing times, Bob Dylan shaped history in song,” it announces, and there’s no caviling or second-guessing through each phase, up to Mr. Dylan’s 1966 motorcycle accident and reclusion. For context, there are segments on the folk revival, McCarthyism and the civil rights movement.
It’s the same era covered by the Martin Scorsese documentary “No Direction Home,” with roughly the same perspective: that Mr. Dylan soaked up everything instantaneously, intersected briefly with the well-meaning folk revival, but was always on his own path. “People often say first time that this isn’t folkmusic,” he told Izzy Young from the Folklore Center in Greenwich Village for program notes at the Carnegie Chapter Hall concert. “My songs aren’t easy to listen to.”
Where “No Direction Home” echoed the tumult of the 1960’s, the museum show allows contemplation instead. There’s a listening station offering that 1961 concert, which has never been officially released; a self-effacing but clearly confident Mr. Dylan yodels gleefully through “Freight Train Blues.”
Listening stations also offer illuminating comparisons: Woody Guthrie’s “1913 Massacre” alongside the same melody in Mr. Dylan’s “Song for Woody,” and Mr. Dylan singing “No More Auction Block,” the melody he would extend for “Blowin’ in the Wind.” A video station has clips from “Don’t Look Back,” the documentary of Mr. Dylan’s 1965 tour of England, and from the rarer, unreleased “Eat the Document,” made a year later.
The exhibition includes staples of rock museumcraft: instruments, discs, posters. A map of Greenwich Village shows how six square blocks held the folk-revival universe. Pictures of Woody Guthrie and Arthur Rimbaud reveal the sources of iconic Dylan poses.
A few explanatory labels draw overreaching conclusions, including one about Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, a Woody Guthrie disciple like the young Mr. Dylan: “Elliott was so well established playing Guthrie songs that Dylan realized he would need to write his own songs to make an impression.” (Mr. Dylan might have become a songwriter anyway.) A Turkish tambourine owned by the New York studio musician Bruce Langhorne is cited as one inspiration for “Mr. Tambourine Man,” but it’s just a round drum, with nothing to jingle-jangle.
The exhibition’s most telling artifacts are the manuscripts: songs in progress, written or typed on whatever paper was at hand. They reveal how Mr. Dylan sharpened every line. “Gates of Eden,” crammed in small, neat lettering on the back of a sheet of Holiday Inn stationery, wasn’t finished yet: “All men are kings inside the gates of Eden,” it reads, later to be changed to the grimmer “There are no kings inside the gates of Eden.”
A page of “Like a Rolling Stone,” famously a torrent of words before it was distilled into the song, has only the phrase “How does it feel” from the eventual lyrics. An early version of “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” was just called “It’s All Right,” and in its margins Mr. Dylan was trying to decide between “Allright” and “All Right.”
Like “No Direction Home,” the exhibition is full of reminders of how seriously music was treated at the time. For the folkies, each song was a manifesto, each change a matter of high stakes. An account of Mr. Dylan’s epochal 1965 Newport Folk Festival appearance in the folk music magazine Sing Out! was far from uncomprehending: “ ‘The people’ so loved by Pete Seeger are ‘the mob’ so hated by Dylan,” Jim Rooney wrote. The folkies, he continued, “seemed to understand that night for the first time what Dylan has been trying to say for over a year — that he is not theirs or anyone else’s.” He concluded: “He shook us. And that’s why we have poets and artists.”
The only one taking it lightly, or trying to, was Mr. Dylan himself. The exhibition’s postscript is a video outtake from “Eat the Document”: Mr. Dylan in a London alley, making Dadaist poetry out of a dog groomer’s advertising sign. Inspired and silly, a genius even when he’s goofing around, he cracks himself up.
“Bob Dylan’s American Journey, 1956-1966” continues through Jan. 6 at the Morgan Library and Museum, 225 Madison Avenue, at 36th Street; (212) 685-0008.
Janet Levy: "Compromised" Intelligence
Janet Levy
http://www.FrontPageMag.com
September 29, 2006
Although the White House reached an agreement last week with dissident GOP senators on interrogation procedures for terrorist detainees, the issue faces additional scrutiny and approval by the Senate and House of Representatives before Congress recesses at week’s end. The GOP compromise bill preserves CIA jurisdiction over interrogation programs and provides legal protections for agency workers, yet maintains the spirit of the Geneva Conventions by prohibiting “cruel and inhumane” treatment. More importantly, the proposed legislation gives the CIA the latitude to use aggressive interrogatory methods with terrorist combatants.
Human rights groups, which have mischaracterized coercive techniques as torture, remain largely dissatisfied with the compromise. They caution that the government has been given too much power and that the principle of “due process” is being jeopardized. They further maintain that the GOP bill could invite torture of our own soldiers and damage America’s reputation as a morally upstanding nation. One group is even calling for the elimination of coercive questioning techniques, including sleep deprivation, exposure to extreme temperatures and forced standing for long periods.
Such a view is woefully misguided. Coercive techniques have yielded valuable information, saving American lives both on the battlefield and at home. The techniques employed are no harsher than those used daily by police departments across the United States. The idea to abandon such useful tactics would be to leave ourselves vulnerable to an enemy and its ad-hoc warriors who pay no heed to an equivalent sense of honor or justice with captured troops or civilians.
The value of coercive techniques has been repeatedly demonstrated by questioning of captured jihadists that yielded critical, national security information. Such techniques have been used to obtain valuable information that has prevented attacks and significantly impacted U.S. military actions in Iraq. For example, following his placement in a freezing room with blaring rock music, senior Al Qaeda planner Abu Zubayda provided critical information on Osama bin Laden’s operation, as well as on a planned terrorist attack inside the United States. In addition, Zubayda identified Ramzi bin al-Shibh, a key accomplice in the 9/11 attacks. Information provided by al-Shibh and Zubayda led to the capture of 9-11 mastermind, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Information from terrorists in CIA custody have helped avert planned strikes on military installations, identified the location of Al Qaeda training camps and foiled car bomb attacks aimed at Iraqi civilian populations.
Brian Ross of ABC News recently reported that 14 terrorists detained at CIA facilities gave up critical information about Al Qaeda operatives in the United States and Europe, plus disclosed over a dozen planned attacks, including a plot to fly a plane into the Library Tower in Los Angeles. This knowledge potentially saved thousands of lives.
Tactical interrogations conducted by soldiers in the battlefield provide life-and-death information about imminent threats, such as an impending suicide attack, ambush or IED (improvised explosive device), is a life-or-death matter. Battlefield captures often have critical information about planned attacks on American soldiers. Any intelligence gathered has a short shelf life as terrorists quickly change locations, plans, and communication methods.
Field intelligence officers don’t have the time to transport a captured terrorist detainee to an interrogation facility. They need information immediately to save the lives of their troops. Physical intimidation, such as shoving, may be critical to obtaining important information for the safety and welfare of their fellow soldiers. Yes, the actions of our troops in the heat of combat are being judged through the eyes of an unsympathetic, mostly anti-war media. While our soldiers are facing life-and-death decisions, they must also worry about their immediate actions being investigated after-the-fact or being brought up on formal charges much later. Such incidents as the arrest and incarceration of the Pendleton Eight and the harrowing experiences of now-exonerated, second lieutenant Ilario Pantano affect our troops ability to make split-second decisions. It can translate into the loss of lives.
Further, many of these aggressive interrogation methods that don’t cause bodily injury and sustainable aftereffects are routinely used by U.S. police departments across the country. They include good cop/bad cop, isolation/segregation, false flag (having an informant in the same cell pretending to be a fellow prisoner), intimidation related to sentencing and incarceration, granting of special privileges in exchange for cooperation and dietary or environmental manipulations. Often the discomfort and fear induced by these techniques sufficiently motivates suspects to offer helpful information that solves crimes and saves lives.
Yet, the enemy we face uses even harsher methods. Our troops know that if they are captured by Al Qaeda, Hezbollah or any other terrorist group, they can expect torture, disfigurement, and a painful death. They will certainly not be treated according to the Geneva Conventions, the Rules of Engagement or any internationally recognized military protocol. After the U.S. Army’s 507th Maintenance Company was captured during Operation Iraqi Freedom in Nasiriyah in 2003, nine troops were tortured and beheaded. As she lay in a hospital bed and peered out the window, Private Jessica Lynch, a member of that company, saw the shallow graves of her follow soldiers, buried in a soccer field nearby, stepped on in dishonor by the enemy. U.S. Army prisoners of war have been shot dead by Saddam loyalists as they surrendered with their hands up. Recently, the bodies of kidnapped American soldiers, Thomas Tucker and Christian Menchaca were so severely mutilated by Al Qaeda that DNA testing was required to determine the identity of the corpses.
Our ability to extract information from terrorists is our best tool for preventing future attacks in the United States and on the battlefield. It has already enabled us to gather critical information used to stop attacks that would have led to massive casualties. Without good and timely intelligence, we can’t win the war against Islamic terrorists nor protect the lives of our civilians and our troops.
Further, we have already seen that the way we treat terrorist detainees is inconsequential to the treatment of our own captured troops. Our humane methods are viewed as an exploitable weakness, as is our liberal media and overly cautious, criminal justice system. We know that our soldiers will always be faced with brutal torture or death at the hands of Islamic terrorists. Why should we broadcast to Al Qaeda and other terrorist entities that they have nothing to fear in U.S. custody? Why should we spare a brutal terrorist temporary discomfort and pain at the expense of American lives?
Click Here to support Frontpagemag.com.
Janet Levy is the founder of ESG Consulting, an organization that offers project management, fundraising, promotion, event organizing and planning services for conservative political causes and issues related to terrorism and national security.
http://www.FrontPageMag.com
September 29, 2006
Although the White House reached an agreement last week with dissident GOP senators on interrogation procedures for terrorist detainees, the issue faces additional scrutiny and approval by the Senate and House of Representatives before Congress recesses at week’s end. The GOP compromise bill preserves CIA jurisdiction over interrogation programs and provides legal protections for agency workers, yet maintains the spirit of the Geneva Conventions by prohibiting “cruel and inhumane” treatment. More importantly, the proposed legislation gives the CIA the latitude to use aggressive interrogatory methods with terrorist combatants.
