Army warned about jihadist threat in '08

By Bill Gertz
The Washington Times
http://www.washingtontimes.com/
Tuesday, February 9, 2010

Almost two years before the deadly Fort Hood shooting by a radicalized Muslim officer, the U.S. Army was explicitly warned that jihadism — Islamic holy war — was a serious problem and threat to personnel in the U.S., according to participants at a major Army-sponsored conference.

The annual Army anti-terrorism conference in Florida in February 2008 included presentations on the threat by counterterrorism specialists Patrick Poole, Army Lt. Col. Joseph Myers and Terri Wonder.

US Army soldiers stand together as they prepare to leave after the memorial service in honor of the 13 victims of the shooting rampage on November 10, 2009 in Fort Hood, Texas. A report into the Fort Hood shooting spree calls for holding accountable "several" US military officers who supervised the suspected gunman, a leader of the probe said last Friday.
(AFP/Getty Images/File/Joe Raedle)

The meeting was organized by the Army's provost marshal general and included more than 350 force protection and anti-terrorism professionals who came from major Army installations and commands from around the world, according to participants.

Mr. Poole, a counterterrorism specialist and adviser to government and law-enforcement agencies, said his presentation and that of the other two counterterrorism experts "attempted to instruct these anti-terrorism and force protection professionals not just in the indicators of Islamic jihadism, but also the strategic deficiencies in the military comprehension of the overall jihadist threat."

The shooting at a recruiting center in Little Rock, Ark., in June and the November shooting at Fort Hood, Texas, that killed 13 people have exposed the problem of the Army's deficiencies in understanding the nature of the domestic Islamic terrorist threat, Mr. Poole said.

The incidents have raised questions about whether the Army made any effort to "operationalize" the threat warnings from the 2008 conference and develop policies to counter the threats. "The answer quite clearly is no," Mr. Poole said.

Col. Myers said in an interview that he was a key speaker at the annual conference and spoke there based on his role as a force protection instructor-trainer.

He also had conducted an organizational review of the Pentagon's Anti-Terrorism Operations Intelligence Cell, a group that provides strategic threat warnings to the Army.

"I noted that because of our lack of understanding of Islamic doctrines, Islamic Jihad and my view that our counterintelligence function is broken, outdated and being usurped in some cases by public affairs and equal opportunity officials, we were going to get soldiers killed in America, on our own bases for that professional ignorance," he said, adding that his comments were his personal views and not those of the service.

Col. Myers said he told the conference that senior military and defense officials were involved in outreach programs to "organizations affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood and snapping pictures with its foundational leaders in our country."

"The Muslim Brotherhood, also known as the Ikhwan al Muslimeen, is a global jihad organization that fundamentally shares the same objectives as the 'combat jihad' groups like al Qaeda, but orients on 'cultural jihad' — subversion, infiltration and proselytization," he said. "By its own long-standing strategic documents, … they say they exist in America to destroy our civilization and replace it with an Islamic one."

Army spokesman Lt. Col. Nathan Banks declined to comment on the specifics of the Army conference.

However, "in light of the Fort Hood tragedy, we are currently reviewing potential vulnerabilities and methods of combating external and internal threats," Col. Banks said.

The Pentagon-wide review led by former Army Secretary Togo West and retired Adm. Vern Clark, former chief of naval operations, as well as an Army review "have been focused on identifying those vulnerabilities and developing ways to mitigate those threats," Col. Banks said.

Mr. Poole said the Pentagon's outreach program to some Muslim groups, including photographs of senior defense officials associating with questionable domestic Muslim leaders and groups, gave "legitimacy" to some of the organizations promoting the ideology embraced by Maj. Nidal Hasan, the suspect in the shooting rampage at Fort Hood that killed 13 people.

"These embarrassing photo-ops occur because the military is not well-schooled on the jihadist threat in America, and because fundamentally the national security establishment does not have a fully elaborated threat model for the global and domestic jihad," Mr. Poole said. "In many instances, relationships and events with terror-tied Islamic groups and leaders are organized by public affairs flacks and never vetted by counterintelligence agencies."