Human rights groups, which have mischaracterized coercive techniques as torture, remain largely dissatisfied with the compromise. They caution that the government has been given too much power and that the principle of “due process” is being jeopardized. They further maintain that the GOP bill could invite torture of our own soldiers and damage America’s reputation as a morally upstanding nation. One group is even calling for the elimination of coercive questioning techniques, including sleep deprivation, exposure to extreme temperatures and forced standing for long periods.
Such a view is woefully misguided. Coercive techniques have yielded valuable information, saving American lives both on the battlefield and at home. The techniques employed are no harsher than those used daily by police departments across the United States. The idea to abandon such useful tactics would be to leave ourselves vulnerable to an enemy and its ad-hoc warriors who pay no heed to an equivalent sense of honor or justice with captured troops or civilians.
The value of coercive techniques has been repeatedly demonstrated by questioning of captured jihadists that yielded critical, national security information. Such techniques have been used to obtain valuable information that has prevented attacks and significantly impacted U.S. military actions in Iraq. For example, following his placement in a freezing room with blaring rock music, senior Al Qaeda planner Abu Zubayda provided critical information on Osama bin Laden’s operation, as well as on a planned terrorist attack inside the United States. In addition, Zubayda identified Ramzi bin al-Shibh, a key accomplice in the 9/11 attacks. Information provided by al-Shibh and Zubayda led to the capture of 9-11 mastermind, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Information from terrorists in CIA custody have helped avert planned strikes on military installations, identified the location of Al Qaeda training camps and foiled car bomb attacks aimed at Iraqi civilian populations.
Brian Ross of ABC News recently reported that 14 terrorists detained at CIA facilities gave up critical information about Al Qaeda operatives in the United States and Europe, plus disclosed over a dozen planned attacks, including a plot to fly a plane into the Library Tower in Los Angeles. This knowledge potentially saved thousands of lives.
Tactical interrogations conducted by soldiers in the battlefield provide life-and-death information about imminent threats, such as an impending suicide attack, ambush or IED (improvised explosive device), is a life-or-death matter. Battlefield captures often have critical information about planned attacks on American soldiers. Any intelligence gathered has a short shelf life as terrorists quickly change locations, plans, and communication methods.
Field intelligence officers don’t have the time to transport a captured terrorist detainee to an interrogation facility. They need information immediately to save the lives of their troops. Physical intimidation, such as shoving, may be critical to obtaining important information for the safety and welfare of their fellow soldiers. Yes, the actions of our troops in the heat of combat are being judged through the eyes of an unsympathetic, mostly anti-war media. While our soldiers are facing life-and-death decisions, they must also worry about their immediate actions being investigated after-the-fact or being brought up on formal charges much later. Such incidents as the arrest and incarceration of the Pendleton Eight and the harrowing experiences of now-exonerated, second lieutenant Ilario Pantano affect our troops ability to make split-second decisions. It can translate into the loss of lives.
Further, many of these aggressive interrogation methods that don’t cause bodily injury and sustainable aftereffects are routinely used by U.S. police departments across the country. They include good cop/bad cop, isolation/segregation, false flag (having an informant in the same cell pretending to be a fellow prisoner), intimidation related to sentencing and incarceration, granting of special privileges in exchange for cooperation and dietary or environmental manipulations. Often the discomfort and fear induced by these techniques sufficiently motivates suspects to offer helpful information that solves crimes and saves lives.
Yet, the enemy we face uses even harsher methods. Our troops know that if they are captured by Al Qaeda, Hezbollah or any other terrorist group, they can expect torture, disfigurement, and a painful death. They will certainly not be treated according to the Geneva Conventions, the Rules of Engagement or any internationally recognized military protocol. After the U.S. Army’s 507th Maintenance Company was captured during Operation Iraqi Freedom in Nasiriyah in 2003, nine troops were tortured and beheaded. As she lay in a hospital bed and peered out the window, Private Jessica Lynch, a member of that company, saw the shallow graves of her follow soldiers, buried in a soccer field nearby, stepped on in dishonor by the enemy. U.S. Army prisoners of war have been shot dead by Saddam loyalists as they surrendered with their hands up. Recently, the bodies of kidnapped American soldiers, Thomas Tucker and Christian Menchaca were so severely mutilated by Al Qaeda that DNA testing was required to determine the identity of the corpses.
Our ability to extract information from terrorists is our best tool for preventing future attacks in the United States and on the battlefield. It has already enabled us to gather critical information used to stop attacks that would have led to massive casualties. Without good and timely intelligence, we can’t win the war against Islamic terrorists nor protect the lives of our civilians and our troops.
Further, we have already seen that the way we treat terrorist detainees is inconsequential to the treatment of our own captured troops. Our humane methods are viewed as an exploitable weakness, as is our liberal media and overly cautious, criminal justice system. We know that our soldiers will always be faced with brutal torture or death at the hands of Islamic terrorists. Why should we broadcast to Al Qaeda and other terrorist entities that they have nothing to fear in U.S. custody? Why should we spare a brutal terrorist temporary discomfort and pain at the expense of American lives?
Click Here to support Frontpagemag.com.
Janet Levy is the founder of ESG Consulting, an organization that offers project management, fundraising, promotion, event organizing and planning services for conservative political causes and issues related to terrorism and national security.
Vasko Kohlmayer: The Case for Waterboarding
Vasko Kohlmayer
http://www.FrontPageMag.com
September 29, 2006
Discussing his recent compromise with the White House on detention and interrogation of captured terrorists, John McCain said on the Today show that ‘there will be no such thing as waterboarding…You will never see that again. We stood up and said that cannot be done.’
It is not easy to grasp the thinking of senator McCain and others who seek to ban this practice in the light of its immense value in our fight against terror. Take, for instance, the case of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed captured in Pakistan in March of 2003. One of the masterminds of 9/11 and al-Qaeda’s operational leader at the time, he possessed a wide-ranging knowledge of the network’s plans, logistics and personnel. Unwilling to share it voluntarily, he was subjected to forced interrogation. As resilient as he was and defiant, he held out until the interrogators decided to proceed with waterboarding. Two and a half minutes into the procedure, a broken Mohammed begged for relief. Stunned and shaken, his extensive confession amounted to nothing less than a treasure trove of priceless intelligence.
This case is unusual not in how quickly the waterboarding worked, but how long Mohammed was able to withstand it. Two and a half minutes is by all accounts a record of sorts, as most subjects usually break down inside a minute. CIA agents who undergo this procedure as part of their training rarely last more than 40 seconds. This despite the fact that they are in a friendly environment and know that death is not an option.
Although waterboarding is normally employed as the last resort and the frequency of its use kept secret, it has been made known that so far it has worked every time it has been tried. Thanks to its extraordinary efficacy, we have been able to obtain a great amount of critical intelligence that would have otherwise remained inaccessible. With the help of this information we have captured al-Qaeda operatives, stopped deadly plots, and saved many innocent lives. One of the fruits of Mohammed’s confession, to give one example, was the thwarting of a conspiracy to fly an airliner into the Library Tower, the tallest building in Los Angeles.
Given these facts, it is almost incomprehensible that there are some people in this country who insist that we relinquish this life-saving tool. Resting their objections on ethical grounds, they try to convince us that the procedure is morally unacceptable. But theirs is a misguided stance, since careful consideration shows that waterboarding is in fact one of the least injurious among interrogation techniques.
To see why this is so, it is enough to contrast it with the most common approach which involves a combination of sleep deprivation and cold exposure. Frequently requiring days and even weeks to break the captive’s spirit, it carries a real possibility of long-term physical and psychological damage. Worse still, it often fails to achieve the desired effect with the result that the captive is subjected to prolonged hardships, but we still end up without the information we so urgently need.
Waterboarding, on the other hand, is fleeting in duration with the actual discomfort lasting seldom more than a couple of minutes. And since a man can be safely deprived of oxygen for at least twice as long, there is almost no risk of long-term harm. The possibility of injury is further reduced by the fact that the procedure calls for no direct physical contact between the subject and his interrogators. Not even as much as pushing or chest slapping is required at any time, making waterboarding one of the safest and least confrontational among interrogation methods. Involving the lowest risk of long-term harm and the least amount of cumulative discomfort, it is also the most humane. Most importantly, it is the most effective.
While other interrogation procedures employ raw force, intimidation or long-term duress, waterboarding brings the terrorist face to face with that which he himself seeks to inflict upon his victims – the horror of dying. Viewed in this light, waterboarding may well be the most just form of interrogation for this kind of criminal, because it gives him a taste of his own evil. The difference is that his anguish is stopped the moment he expresses a desire for it to be so. This, tragically, is something which his victims would never be granted. While the terrorist turns his prey into mangled corpses, waterboarding gives him a chance to see another day without being so much as scathed by his momentary ordeal. But even as he goes on living, we have in our possession crucial intelligence that will save innocent lives.
It is widely agreed that the horrors of 9/11 took place primarily because of our intelligence gathering failures. The fact that at the time we had in our custody the 20th hijacker makes this tragedy all the more painful. Even though we suspected that Zacarias Moussaoui knew something big was in the works, we did not interrogate him aggressively enough to extract this information from him. Had we done so, things could have turned out differently. One of the primary objectives of waterboarding is to bring forth the kind of intelligence that will prevent tragedies like 9/11 from occurring again.
Rather than depriving our interrogators of this tool for wresting intelligence from recalcitrant terrorists, we must ensure that it is available whenever the need arises. Our government officials would do well to remember what the stakes are and whose protection they have been entrusted with. Once they do so, they cannot but recognize that our government not only is fully justified in utilizing this invaluable technique, but has a moral obligation to use it to save lives.
And as far as opponents of waterboarding are concerned, I have these questions to ask: Are a few moments of a terrorist’s discomfort more important than the lives of the innocents he seeks to destroy? Are two minutes of Moussaoui’s anguish worth more than the three thousand lives lost on 9/11? Does his momentary pain override a lifetime of hurt of those left behind?
If you can’t answer in the affirmative then hold your peace.
Click Here to support Frontpagemag.com.
http://www.FrontPageMag.com
September 29, 2006
Discussing his recent compromise with the White House on detention and interrogation of captured terrorists, John McCain said on the Today show that ‘there will be no such thing as waterboarding…You will never see that again. We stood up and said that cannot be done.’
It is not easy to grasp the thinking of senator McCain and others who seek to ban this practice in the light of its immense value in our fight against terror. Take, for instance, the case of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed captured in Pakistan in March of 2003. One of the masterminds of 9/11 and al-Qaeda’s operational leader at the time, he possessed a wide-ranging knowledge of the network’s plans, logistics and personnel. Unwilling to share it voluntarily, he was subjected to forced interrogation. As resilient as he was and defiant, he held out until the interrogators decided to proceed with waterboarding. Two and a half minutes into the procedure, a broken Mohammed begged for relief. Stunned and shaken, his extensive confession amounted to nothing less than a treasure trove of priceless intelligence.
This case is unusual not in how quickly the waterboarding worked, but how long Mohammed was able to withstand it. Two and a half minutes is by all accounts a record of sorts, as most subjects usually break down inside a minute. CIA agents who undergo this procedure as part of their training rarely last more than 40 seconds. This despite the fact that they are in a friendly environment and know that death is not an option.
Although waterboarding is normally employed as the last resort and the frequency of its use kept secret, it has been made known that so far it has worked every time it has been tried. Thanks to its extraordinary efficacy, we have been able to obtain a great amount of critical intelligence that would have otherwise remained inaccessible. With the help of this information we have captured al-Qaeda operatives, stopped deadly plots, and saved many innocent lives. One of the fruits of Mohammed’s confession, to give one example, was the thwarting of a conspiracy to fly an airliner into the Library Tower, the tallest building in Los Angeles.
Given these facts, it is almost incomprehensible that there are some people in this country who insist that we relinquish this life-saving tool. Resting their objections on ethical grounds, they try to convince us that the procedure is morally unacceptable. But theirs is a misguided stance, since careful consideration shows that waterboarding is in fact one of the least injurious among interrogation techniques.
To see why this is so, it is enough to contrast it with the most common approach which involves a combination of sleep deprivation and cold exposure. Frequently requiring days and even weeks to break the captive’s spirit, it carries a real possibility of long-term physical and psychological damage. Worse still, it often fails to achieve the desired effect with the result that the captive is subjected to prolonged hardships, but we still end up without the information we so urgently need.
Waterboarding, on the other hand, is fleeting in duration with the actual discomfort lasting seldom more than a couple of minutes. And since a man can be safely deprived of oxygen for at least twice as long, there is almost no risk of long-term harm. The possibility of injury is further reduced by the fact that the procedure calls for no direct physical contact between the subject and his interrogators. Not even as much as pushing or chest slapping is required at any time, making waterboarding one of the safest and least confrontational among interrogation methods. Involving the lowest risk of long-term harm and the least amount of cumulative discomfort, it is also the most humane. Most importantly, it is the most effective.
While other interrogation procedures employ raw force, intimidation or long-term duress, waterboarding brings the terrorist face to face with that which he himself seeks to inflict upon his victims – the horror of dying. Viewed in this light, waterboarding may well be the most just form of interrogation for this kind of criminal, because it gives him a taste of his own evil. The difference is that his anguish is stopped the moment he expresses a desire for it to be so. This, tragically, is something which his victims would never be granted. While the terrorist turns his prey into mangled corpses, waterboarding gives him a chance to see another day without being so much as scathed by his momentary ordeal. But even as he goes on living, we have in our possession crucial intelligence that will save innocent lives.
It is widely agreed that the horrors of 9/11 took place primarily because of our intelligence gathering failures. The fact that at the time we had in our custody the 20th hijacker makes this tragedy all the more painful. Even though we suspected that Zacarias Moussaoui knew something big was in the works, we did not interrogate him aggressively enough to extract this information from him. Had we done so, things could have turned out differently. One of the primary objectives of waterboarding is to bring forth the kind of intelligence that will prevent tragedies like 9/11 from occurring again.
Rather than depriving our interrogators of this tool for wresting intelligence from recalcitrant terrorists, we must ensure that it is available whenever the need arises. Our government officials would do well to remember what the stakes are and whose protection they have been entrusted with. Once they do so, they cannot but recognize that our government not only is fully justified in utilizing this invaluable technique, but has a moral obligation to use it to save lives.
And as far as opponents of waterboarding are concerned, I have these questions to ask: Are a few moments of a terrorist’s discomfort more important than the lives of the innocents he seeks to destroy? Are two minutes of Moussaoui’s anguish worth more than the three thousand lives lost on 9/11? Does his momentary pain override a lifetime of hurt of those left behind?
If you can’t answer in the affirmative then hold your peace.
Click Here to support Frontpagemag.com.
Friday, September 29, 2006
Pat Buchanan: New Deal for U.S. Manufacturers
http://www.townhall.com
Friday, September 29, 2006
In July, our trade deficit hit yet another all-time record, $68 billion, an annual rate of $816 billion. Imports surged to $188 billion for the month, as our dependency on foreigners for the vital necessities of our national life ever deepens.
China's trade surplus with us was $19.6 billion for July alone, moving toward an all-time record of $235 billion for 2006 -- the largest trade deficit one country has ever run with another. Our deficit with Mexico is running at an annual rate of $60 billion. With Canada, it is $70 billion. So much for NAFTA. With the European Union, it is running at $160 billion.
America as the most self-sufficient republic in history is history. For decades, U.S. factories have been closing. Three million manufacturing jobs have disappeared since Bush arrived. Ford and GM are fighting for their lives.
Bushites boast of all the new jobs created, but Business Week tells the inconvenient truth: "Since 2001, 1.7 million new jobs have been created in the health care sector. ... Meanwhile, the number of private sector jobs outside of health care is no higher than it was five years ago."
"Perhaps most surprising," writes BW, "information technology, the great electronic promise of the 1990s, has turned into one of the biggest job-growth disappointments of all time. ... (B)usinesses at the core of the information economy -- software, semiconductors, telecom and the whole gamut of Web companies -- have lost more than 1.1 million jobs in the past five years. Those business employ fewer Americans than they did in 1998, when the Internet economy kicked into high gear."
Where did the high-tech go? China. Beijing's No. 1 export to the United States in 2005, $50 billion worth, was computers and electronics.
If Americans are the most efficient workers on earth and work longer hours than almost any other advanced nation, why are we getting our clocks cleaned? Answer: While American workers are world-class, our elites are mentally challenged. So rhapsodic are they about the Global Economy they have forgotten their own country. Europeans, Japanese, Canadians and Chinese sell us so much more than they buy from us, because they have rigged the rules of world trade.
While the United States has a corporate income tax, our trade rivals use a value-added tax. At each level of production, a tax is imposed on the value added to the product. Under the rules of global trade, nations may rebate VAT levies on exports, and impose the equivalent of a VAT on imports.
Assume a VAT that adds up to 15 percent of the cost of a new car in Japan. If Toyota ships 1 million cars to the United States valued at $20,000 each, $20 billion worth of Toyotas, they can claim a rebate of the VAT of $3,000 on each car, or $3 billion -- a powerful incentive to export. But each U.S. car arriving at the Yokohama docks will have 15 percent added to its sticker price to make up for Japan's VAT.
This amounts to a foreign subsidy on exports to the United States and a foreign tax on imports from America. Uncle Sam gets hit coming and going. It is as though, after firing a round of 66 in the Masters, Tiger Woods has five strokes added to his score for a 71, and five strokes are subtracted from the scores of his rivals. Even Tiger would bring home few trophies with those kind of ground rules.
The total tax disadvantage to U.S. producers -- of VAT rebates and VAT equivalents imposed on U.S. products -- is estimated at $294 billion.
Exported U.S services face the same double whammy. A VAT equivalent is imposed on them, while the exported services of foreign providers get the VAT rebate. Disadvantage to U.S. services: $85 billion annually.
Why do our politicians not level the playing field for U.S. companies?
First, ignorance of how world trade works. Second, ideology. These robotic free-traders recoil from any suggestion that they aid U.S. producers against unfair foreign tactics as interfering with Adam Smith's "invisible hand," which they equate with the hand of the Almighty.
Third, they are hauling water for transnational companies that want to move production overseas and shed their U.S. workers.
How could we level the playing field? Simple. Impose an "equalizing fee" on imports equal to the rebates. Take the billions raised, and cut taxes on U.S. companies, especially in production. Create a level playing field for U.S. goods and services in foreign markets, and increase the competitiveness of U.S. companies in our own home market by reducing their tax load.
U.S. trade deficits would shrivel overnight. And jobs and factories lately sent abroad would start coming home.
Isn't it time we put America first -- even ahead of China?
Friday, September 29, 2006
In July, our trade deficit hit yet another all-time record, $68 billion, an annual rate of $816 billion. Imports surged to $188 billion for the month, as our dependency on foreigners for the vital necessities of our national life ever deepens.
China's trade surplus with us was $19.6 billion for July alone, moving toward an all-time record of $235 billion for 2006 -- the largest trade deficit one country has ever run with another. Our deficit with Mexico is running at an annual rate of $60 billion. With Canada, it is $70 billion. So much for NAFTA. With the European Union, it is running at $160 billion.
America as the most self-sufficient republic in history is history. For decades, U.S. factories have been closing. Three million manufacturing jobs have disappeared since Bush arrived. Ford and GM are fighting for their lives.