Mr. Poole said an example was a lecture on Islam that was given to U.S. troops at Fort Hood by Louay Safi as the troops were preparing to deploy to Afghanistan. Mr. Poole said Mr. Safi had been captured on FBI communications intercepts talking to a senior Palestinian Islamic Jihad leader in the U.S. Additionally, Mr. Safi's office had been raided by the FBI in 2002 as part of a terrorism finance probe.

"Amazingly, a Fort Hood spokesman later claimed that Safi had been fully vetted," Mr. Poole said. "If thats true, who was doing the vetting and what standards were they using?"

Ms. Wonder, a third speaker at the conference, also presented several case studies showing indicators and warnings of mosques in the U.S. that were taken over by Islamic radicals, many linked to the Muslim Brotherhood. The mosques are being used as "hubs" and support systems for active terrorist cells, she told the conference.

Col. Myers said his presentation in 2008 represents a failure to strategically understand the full nature of the threat facing the United States in the war on terrorism. "Unfortunately, such strategic failings at senior leader levels cannot help but result in tactical failings, such as the Fort Hood terrorist attack," he said. "It demonstrates that we don't get it."

Mr. Poole noted the case of Army Sgt. Hasan Karim Akbar, who killed two fellow soldiers in Kuwait in 2003. Akbar was sentenced to death for the killing.

"Our conclusion was that ignorance and inaction keeps our troops vulnerable," Mr. Poole said. "But our warnings were ignored and no policies were changed. And in 2009, 13 soldiers and one civilian employee paid with their lives."

Col. Myers said the Army's recent report on the Fort Hood shooting, like much of current military doctrine, focused on capabilities and deficiencies, process and procedures but failed to address the threat.

"We continue to act and talk as though we don't understand it and that there is a level of 'uncertainty' — a word overused today in military parlance — as to who our enemy is and at this point, that can no longer be tolerated," he said.

"All federal and commissioned officers take an oath to defend the Constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic, and that mandates a duty to be clear on who the enemies of our Constitution are, and a failure to know is a failure of duty."

The end of the IPCC

By S. Fred Singer
http://www.americanthinker.com/
February 10, 2010

Almost daily, we learn about new problems with the formerly respected UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC): In their 2001 report, they claimed that the 20th century was "unusual" and blamed it on human-released greenhouse gases. Their infamous temperature graph shown there, shaped like a hockey stick, did away with the well-established Medieval Warm Period (around 1000AD, when Vikings were able to settle in Southern Greenland and grow crops there) and the following Little Ice Age (around 1400 to 1800AD). Two Canadians exposed the bad data used by the IPCC and the statistical errors in their analysis.

The most recent IPCC report of 2007 predicted the disappearance of the Himalayan glaciers within 25 years; the imminent death of nearly half the Amazon rain forest; and major damage from stronger hurricanes -- all in contradiction to expert opinions offered by its appointed reviewers, but ignored by IPCC editors for mostly ideological reasons. More scandalous even, the IPCC based their lurid predictions on anecdotal, non-peer-reviewed sources -- not at all in accord with its solemnly announced principles and scientific standards.

These events showed not only a general sloppiness of IPCC procedures but also an extreme bias -- quite inappropriate to a supposedly impartial scientific survey. By themselves, they do not invalidate the basic IPCC conclusion -- that a warming in the latter half of the 20th century was human-caused, presumably by the rise of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide. Yet all of these missteps pale in comparison to ClimateGate, which calls into question the very temperature data used by the IPCC's main policy result.

As the leaked e-mails from the University of East Anglia (UK) reveal, this IPCC conclusion -- that Global Warming is anthropogenic -- is based on manipulated data and therefore flawed -- as are demands for the control of CO2 emissions, like the Kyoto Protocol and the Copenhagen Accord. In my opinion, ClimateGate is a much more serious issue than simply sloppiness and ideological distortion; ClimateGate suggests conspiracy to commit fraud.

Let us recall: The e-mails leaked in the fall of 2009 allow us to trace the machinations of a small but influential band of British and US climate scientists who played the lead role in the IPCC reports. It appears that this group, which controlled access to basic temperature data, was able to produce a "warming" by manipulating the analysis of the data, but refused to share information on the basic data or details of their analysis with independent scientists who requested them -- in violation of Freedom of Information laws. In fact, they went so far as to keep any dissenting views from being published -- by monopolizing the peer-review process, aided by ideologically cooperative editors of prestigious journals, like Science and Nature.