Bushites boast of all the new jobs created, but Business Week tells the inconvenient truth: "Since 2001, 1.7 million new jobs have been created in the health care sector. ... Meanwhile, the number of private sector jobs outside of health care is no higher than it was five years ago."
"Perhaps most surprising," writes BW, "information technology, the great electronic promise of the 1990s, has turned into one of the biggest job-growth disappointments of all time. ... (B)usinesses at the core of the information economy -- software, semiconductors, telecom and the whole gamut of Web companies -- have lost more than 1.1 million jobs in the past five years. Those business employ fewer Americans than they did in 1998, when the Internet economy kicked into high gear."
Where did the high-tech go? China. Beijing's No. 1 export to the United States in 2005, $50 billion worth, was computers and electronics.
If Americans are the most efficient workers on earth and work longer hours than almost any other advanced nation, why are we getting our clocks cleaned? Answer: While American workers are world-class, our elites are mentally challenged. So rhapsodic are they about the Global Economy they have forgotten their own country. Europeans, Japanese, Canadians and Chinese sell us so much more than they buy from us, because they have rigged the rules of world trade.
While the United States has a corporate income tax, our trade rivals use a value-added tax. At each level of production, a tax is imposed on the value added to the product. Under the rules of global trade, nations may rebate VAT levies on exports, and impose the equivalent of a VAT on imports.
Assume a VAT that adds up to 15 percent of the cost of a new car in Japan. If Toyota ships 1 million cars to the United States valued at $20,000 each, $20 billion worth of Toyotas, they can claim a rebate of the VAT of $3,000 on each car, or $3 billion -- a powerful incentive to export. But each U.S. car arriving at the Yokohama docks will have 15 percent added to its sticker price to make up for Japan's VAT.
This amounts to a foreign subsidy on exports to the United States and a foreign tax on imports from America. Uncle Sam gets hit coming and going. It is as though, after firing a round of 66 in the Masters, Tiger Woods has five strokes added to his score for a 71, and five strokes are subtracted from the scores of his rivals. Even Tiger would bring home few trophies with those kind of ground rules.
The total tax disadvantage to U.S. producers -- of VAT rebates and VAT equivalents imposed on U.S. products -- is estimated at $294 billion.
Exported U.S services face the same double whammy. A VAT equivalent is imposed on them, while the exported services of foreign providers get the VAT rebate. Disadvantage to U.S. services: $85 billion annually.
Why do our politicians not level the playing field for U.S. companies?
First, ignorance of how world trade works. Second, ideology. These robotic free-traders recoil from any suggestion that they aid U.S. producers against unfair foreign tactics as interfering with Adam Smith's "invisible hand," which they equate with the hand of the Almighty.
Third, they are hauling water for transnational companies that want to move production overseas and shed their U.S. workers.
How could we level the playing field? Simple. Impose an "equalizing fee" on imports equal to the rebates. Take the billions raised, and cut taxes on U.S. companies, especially in production. Create a level playing field for U.S. goods and services in foreign markets, and increase the competitiveness of U.S. companies in our own home market by reducing their tax load.
U.S. trade deficits would shrivel overnight. And jobs and factories lately sent abroad would start coming home.
Isn't it time we put America first -- even ahead of China?
Thursday, September 28, 2006
Robert Stacy McCain on Ann Coulter's "Godless"
Is Ann Coulter Among the Prophets?by Robert Stacy McCain
http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org
“And they worshipped the dragon which gave power unto the beast, and they worshipped the beast, saying, Who is like unto the beast? Who is able to make war with him?”—Revelation 13:4
Signs and omens have been everywhere this year. Amid wars and rumors of wars, one occasionally glimpses evidence that truth is now being revealed in ways that might astonish even battle-scarred veterans of the culture wars.
I knew the Apocalypse was upon us when I picked up Phyllis Chesler’s The Death of Feminism and discovered that Chesler, bearing decades of liberal feminist credentials, had praised as “prophetic” Jean Raspail’s Camp of the Saints. What next? Will we see Cornel West invoking Robert E. Lee? Or George Will paying tribute to M.E. Bradford?
Let him that hath understanding consider the significance when the latest best-seller by Ann Coulter—Sean Hannity’s favorite TV guest—cites Joe Sobran. Like Raspail, Sobran is one of The Great Unmentionables, whose existence is not even to be acknowledged by respectable people in the conservative movement. Once you have been denounced as an Unpatriotic Conservative in the pages of National Review, your name disappears, with the resulting void serving as a warning to anyone else who might dare to offend the arbiters of conservative respectability.
And yet, there it was, on page 201 of Godless, where Coulter recognizes Darwinism as “the creation myth” of the Church of Liberalism and refers to evolutionary cultists as “the Darwiniacs”—adding, “as author and columnist Joe Sobran calls them.” Not content with that offense to the Straussian archons, Coulter thanks Sobran in her acknowledgements, numbering him among her “long-suffering, magnificent friends.” Coulter has even gone out of her way to call attention to her thoughtcrime. On the day her book was released—June 6, 2006, making use of the number of the beast as a publicity stunt—Coulter paid tribute to Sobran in an interview published by Human Events, calling him a “magnificent writer” who had given her “the greatest advice a writer could ever get.”
Coulter herself has survived banishment from National Review without suffering any discernible loss of popularity, and this survival evidently inspired in her an even-greater loathing of the pieties of political correctness. How else to explain her designation of Willie Horton as the “martyr” of the Church of Liberalism? She devotes a 17-page chapter to revisiting Horton’s crimes, the Massachusetts prison furlough program that turned Horton loose, and the way in which Horton’s furlough became an issue in the 1988 presidential election. Though Democratic-primary rival Al Gore was the first to use the Horton furlough against Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis, Democrats did not begin shouting “racism” until Republicans followed suit.
No serious student of the 1988 presidential campaign has ever expressed doubt that the South Carolina-born Lee Atwater, campaign boss for George H.W. Bush, knew exactly what he was doing when he summoned forth the dark specter of Willie Horton. A murderer serving life without parole, Horton was furloughed as part of a program staunchly defended by Dukakis and other Massachusetts liberals. He then kidnapped and tortured a Maryland couple—pistol-whipped, bound, gagged, and sadistically tortured the man, then forced him to listen to his fiancée’s screams as Horton repeatedly raped her. This incident would have been a scathing indictment of Dukakis’s commitment to public safety whatever Horton’s race, but because Horton was black, his crimes held a deeper symbolism.
The Willie Horton ads turned Dukakis’s boast of being a “card-carrying member of the ACLU” into a fatal campaign liability. In reaction, Democrats accused Republicans of having appealed to primal racial fears of the sort that once inspired lynch mobs and made D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation the original Hollywood blockbuster. Republicans have spent nearly two decades denying this, and Coulter is not about to give liberals any satisfaction:
Since none of their other defenses of Dukakis’s furlough program were working, the Democrats reverted to their default argument: they accused Republicans of racism. This was consistent with author Peter Brimelow’s definition of “racist” as “someone who is winning an argument with a liberal.”
(See? There she goes again, bringing up the name of yet another conservative banished from polite society.)
I only wish that Coulter had acknowledged the extent to which the liberal criticisms were fair. One need not be a liberal to say that a black rapist represents a symbolic fear to many Americans, nor is it racist to question whether this symbolism is strictly irrational. Is it racist to admit into evidence Eldridge Cleaver’s testimony about the implications of rape as “symbol” and “metaphor”? Yet Coulter, while boldly violating the Republican taboo against discussing the 1988 ads, still seems compelled to respect other taboos—or risk providing ammunition to those who regularly accuse her of fomenting hatred. Coulter clearly understands that, when liberals express a desire for honest, forthright “racial dialogue,” what they actually mean is: Shut up.
The initial indignation over Godless had nothing to do with Willie Horton, however, but with Coulter’s treatment of the “Jersey Girls”—the group of women widowed in the World Trade Center attacks who gained fame as prominent critics of the Bush administration. Coulter styles Kristen Breitweiser and her cohorts “the Witches of East Brunswick” and accuses them of deploying their grief for partisan gain after demanding over one million dollars in federal compensation for their loss:
These self-obsessed women seemed genuinely unaware that 9/11 was an attack on our nation and acted as if the terrorist attacks happened only to them. The whole nation was wounded, all of our lives reduced. But they believed the entire country was required to marinate in their exquisite personal agony. Apparently, denouncing Bush was an important part of their closure process. These broads are millionaires, lionized on TV and in articles about them, reveling in their status as celebrities and stalked by grief-arazzis. I’ve never seen people enjoying their husbands’ deaths so much.
Here, quite apart from partisan or ideological allegiances, can we all agree that Coulter has taken hyperbole entirely beyond defensible limits? As much as anyone might wish to criticize the publicity seeking and griefmongering of Breitweiser et al., it is both cruel and false to say that they are “enjoying” the deaths of their spouses. In reading that offending sentence, I wondered how an editor could have failed to demand that it be recast, or why Coulter would have insisted it stand as written. Indefensible as argument, it makes sense only as a punch line. Its stark clarity is its only conceivable excuse, and I suspect that Coulter demanded that it be printed for the same reason that Lyndon Johnson once sought to accuse a Texas political foe of barnyard bestiality: “I just want to hear the S.O.B. deny it.”
The usual “respectable” Republican types have joined many genuine conservatives in lamenting Coulter’s penchant for such rhetorical abuses. Coulter is vulnerable to the charge of committing the same sins of which she accuses liberals. (Imagine her reaction if any liberal had accused Horton’s rape victim of “enjoying” it.) Even if turnabout is fair play or if two wrongs could make a right, even if one might enjoy Coulter’s high-wire act as a sort of showbiz spectacle, one might also wish that some friendly editor would take the time to talk her out of the most egregious of her excesses.
Yet that would spoil the fun of periodically turning on the television to see Coulter running rings around Matt Lauer or whatever other liberal spokesman has drawn the unenviable assignment of confronting her in a live interview. A lawyer by training, Coulter is quick-witted and tenacious, with a carefully honed knack for making liberal antagonists look foolish.
Thus with the “Jersey Girls.” Coulter’s attack on Breitweiser is part of a chapter in which she correctly points out that liberals have hit on an ingenious strategy: They would choose only messengers whom we’re not allowed to respond to. That’s why all Democratic spokesmen these days are sobbing, hysterical women. You can’t respond to them because that would be questioning the authenticity of their suffering.
She includes in this category various individuals (Valerie Plame, Rep. John Murtha, Cindy Sheehan) whom she treats as examples of a single phenomenon:
What crackpot argument can’t be immunized by the Left’s invocation of infallibility based on personal experience? . . . If these Democrat human shields have a point worth making, how about allowing it to be made by someone we’re allowed to respond to?
That Coulter was criticizing the Oprahfication of politics was a point lost in the immediate uproar over her “Witches of East Brunswick” line. Her point will be understood better by the thousands who buy her books, among whom are many College Republicans who will seek to emulate her defiance of liberal sensibilities. This is why liberals so hate Coulter: If she can get rich by sarcastically denouncing the myths and martyrs of the liberal faith, she will inspire others to similar impiety, and liberals must dread that nightmare future when cable TV news is fully stocked with Ann Coulter wannabes, as talk radio is now dominated by Rush Limbaugh clones.
Most genuine conservatives probably do not relish a future in which political debate is conducted in one-liners, even if liberalism is the butt of the joke. And Coulter’s enthusiasm for the war in Iraq will annoy those readers of Thucydides who understand that Nicias was right in opposing the Sicilian campaign, even if Alcibiades won the debate in Athens. Still, Godless has much to recommend it.
In her 20-page chapter on abortion—the “holiest sacrament” of the Church of Liberalism—Coulter is unrelenting. “No Republican is as crazily obsessed with any issue as the Democrats are with abortion,” she observes, labeling them the “Abortion Party.” Coulter anticipates that some will respond by pointing to pro-life Democrats and is ready to show that these commitments are routinely discarded by Democrats with national ambitions:
Showing the raw principle of the modern Democratic Party, among the Democrats who have abandoned pro-life positions to become pro-choice are former president Jimmy Carter, Senator Dick Durbin, former representative Richard Gephardt, Representative Dennis Kucinich, the Reverend Jesse Jackson, and [former vice president] Al Gore. . . . It’s easy to imagine a person going from being pro-abortion to anti-abortion based on new information—ultrasounds, medical advances, pictures of babies smiling in the womb. But it’s hard to see how new information could produce the reverse conversion.
On abortion, Coulter thus takes her stand with one of the most influential, though least prestigious, of the Republican Party’s constituencies, the Religious Right. Here again, she invites censure from the GOP elite, who scarcely conceal their embarrassment at their party’s reliance on the votes of devout Catholics and hard-shell evangelical Protestants. And her proclivity for adding insult to injury is further evidenced when she concludes with three chapters (82 pages) attacking Darwinism.
Her critique of Darwinian evolution will offer few surprises to the reader who has followed the development of the Intelligence Design (ID) argument over the past two decades. Coulter acknowledges the assistance of ID’s leading theorists (Michael Behe, David Berlinksi, and William Dembski) and also mentions Berkeley law professor Phillip E. Johnson, who has explored the philosophical terrain staked out by evolutionists. And, in the end, she presents the same argument, really, that Johnson made a decade ago in his book, Reason in the Balance.
Johnson, however, is not a long-stemmed blonde with a caustic wit, nor does he have Sean Hannity’s private number on speed-dial. Coulter’s notoriety enables her to reach many thousands who would never read a Berkeley law professor’s book, let alone anything by Joe Sobran or Peter Brimelow.
Conservative intellectuals may disdain Coulter as a shallow popularizer, but, so long as she’s popularizing the right ideas, she is doing the Lord’s work. She goes where angels fear to tread and seems to have been blessed with some mystical protection against the conservative establishment’s desire to rid itself of inconvenient associations. The SPLC can scream all it wants about Coulter’s friendships—in May, she wrote a column about immigration that cited VDare.com—and she’ll just toss her blonde mane and laugh.
This apparent immunity to rebuke is enviable, as was noted en passant by Samuel Francis a few years before his death. Coulter had just got herself banished from National Review Online and had responded by calling Jonah Goldberg and Rich Lowry “girly boys.” Noting a series of neocon attacks on Coulter in 2003, Francis dryly observed, “it may be that Miss Coulter kind of ODs on the hyperbole. I know the problem myself.” Don’t we all? But we cannot all be blue-eyed blondes, and, in the Age of Media, many must toil in thankless obscurity while a favored few reap fame and fortune.
Rather than succumb to envy, however, we the obscure ought to count our blessings and remain steadfast in faith. For the signs indicate that the day is coming when “the first shall be last.”
Robert Stacy McCain is coauthor, with Lynn Vincent, of Donkey Cons: Sex, Crime, and Corruption in the Democratic Party (Nelson Current).
This article first appeared in the September 2006 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.
Ann Coulter: I Did Not Have Sex with that Nomad, Osama bin Laden
Ann Coulter
http://www.frontpagemag.com/
September 28, 2006
It's just like old times. Bill Clinton delivers an impassioned speech, and within 24 hours the Web is bristling with documentation establishing that nearly every sentence was a lie.
The glassy-eyed Clinton cultists are insisting their idol's on-air breakdown during a "Fox News Sunday" interview with Chris Wallace was a calculated performance, which is a bit like describing Hurricane Katrina as a "planned demolition." Like an Osama tape, they claim he was sending a signal to Democrats to show them how to treat Republicans. Listen up, Democrats: Let's energize the undecideds by throwing a hissy fit on national television!
The Clintonian plan for action apparently entails inventing lunatic conspiracy theories, telling lots of lies, shouting, sneering, interrupting and telling your interlocutor, "(Y)ou've got that little smirk on your face and you think you're so clever" – all for asking a simple question. To wit: "Why didn't you do more to put bin Laden and al-Qaida out of business when you were president?" The only thing Clinton forgot to say to Wallace was, "You'd better put some ice on that."
Let me be the first to welcome Chris Wallace to the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy! If the son of Mike Wallace is a member, can Chelsea be far behind?
According to Wallace, Clinton's aide, Jay Carson, demanded that the interview be stopped a few minutes into Clinton's tantrum – just before the part where he threw the lamp at Wallace. The last time Clinton got that red in the face, the encounter ended with a stained dress. Even Muslims thought Clinton overreacted. But the Clinton Kool-Aid drinkers tell us this was a masterfully planned set-piece by their leader.
I also think Jessica Savitch's slurred, incoherent broadcast on "NBC Nightly News" in October 1983 was intentional. Others say it was drug-addled breakdown that ended her career, but obviously Savitch intended to speak in garbled gibberish on air as a brilliantly executed prelude to her death in a ditch weeks later.
And when Stephen Colbert did a routine at the White House Correspondents Dinner that bombed, I think he planned it that way.
Then there was Capt. Joseph Hazelwood's meticulously planned off-loading of 11 million gallons of crude oil off the Exxon Valdez.
Clinton shouted so many lies during his televised meltdown, only the World Wide Web can capture them all. These are just a few.
Clinton yelled at Wallace: "What did I do? What did I do? I worked hard to try to kill him. I authorized a finding for the CIA to kill him. We contracted with people to kill him. I got closer to killing him than anybody has gotten since."
This is so crazy it's worthy of an Air America caller. Clinton has consistently misrepresented the presidential directive about political assassinations. Clinton did not order bin Laden assassinated. He did not even lift the ban on intelligence agencies attempting to assassinate bin Laden.
What he did was lift the ban on political assassinations – provided that assassinating bin Laden was not the purpose of the mission. So if U.S. forces were engaged in an operation to capture bin Laden, but accidentally killed him, they would not be court-martialed.
Clinton said, "All the right-wingers who now say I didn't do enough said I did too much – same people." As proof, he cites his humiliating withdrawal from Somalia, claiming, "They were all trying to get me to withdraw from Somalia in 1993 the next day after we were involved in 'Black Hawk down,' and I refused to do it."
He added, as if it mattered, "There is not a living soul in the world who thought that Osama bin Laden had anything to do with 'Black Hawk down.'"
In fact, what Republicans objected to was Clinton's transforming a U.N. mission in Somalia to prevent mass starvation into a much grander "nation building" exercise – something the Democrats now hysterically support in Darfur and oppose in Iraq.
Democrats long to see American mothers weeping for their sons lost in a foreign war, but only if the mission serves absolutely no national security objectives of the United States. If we are building a democracy in a country while also making America safer – such as in Iraq – Democrats oppose it with every fiber of their being.
When Clinton's "nation building" in Somalia led to the brutal killing of 18 Americans, some of whose corpses were then dragged through the streets, Clinton did what the Democrats are currently demanding we do in Iraq: He cut and ran.
Republicans didn't like that either, and it had nothing to do with whether it was al-Qaida we were running from. It could have been Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, al-Dawa or the Viet Cong. We ran, and the terrorists noticed.
Osama bin Laden told "ABC News" in 1998 that America's humiliating retreat from Somalia emboldened his jihadists: "The youth were surprised at the low morale of the American soldiers and realized more than before that the American soldier was a paper tiger and after a few blows ran in defeat."
If this is the message that Clinton is hoping to telegraph to the American people, I hope the voters are listening.
Click Here to support Frontpagemag.com.
Ann Coulter is a bestselling author and syndicated columnist. Her most recent book is Godless: The Church of Liberalism.
http://www.frontpagemag.com/
September 28, 2006
It's just like old times. Bill Clinton delivers an impassioned speech, and within 24 hours the Web is bristling with documentation establishing that nearly every sentence was a lie.
The glassy-eyed Clinton cultists are insisting their idol's on-air breakdown during a "Fox News Sunday" interview with Chris Wallace was a calculated performance, which is a bit like describing Hurricane Katrina as a "planned demolition." Like an Osama tape, they claim he was sending a signal to Democrats to show them how to treat Republicans. Listen up, Democrats: Let's energize the undecideds by throwing a hissy fit on national television!