Woe to these dissenting scientists, however. The younger ones were denied an opportunity to advance or receive academic tenure -- or were simply fired. The independent ones were maligned as "deniers" and ostracized. In many instances, commercially operated 'smear blogs' invented slurs; the most common ones being "tool of the oil industry" or "paid by the tobacco lobby." In my own case, my Wiki bio also carried additional malicious accusations; the most bizarre one was that I believed in the existence of Martians.

We learn from the e-mails that the ClimateGate gang was able to "hide the decline" [of global temperature] by applying what they termed as "tricks," and that they intimidated editors and forced out those judged to be "uncooperative." No doubt, thorough investigations, now in progress or planned, will disclose the full range of their nefarious activities. But it is clear that this small cabal was able to convince much of the world that climate disasters were impending -- unless drastic steps were taken. Not only were most of the media, public, and politicians misled, but so were many scientists, national academies of science, and professional organizations -- and even the Norwegian committee that awarded the 2007 Peace Prize to the IPCC and Al Gore, the chief apostle of climate alarmism.

In this enterprise, the group was aided not only by environmental zealots, anti-technology Luddites, utopian one-worlders, and population-control fanatics, but also by bureaucrats, businesses, brokers and bankers, who had learned how to game the system and profit from government grants and subsidies for exotic schemes to produce "carbon-free" energy and from the trading of carbon permits. Hundreds of billions have already been wasted -- most of this in transfers of tax revenues to a favored few.

These sums pale, however, in comparison to the trillions that would have been spent in future if some of the mitigation schemes had come to fruition -- such as an extension and major expansion of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol to control greenhouse-gas emissions. Fortunately for the world economy and for taxpayers in industrialized nations, these schemes collapsed at the Copenhagen climate conference in Dec 2009. Clearly, developing nations did not want to take on the sacrifices and restrictions on growth. There was little concern expressed about climate; Copenhagen was mostly about transfer of money from rich to poor countries - or more precisely, from the poor in rich countries to the rich in poor ones.

Of course, this breakdown in negotiating global controls does not stop unilateral actions. Major developing nations, like India and China, have already refused to act. Australia's parliament has so far turned down attempts to impose limits on the emission of greenhouse gases, which many still believe to cause significant global warming -- in spite of contrary evidence. The European Union is likely to persist in its misguided efforts to continue and expand the Kyoto restrictions. In the US, the House has (barely) passed the calamitous Waxman-Markey "Cap & Trade" bill; the US Senate likely will not pass a similar bill in 2010, an election year.

There is still the US-EPA's drive to extend the Clean Air Act to include carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases as "pollutants." But with the evidence of ClimateGate in hand, EPA's attempt to provide the necessary scientific justification for its "Endangerment Finding" will surely fail. Whoever leaked the incriminating e-mails deserves a medal for saving the US economy from certain ruin.


- The writer, an atmospheric physicist, professor emeritus at the University of Virginia, and former director of the US Weather Satellite Service, is the organizer of NIPCC (Non-governmental International Panel on Climate Change) and coauthor of its reports "Nature, not human activity, rules the climate" [2008] and "Climate Change Reconsidered" [2009].

OBAMA'S OWNED -- YOU CAN BANK ON IT

By Ann Coulter
http://www.anncoulter.com/
February 10, 2010

The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal are bristling with the news that Republicans have decided now is the time to suck up to Wall Street. As the saying goes, there is no truer friend than a Wall Street arbitrageur -- they are the salt-of-the-earth, the most loyal men who ever drew a breath!

What are Republicans thinking? While not every money-manipulator on Wall Street deserves to be treated like a heroin dealer, lots do. Could the Republicans be a little more discriminating in picking up the Democrats' old friends?

The Democrats are acting as if they want to punish everyone in the financial services industry, including the innocent, while the Republicans seem to want to protect everyone on Wall Street, including the guilty.

How about just punishing the guilty? The Democrats can't do that because the list of Wall Street's biggest offenders may turn out to be eerily similar to the list of Obama's biggest campaign contributors.