The Clintonian plan for action apparently entails inventing lunatic conspiracy theories, telling lots of lies, shouting, sneering, interrupting and telling your interlocutor, "(Y)ou've got that little smirk on your face and you think you're so clever" – all for asking a simple question. To wit: "Why didn't you do more to put bin Laden and al-Qaida out of business when you were president?" The only thing Clinton forgot to say to Wallace was, "You'd better put some ice on that."
Let me be the first to welcome Chris Wallace to the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy! If the son of Mike Wallace is a member, can Chelsea be far behind?
According to Wallace, Clinton's aide, Jay Carson, demanded that the interview be stopped a few minutes into Clinton's tantrum – just before the part where he threw the lamp at Wallace. The last time Clinton got that red in the face, the encounter ended with a stained dress. Even Muslims thought Clinton overreacted. But the Clinton Kool-Aid drinkers tell us this was a masterfully planned set-piece by their leader.
I also think Jessica Savitch's slurred, incoherent broadcast on "NBC Nightly News" in October 1983 was intentional. Others say it was drug-addled breakdown that ended her career, but obviously Savitch intended to speak in garbled gibberish on air as a brilliantly executed prelude to her death in a ditch weeks later.
And when Stephen Colbert did a routine at the White House Correspondents Dinner that bombed, I think he planned it that way.
Then there was Capt. Joseph Hazelwood's meticulously planned off-loading of 11 million gallons of crude oil off the Exxon Valdez.
Clinton shouted so many lies during his televised meltdown, only the World Wide Web can capture them all. These are just a few.
Clinton yelled at Wallace: "What did I do? What did I do? I worked hard to try to kill him. I authorized a finding for the CIA to kill him. We contracted with people to kill him. I got closer to killing him than anybody has gotten since."
This is so crazy it's worthy of an Air America caller. Clinton has consistently misrepresented the presidential directive about political assassinations. Clinton did not order bin Laden assassinated. He did not even lift the ban on intelligence agencies attempting to assassinate bin Laden.
What he did was lift the ban on political assassinations – provided that assassinating bin Laden was not the purpose of the mission. So if U.S. forces were engaged in an operation to capture bin Laden, but accidentally killed him, they would not be court-martialed.
Clinton said, "All the right-wingers who now say I didn't do enough said I did too much – same people." As proof, he cites his humiliating withdrawal from Somalia, claiming, "They were all trying to get me to withdraw from Somalia in 1993 the next day after we were involved in 'Black Hawk down,' and I refused to do it."
He added, as if it mattered, "There is not a living soul in the world who thought that Osama bin Laden had anything to do with 'Black Hawk down.'"
In fact, what Republicans objected to was Clinton's transforming a U.N. mission in Somalia to prevent mass starvation into a much grander "nation building" exercise – something the Democrats now hysterically support in Darfur and oppose in Iraq.
Democrats long to see American mothers weeping for their sons lost in a foreign war, but only if the mission serves absolutely no national security objectives of the United States. If we are building a democracy in a country while also making America safer – such as in Iraq – Democrats oppose it with every fiber of their being.
When Clinton's "nation building" in Somalia led to the brutal killing of 18 Americans, some of whose corpses were then dragged through the streets, Clinton did what the Democrats are currently demanding we do in Iraq: He cut and ran.
Republicans didn't like that either, and it had nothing to do with whether it was al-Qaida we were running from. It could have been Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, al-Dawa or the Viet Cong. We ran, and the terrorists noticed.
Osama bin Laden told "ABC News" in 1998 that America's humiliating retreat from Somalia emboldened his jihadists: "The youth were surprised at the low morale of the American soldiers and realized more than before that the American soldier was a paper tiger and after a few blows ran in defeat."
If this is the message that Clinton is hoping to telegraph to the American people, I hope the voters are listening.
Click Here to support Frontpagemag.com.
Ann Coulter is a bestselling author and syndicated columnist. Her most recent book is Godless: The Church of Liberalism.
Wednesday, September 27, 2006
Richard Miniter: What Clinton Didn't Do
What Clinton Didn't Do . . . . . . .and when he didn't do it.
The Wall Street Journal
Wednesday, September 27, 2006 12:01 a.m. EDT
Bill Clinton's outburst on Fox News was something of a public service, launching a debate about the antiterror policies of his administration. This is important because every George W. Bush policy that arouses the ire of Democrats--the Patriot Act, extraordinary rendition, detention without trial, pre-emptive war--is a departure from his predecessor. Where policies overlap--air attacks on infrastructure, secret presidential orders to kill terrorists, intelligence sharing with allies, freezing bank accounts, using police to arrest terror suspects--there is little friction. The question, then, is whether America should return to Mr. Clinton's policies or soldier on with Mr. Bush's.
It is vital that this debate be honest, but so far this has not been the case. Both Mr. Clinton's outrage at Chris Wallace's questioning and the ABC docudrama "The Path to 9/11" are attempts to polarize the nation's memory. While this divisiveness may be good for Mr. Clinton's reputation, it is ultimately unhealthy for the country. What we need, instead, is a cold-eyed look at what works against terrorists and what does not. The policies of the Clinton and Bush administrations ought to be put to the same iron test.
**********
With that in mind, let us examine Mr. Clinton's war on terror. Some 38 days after he was sworn in, al Qaeda attacked the World Trade Center. He did not visit the twin towers that year, even though four days after the attack he was just across the Hudson River in New Jersey, talking about job training. He made no attempt to rally the public against terrorism. His only public speech on the bombing was a few paragraphs inserted into a radio address mostly devoted an economic stimulus package. Those stray paragraphs were limited to reassuring the public and thanking the rescuers, the kinds of things governors say after hurricanes. He did not even vow to bring the bombers to justice. Instead, he turned the first terrorist attack on American soil over to the FBI.
In his Fox interview, Mr. Clinton said "no one knew that al Qaeda existed" in October 1993, during the tragic events in Somalia. But his national security adviser, Tony Lake, told me that he first learned of bin Laden "sometime in 1993," when he was thought of as a terror financier. U.S. Army Capt. James Francis Yacone, a black hawk squadron commander in Somalia, later testified that radio intercepts of enemy mortar crews firing at Americans were in Arabic, not Somali, suggesting the work of bin Laden's agents (who spoke Arabic), not warlord Farah Aideed's men (who did not). CIA and DIA reports also placed al Qaeda operatives in Somalia at the time.
By the end of Mr. Clinton's first year, al Qaeda had apparently attacked twice. The attacks would continue for every one of the Clinton years.
• In 1994, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (who would later plan the 9/11 attacks) launched "Operation Bojinka" to down 11 U.S. planes simultaneously over the Pacific. A sharp-eyed Filipina police officer foiled the plot. The sole American response: increased law-enforcement cooperation with the Philippines.
• In 1995, al Qaeda detonated a 220-pound car bomb outside the Office of Program Manager in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, killing five Americans and wounding 60 more. The FBI was sent in.
• In 1996, al Qaeda bombed the barracks of American pilots patrolling the "no-fly zones" over Iraq, killing 19. Again, the FBI responded.
• In 1997, al Qaeda consolidated its position in Afghanistan and bin Laden repeatedly declared war on the U.S. In February, bin Laden told an Arab TV network: "If someone can kill an American soldier, it is better than wasting time on other matters." No response from the Clinton administration.
• In 1998, al Qaeda simultaneously bombed U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, killing 224, including 12 U.S. diplomats. Mr. Clinton ordered cruise-missile strikes on Afghanistan and Sudan in response. Here Mr. Clinton's critics are wrong: The president was right to retaliate when America was attacked, irrespective of the Monica Lewinsky case.
Still, "Operation Infinite Reach" was weakened by Clintonian compromise. The State Department feared that Pakistan might spot the American missiles in its air space and misinterpret it as an Indian attack. So Mr. Clinton told Gen. Joe Ralston, vice chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff, to notify Pakistan's army minutes before the Tomahawks passed over Pakistan. Given Pakistan's links to jihadis at the time, it is not surprising that bin Laden was tipped off, fleeing some 45 minutes before the missiles arrived.
• In 1999, the Clinton administration disrupted al Qaeda's Millennium plots, a series of bombings stretching from Amman to Los Angeles. This shining success was mostly the work of Richard Clarke, a NSC senior director who forced agencies to work together. But the Millennium approach was shortlived. Over Mr. Clarke's objections, policy reverted to the status quo.
• In January 2000, al Qaeda tried and failed to attack the U.S.S. The Sullivans off Yemen. (Their boat sank before they could reach their target.) But in October 2000, an al Qaeda bomb ripped a hole in the hull of the U.S.S. Cole, killing 17 sailors and wounding another 39.
When Mr. Clarke presented a plan to launch a massive cruise missile strike on al Qaeda and Taliban facilities in Afghanistan, the Clinton cabinet voted against it. After the meeting, a State Department counterterrorism official, Michael Sheehan, sought out Mr. Clarke. Both told me that they were stunned. Mr. Sheehan asked Mr. Clarke: "What's it going to take to get them to hit al Qaeda in Afghanistan? Does al Qaeda have to attack the Pentagon?"
**********
There is much more to Mr. Clinton's record--how Predator drones, which spotted bin Laden three times in 1999 and 2000, were grounded by bureaucratic infighting; how a petty dispute with an Arizona senator stopped the CIA from hiring more Arabic translators. While it is easy to look back in hindsight and blame Bill Clinton, the full scale and nature of the terrorist threat was not widely appreciated until 9/11. Still: Bill Clinton did not fully grasp that he was at war. Nor did he intuit that war requires overcoming bureaucratic objections and a democracy's natural reluctance to use force. That is a hard lesson. But it is better to learn it from studying the Clinton years than reliving them.
Mr. Miniter, a fellow at the Hudson Institute, is author of "Disinformation: 22 Media Myths that Undermine the War on Terror" (Regnery, 2005).