Employees from Goldman Sachs gave more to the Obama campaign than any other organization except the University of California -- with Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase quickly following in sixth and seventh place.

Whatever Obama has in mind for punishing the financial industry, I promise you, he won't punish his friends. After JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon took a $17 million bonus this week, and Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein got a $9 million bonus, Obama said he didn't begrudge them their bonuses, saying, "I know both those guys."

Obama seems to be hoping that his vague bluster about "obscene profits" will lure Republicans into embracing Wall Street welfare recipients -- thereby losing Americans forever.

Never bet against Republicans being outwitted.

Risk-taking and speculation are good. But the Democrats' crony capitalism is the worst of both worlds: risk-taking without any real risk for the risk-takers. It's like gambling with your rich daddy's money, except we're the rich daddy.

Obama, like the rest of his party, is an ideologue who doesn't understand or particularly like the free market. He fundamentally believes in the efficacy of the welfare state, whether the beneficiary is a layabout single mother or a rich Wall Street banker.

As Peter Schweizer describes in his magnificent book "Architects of Ruin," the Democrats have been bailing out investment houses from their bad bets since the Clinton administration. The bankers got all the profits when their risky bonds were paying -- and then gave massive donations to their Democratic benefactors. But once the bets went bad, it was the taxpayers' problem.

Heavily leveraged securities packages put together by Goldman Sachs and others were the HIV virus that killed the American economy. And the reason investment firms piled leverage on leverage on leverage was that they knew the government would bail them out if their house of cards collapsed.

On one hand, Goldman put together toxic securities packages for their clients, but on the other hand, Goldman knew the mortgage securities being sold on the market were crap, so they also took out lots of insurance with AIG on crappy products being traded on the market.

It would be as if, anticipating a major earthquake, Goldman bought massive insurance policies on every house on the San Andreas fault line.

There's nothing wrong with taking risks and making bets, provided that if you bet wrong or if you bankrupt your betting partner with wild gambles: You lose.

The problem was that Goldman and AIG, among many others, knew they wouldn't lose. Twenty years of Democratic bailouts have led them to understand that when their bets go bad, the taxpayer will save them.

Which is exactly what happened.

When the earthquake hit toxic securities, the insurer, AIG, couldn't pay up. Normally, that would result in the insurer going bankrupt, an orderly proceeding in bankruptcy court to distribute AIG's assets, and Goldman recovering only a portion of the insurance payout on the crappy products.

But instead of AIG going bankrupt and Goldman taking a hit, the U.S. taxpayer made good on AIG's securities insurance. In a deal arranged by former Goldman CEO and current Obama BFF, Hank Paulson, Goldman ended up being paid -- by you -- an astonishing 100 cents on the dollar.

So Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein's boast that his firm didn't want TARP money and has paid it all back is completely irrelevant. Goldman took billions of dollars -- that's millions with a "b" -- of the AIG bailout money. How about paying that back?

It took The New York Times a year and a half to figure out Goldman's jackpot winnings from the AIG bailout -- $12.9 billion, according to the Times -- so the first thing Republicans ought to do is hold hearings to determine who benefited from the Democrats' crony capitalism, and not take their bluster as fact.

The next step should be to get all the bailout money back.

When the government steps in to save the very financial institutions that poisoned the nation's financial system with contaminated securities and derivatives -- all while the bankers get to keep the fees and bonuses on their bad bets -- we are not talking about a free market.

We're talking about regular Americans being forced to foot the bill for the gambling habits of left-wing multimillionaires by buying the malefactors more chips every time they lose.

Republicans should defend any investment houses that never benefited from a government bailout. But anyone who took huge gambles, lost and got bailed out with taxpayer money should be tortured and then shot, miraculously brought back to life, tortured some more, then shot a few more times.

COPYRIGHT 2010 ANN COULTER

Exalting Khomeini’s Legacy

by Lisa Daftari
http://www.frontpagemag.com
Feb 11th, 2010

Most Iranians can remember the exact moments in their lives when they discovered that the Ayatollah Khomeini had died. For many Iranians, this was a joyous occasion and the cause of days of partying, drinking champagne and fanciful thinking about the fate of their country. Schools were closed for forty days, and Iranians abroad remained attached to their television sets wondering if they would touch the soil of their homeland once again. Khomeini’s name was synonymous with the Revolution, the precarious social ambiance and the severe impact that Islamic ideology had on the country. The root of that influence was now gone.