The Wall Street Journal
Wednesday, September 27, 2006 12:01 a.m. EDT
Bill Clinton's outburst on Fox News was something of a public service, launching a debate about the antiterror policies of his administration. This is important because every George W. Bush policy that arouses the ire of Democrats--the Patriot Act, extraordinary rendition, detention without trial, pre-emptive war--is a departure from his predecessor. Where policies overlap--air attacks on infrastructure, secret presidential orders to kill terrorists, intelligence sharing with allies, freezing bank accounts, using police to arrest terror suspects--there is little friction. The question, then, is whether America should return to Mr. Clinton's policies or soldier on with Mr. Bush's.
It is vital that this debate be honest, but so far this has not been the case. Both Mr. Clinton's outrage at Chris Wallace's questioning and the ABC docudrama "The Path to 9/11" are attempts to polarize the nation's memory. While this divisiveness may be good for Mr. Clinton's reputation, it is ultimately unhealthy for the country. What we need, instead, is a cold-eyed look at what works against terrorists and what does not. The policies of the Clinton and Bush administrations ought to be put to the same iron test.
**********
With that in mind, let us examine Mr. Clinton's war on terror. Some 38 days after he was sworn in, al Qaeda attacked the World Trade Center. He did not visit the twin towers that year, even though four days after the attack he was just across the Hudson River in New Jersey, talking about job training. He made no attempt to rally the public against terrorism. His only public speech on the bombing was a few paragraphs inserted into a radio address mostly devoted an economic stimulus package. Those stray paragraphs were limited to reassuring the public and thanking the rescuers, the kinds of things governors say after hurricanes. He did not even vow to bring the bombers to justice. Instead, he turned the first terrorist attack on American soil over to the FBI.
In his Fox interview, Mr. Clinton said "no one knew that al Qaeda existed" in October 1993, during the tragic events in Somalia. But his national security adviser, Tony Lake, told me that he first learned of bin Laden "sometime in 1993," when he was thought of as a terror financier. U.S. Army Capt. James Francis Yacone, a black hawk squadron commander in Somalia, later testified that radio intercepts of enemy mortar crews firing at Americans were in Arabic, not Somali, suggesting the work of bin Laden's agents (who spoke Arabic), not warlord Farah Aideed's men (who did not). CIA and DIA reports also placed al Qaeda operatives in Somalia at the time.
By the end of Mr. Clinton's first year, al Qaeda had apparently attacked twice. The attacks would continue for every one of the Clinton years.
• In 1994, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (who would later plan the 9/11 attacks) launched "Operation Bojinka" to down 11 U.S. planes simultaneously over the Pacific. A sharp-eyed Filipina police officer foiled the plot. The sole American response: increased law-enforcement cooperation with the Philippines.
• In 1995, al Qaeda detonated a 220-pound car bomb outside the Office of Program Manager in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, killing five Americans and wounding 60 more. The FBI was sent in.
• In 1996, al Qaeda bombed the barracks of American pilots patrolling the "no-fly zones" over Iraq, killing 19. Again, the FBI responded.
• In 1997, al Qaeda consolidated its position in Afghanistan and bin Laden repeatedly declared war on the U.S. In February, bin Laden told an Arab TV network: "If someone can kill an American soldier, it is better than wasting time on other matters." No response from the Clinton administration.
• In 1998, al Qaeda simultaneously bombed U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, killing 224, including 12 U.S. diplomats. Mr. Clinton ordered cruise-missile strikes on Afghanistan and Sudan in response. Here Mr. Clinton's critics are wrong: The president was right to retaliate when America was attacked, irrespective of the Monica Lewinsky case.
Still, "Operation Infinite Reach" was weakened by Clintonian compromise. The State Department feared that Pakistan might spot the American missiles in its air space and misinterpret it as an Indian attack. So Mr. Clinton told Gen. Joe Ralston, vice chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff, to notify Pakistan's army minutes before the Tomahawks passed over Pakistan. Given Pakistan's links to jihadis at the time, it is not surprising that bin Laden was tipped off, fleeing some 45 minutes before the missiles arrived.
• In 1999, the Clinton administration disrupted al Qaeda's Millennium plots, a series of bombings stretching from Amman to Los Angeles. This shining success was mostly the work of Richard Clarke, a NSC senior director who forced agencies to work together. But the Millennium approach was shortlived. Over Mr. Clarke's objections, policy reverted to the status quo.
• In January 2000, al Qaeda tried and failed to attack the U.S.S. The Sullivans off Yemen. (Their boat sank before they could reach their target.) But in October 2000, an al Qaeda bomb ripped a hole in the hull of the U.S.S. Cole, killing 17 sailors and wounding another 39.
When Mr. Clarke presented a plan to launch a massive cruise missile strike on al Qaeda and Taliban facilities in Afghanistan, the Clinton cabinet voted against it. After the meeting, a State Department counterterrorism official, Michael Sheehan, sought out Mr. Clarke. Both told me that they were stunned. Mr. Sheehan asked Mr. Clarke: "What's it going to take to get them to hit al Qaeda in Afghanistan? Does al Qaeda have to attack the Pentagon?"
**********
There is much more to Mr. Clinton's record--how Predator drones, which spotted bin Laden three times in 1999 and 2000, were grounded by bureaucratic infighting; how a petty dispute with an Arizona senator stopped the CIA from hiring more Arabic translators. While it is easy to look back in hindsight and blame Bill Clinton, the full scale and nature of the terrorist threat was not widely appreciated until 9/11. Still: Bill Clinton did not fully grasp that he was at war. Nor did he intuit that war requires overcoming bureaucratic objections and a democracy's natural reluctance to use force. That is a hard lesson. But it is better to learn it from studying the Clinton years than reliving them.
Mr. Miniter, a fellow at the Hudson Institute, is author of "Disinformation: 22 Media Myths that Undermine the War on Terror" (Regnery, 2005).
Robert Spencer: Keith Ellison, CAIR and Hamas
Robert Spencer
http://www.FrontPageMag.com
September 27, 2006
Keith Ellison (D-MN) is shaping up to be the first-ever Muslim member of Congress, and the mainstream media is treating his candidacy as a huge human-interest story and a triumph of multiculturalism. The Christian Science Monitor gushed that “when Keith Ellison arrives at the Karmel Square, one of Minneapolis’s Somali malls, a rock star might as well be walking by the bustling stalls of bright fabrics, jewelry, phone cards, and videos.” It quoted Larry Jacobs of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota exulting: “You think of the stereotype of Minnesota -- Garrison Keillor and white Norwegian farmers. The first Muslim congressman coming from Minnesota? It says a lot about the changing face of the United States and Minnesota.”
Of course, not all is rosy: the Monitor notes that “conservative bloggers” and Ellison’s Republican opponent, Alan Fine, have raised questions about Ellison’s alleged ties to the Nation of Islam, as well as about a number of unpaid parking tickets that led to the suspension of his drivers’ license. But the Monitor doesn’t mention the most troubling aspect of Ellison’s record: the support he has received from the Council on American Islamic Relations.
Journalist Joel Mowbray has been virtually the only journalist who has pursued this connection, exploring in a recent column “Mr. Ellison’s seemingly tight connection with Nihad Awad, co-founder of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), whom he met almost two decades ago at the University of Minnesota.” Mowbray reports that “Mr. Awad headlined a fundraiser last month that the campaign estimates netted $15,000 to $20,000, and in July, and it appears that CAIR’s co-founder bundled contributions totaling just over $10,000. (The campaign issued a terse denial on the latter point, though it refused to explain away overwhelming evidence to the contrary.)” Faced with this evidence, Ellison’s backers have “attempted to paint attacks on the candidate as overtly partisan or even bigoted. A Minneapolis Star Tribune columnist, for example, recently suggested that Mr. Ellison is under attack solely for being Muslim.”
What is so troubling about Ellison’s connection with Awad and CAIR? Mowbray quotes the assessments of two leading Democrats: Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois has declared that CAIR “is unusual in its extreme rhetoric and its association with groups that are suspect.” New York Senator Charles Schumer, once said that CAIR “has ties to terrorism” and that Ellison’s supporter Awad has “intimate connections with Hamas.” Mowbray establishes the latter point from Awad’s own mouth, quoting his 1994 statement: “I’m in support of the Hamas movement.”
Awad himself responded to this in an AP story about Ellison’s candidacy: “I don’t support Hamas today,” he explained. “My position and CAIR’s position is extremely clear -- we condemn suicide bombings. We are mainstream American Muslims.” AP reporter Frederic Frommer added that a Republican charge that Ellison had received “financial support from a self-identified supporter of Hamas” was a “reference to Awad's 1994 statement that he preferred Hamas to the Palestinian Liberation Organization. In an interview, Awad said that was before the group engaged in suicide bombings and was designated a terrorist organization by the State Department.”
But of course, saying flatly that “I am in support of the Hamas movement” is not simply stating a preference for Hamas over the PLO. In any case, if Awad supported Hamas before 1994, it is useful to examine what that means. I have here preserved the old Hamas website’s “glory record” of attacks against Israelis – the terrorist organization’s own record of its murderous actions. Here are some of Hamas’ self-described exploits from before 1994:
3. Boureen Operation: The militant Hamdan Hussein Al:najar, a member of Hamas, killed the Israeli settler Ya’coub Berey using a big rock as his weapon. The militant was shot down as a martyr after he had ambushed an Israeli patrol using the dead settler’s weapon....
6. Bus No. 405 Operation: Militant Ahmed Hussein Shukry, a member of Hamas, was able to lead an Israeli soldier to a secluded place in Tel Aviv where the militant hit the soldier with a chisel and killed him on 8 September 1989. The following day, the militant got on bus No. 405 and stabbed the driver to take over the bus; however, the passengers were able to stop the militant....
12. Keryat Youval Operation: The militant Mohammed Mustafa Abu Jalala stabbed four Israelis and injured another at a bus station in Keryat Youval in Jerusalem before he was arrested by the Israeli forces.
13. Askalan Road Operation: While driving a taxi, the militant Jameel Ismail Al:baz, a member of Hamas, ran over a group of Israelis waiting on this road on 19 July 1991....
15. Shailou Operation: A military group belonging to Al Qassam Brigades attacked an Israeli bus carrying some settlers on their way to Tel Aviv to participate in demonstrations organized by the extremist party Likud against the peace process. The bus was completely destroyed; two Israelis were killed and five more were injured....
17. Eid Al-maskhara Operation: The militant Ra’ed Al:reefy attacked an Israeli crowd in Jaffa on 17 March 1992. He was able to kill 2 and injure 21 Israelis who gathered to celebrate Eid Al:maskhara, also known as Al:boureem.
18. Beit Lahya Operation: On the third anniversary of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin's arrest, a group belonging to Al Qassam Brigades attacked an Israeli settler at Beit Lahya and shot him down then withdrew safely....
21. Carlo Factory Operation: Four militants belonging to Al Qassam Brigades broke into a citrus packing factory (Carlo) near Nahal Oaz at 2:30 p.m. on 25 June 1992. Three militants stabbed two Israelis while the other was guarding....
Suicide bombings? No. Terrorist attacks on civilians? Sure. And there are many, many more on the list dating from before 1994. So are we to understand that Awad supported such operations and only stopped supporting Hamas later, although these was no change in its ideology and no change in its taste for victimizing civilians?
When Awad says that he and CAIR do not support Hamas today, it should be recalled that in March 2004, when Hamas leader Sheikh Yassin was killed by Israel, CAIR condemned his killing -- without ever mentioning that Yassin was the mastermind and director of suicide killings for Hamas: “We condemn this violation of international law as an act of state terrorism by Ariel Sharon's out-of-control government. Israel’s extra-judicial killing of an Islamic religious leader can only serve to perpetuate the cycle of violence throughout the region. The international community must now take concrete steps to help protect the Palestinian people against such wanton Israeli violence.”
When did CAIR stop supporting Hamas? On Monday I searched the CAIR website for “Hamas.” There are three possible searches: News Briefs, Action Alerts, and Press Releases. Only News Briefs turned up anything at all: an old article from Haaretz attacking Ariel Sharon.
So if CAIR now condemns Hamas, where is it saying so? Just in the lower paragraphs of articles about other subjects? We can’t even get one press release about it? Not one Action Alert calling on Muslims everywhere to condemn Hamas?
Before Minnesotans elect Keith Ellison to Congress, they need to know the answers to these questions.
Click Here to support Frontpagemag.com.
Robert Spencer is a scholar of Islamic history, theology, and law and the director of Jihad Watch. He is the author of six books, seven monographs, and hundreds of articles about jihad and Islamic terrorism, including Islam Unveiled: Disturbing Questions About the World’s Fastest Growing Faith and the New York Times Bestseller The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades). His latest book, The Truth About Muhammad, is coming October 9 from Regnery Publishing.
http://www.FrontPageMag.com
September 27, 2006
Keith Ellison (D-MN) is shaping up to be the first-ever Muslim member of Congress, and the mainstream media is treating his candidacy as a huge human-interest story and a triumph of multiculturalism. The Christian Science Monitor gushed that “when Keith Ellison arrives at the Karmel Square, one of Minneapolis’s Somali malls, a rock star might as well be walking by the bustling stalls of bright fabrics, jewelry, phone cards, and videos.” It quoted Larry Jacobs of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota exulting: “You think of the stereotype of Minnesota -- Garrison Keillor and white Norwegian farmers. The first Muslim congressman coming from Minnesota? It says a lot about the changing face of the United States and Minnesota.”
Of course, not all is rosy: the Monitor notes that “conservative bloggers” and Ellison’s Republican opponent, Alan Fine, have raised questions about Ellison’s alleged ties to the Nation of Islam, as well as about a number of unpaid parking tickets that led to the suspension of his drivers’ license. But the Monitor doesn’t mention the most troubling aspect of Ellison’s record: the support he has received from the Council on American Islamic Relations.
Journalist Joel Mowbray has been virtually the only journalist who has pursued this connection, exploring in a recent column “Mr. Ellison’s seemingly tight connection with Nihad Awad, co-founder of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), whom he met almost two decades ago at the University of Minnesota.” Mowbray reports that “Mr. Awad headlined a fundraiser last month that the campaign estimates netted $15,000 to $20,000, and in July, and it appears that CAIR’s co-founder bundled contributions totaling just over $10,000. (The campaign issued a terse denial on the latter point, though it refused to explain away overwhelming evidence to the contrary.)” Faced with this evidence, Ellison’s backers have “attempted to paint attacks on the candidate as overtly partisan or even bigoted. A Minneapolis Star Tribune columnist, for example, recently suggested that Mr. Ellison is under attack solely for being Muslim.”
What is so troubling about Ellison’s connection with Awad and CAIR? Mowbray quotes the assessments of two leading Democrats: Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois has declared that CAIR “is unusual in its extreme rhetoric and its association with groups that are suspect.” New York Senator Charles Schumer, once said that CAIR “has ties to terrorism” and that Ellison’s supporter Awad has “intimate connections with Hamas.” Mowbray establishes the latter point from Awad’s own mouth, quoting his 1994 statement: “I’m in support of the Hamas movement.”
Awad himself responded to this in an AP story about Ellison’s candidacy: “I don’t support Hamas today,” he explained. “My position and CAIR’s position is extremely clear -- we condemn suicide bombings. We are mainstream American Muslims.” AP reporter Frederic Frommer added that a Republican charge that Ellison had received “financial support from a self-identified supporter of Hamas” was a “reference to Awad's 1994 statement that he preferred Hamas to the Palestinian Liberation Organization. In an interview, Awad said that was before the group engaged in suicide bombings and was designated a terrorist organization by the State Department.”
But of course, saying flatly that “I am in support of the Hamas movement” is not simply stating a preference for Hamas over the PLO. In any case, if Awad supported Hamas before 1994, it is useful to examine what that means. I have here preserved the old Hamas website’s “glory record” of attacks against Israelis – the terrorist organization’s own record of its murderous actions. Here are some of Hamas’ self-described exploits from before 1994:
3. Boureen Operation: The militant Hamdan Hussein Al:najar, a member of Hamas, killed the Israeli settler Ya’coub Berey using a big rock as his weapon. The militant was shot down as a martyr after he had ambushed an Israeli patrol using the dead settler’s weapon....
6. Bus No. 405 Operation: Militant Ahmed Hussein Shukry, a member of Hamas, was able to lead an Israeli soldier to a secluded place in Tel Aviv where the militant hit the soldier with a chisel and killed him on 8 September 1989. The following day, the militant got on bus No. 405 and stabbed the driver to take over the bus; however, the passengers were able to stop the militant....
12. Keryat Youval Operation: The militant Mohammed Mustafa Abu Jalala stabbed four Israelis and injured another at a bus station in Keryat Youval in Jerusalem before he was arrested by the Israeli forces.
13. Askalan Road Operation: While driving a taxi, the militant Jameel Ismail Al:baz, a member of Hamas, ran over a group of Israelis waiting on this road on 19 July 1991....
15. Shailou Operation: A military group belonging to Al Qassam Brigades attacked an Israeli bus carrying some settlers on their way to Tel Aviv to participate in demonstrations organized by the extremist party Likud against the peace process. The bus was completely destroyed; two Israelis were killed and five more were injured....
17. Eid Al-maskhara Operation: The militant Ra’ed Al:reefy attacked an Israeli crowd in Jaffa on 17 March 1992. He was able to kill 2 and injure 21 Israelis who gathered to celebrate Eid Al:maskhara, also known as Al:boureem.
18. Beit Lahya Operation: On the third anniversary of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin's arrest, a group belonging to Al Qassam Brigades attacked an Israeli settler at Beit Lahya and shot him down then withdrew safely....
21. Carlo Factory Operation: Four militants belonging to Al Qassam Brigades broke into a citrus packing factory (Carlo) near Nahal Oaz at 2:30 p.m. on 25 June 1992. Three militants stabbed two Israelis while the other was guarding....
Suicide bombings? No. Terrorist attacks on civilians? Sure. And there are many, many more on the list dating from before 1994. So are we to understand that Awad supported such operations and only stopped supporting Hamas later, although these was no change in its ideology and no change in its taste for victimizing civilians?
When Awad says that he and CAIR do not support Hamas today, it should be recalled that in March 2004, when Hamas leader Sheikh Yassin was killed by Israel, CAIR condemned his killing -- without ever mentioning that Yassin was the mastermind and director of suicide killings for Hamas: “We condemn this violation of international law as an act of state terrorism by Ariel Sharon's out-of-control government. Israel’s extra-judicial killing of an Islamic religious leader can only serve to perpetuate the cycle of violence throughout the region. The international community must now take concrete steps to help protect the Palestinian people against such wanton Israeli violence.”
When did CAIR stop supporting Hamas? On Monday I searched the CAIR website for “Hamas.” There are three possible searches: News Briefs, Action Alerts, and Press Releases. Only News Briefs turned up anything at all: an old article from Haaretz attacking Ariel Sharon.
So if CAIR now condemns Hamas, where is it saying so? Just in the lower paragraphs of articles about other subjects? We can’t even get one press release about it? Not one Action Alert calling on Muslims everywhere to condemn Hamas?
Before Minnesotans elect Keith Ellison to Congress, they need to know the answers to these questions.
Click Here to support Frontpagemag.com.
Robert Spencer is a scholar of Islamic history, theology, and law and the director of Jihad Watch. He is the author of six books, seven monographs, and hundreds of articles about jihad and Islamic terrorism, including Islam Unveiled: Disturbing Questions About the World’s Fastest Growing Faith and the New York Times Bestseller The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades). His latest book, The Truth About Muhammad, is coming October 9 from Regnery Publishing.
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