Khomeini, best known to the rest of the world as the founder of modern Islam, the supporter of the Hostage Crisis and the man who issued a fatwa (death decree) on the head of author Salman Rushdie, represented for the Iranian people a central chapter of their modern history that is both complicated and tragic. In the roughly ten years that he reigned, over 100,000 Iranians were executed. The Iran-Iraq war futilely dragged on for almost a decade, and persecuted Iranians across a multicolored Iranian population wondered what the Revolution had achieved.

Looking back at that time makes it difficult to understand how Islamic Republic leaders are now bringing back a cultish reverence for the Khomeini era. Since the post-election protests, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and likewise, reformist Presidential candidates Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karoubi have made serious efforts to revive a faux nostalgia for the late Ayatollah among the opposition.

On the part of the current regime, uniting their modus operandi with that of Khomeini’s gives them a legitimate claim to the Islamic Republic. Recalling that period reminds Iranians of a time when they were curious to see what the Ayatollah Khomeini could offer them.

For the reformists, who are proposing ‘change,’ they are motivated to do so within the confines of the regime, making respect and support for the Khomeini camp a prerequisite to remain part of and function within the Islamic Republic. As a matter of fact, Mousavi and Karoubi have been quick to use Khomeini’s legacy to strengthen their constituency, alleging that the Ayatollah was a more righteous leader, and that Khamenei’s government has severely deviated from the principles initially set forth.

Besides bearing such resemblances in surnames, Khomeini and Khamenei share similarities beyond the superficial. Both support mass executions, terrorism, and a fundamentalist Islamic ideology. Khomeini was famous for the words, “We do not worship Iran. We worship Allah. For patriotism is another name for paganism. I say let this land [Iran] burn. I say let this land go up in smoke, provided Islam emerges triumphant in the rest of the world.” To spread Islam and its influence was his agenda, not much different from the current regime. So inherent is Khomeini’s role in the Islamic Republic landscape that to eradicate his influence from the movement is to study the establishment of the American government system without George Washington, or better yet, to assess Nazism absent Adolph Hitler.

The cleansing of Khomeini’s image became en vogue under former President Mohammad Khatami, who sought to salvage the late Ayatollah’s bloody reputation and in effect absolve the regime, beginning at its very roots. It is said that Khatami began his campaign to change the then dull and disillusioned mood during his presidency and to purify Iran’s modern history. It also might have to do with the fact that Khatami and Khomeini were related. Khatami’s brother, Mohammad Reza, is married to Khomeini’s granddaughter, Zahra Eshraghi.

Incidentally, the intricate web of marriages within the handful of regime dynasties does not stop at the Khatami and Khomeini families. Most staggeringly, the fathers of Mousavi and Khamenei are brothers, making them first cousins. The unions demonstrate how far the inner circle of the regime will go to preserve their stronghold.

Under every IRI leader since Khatami, there has been a push to glorify the name and legacy of Khomeini, a move the leaders believe will sustain the Islamic Republic. For the current government it relies on erasing a very recent history, and for the reformists, it means tying themselves to a retrospectively more ‘benevolent’ supreme leader, in order to say that not everything about the Islamic Republic is corrupt; it had its glory days too.

Making such a claim relies entirely on pandering to a population of Iranians under the age of 30, who do not clearly remember Khomeini’s track record. Or maybe they do remember it and choose not to. It is clearly more pleasant to remember a peaceful history rather than one dotted with executions, stonings and lack of human rights. The leaders may take advantage of the people’s yearning for a united Iran, albeit one that chooses to forget its own history and thus remains under the grips of an Islamic Republic.

When Khomeini’s picture was rampantly burned in the streets of Iran in early December during National Students’ Day, many believed that was, at the very least, a clear and overt indication that the unrest was certainly not just over a fraudulent election. More profoundly taken, burning the picture of the founder of the Islamic Republic represented a denunciation of a theocratic regime and a manifestation of a movement pro-secular.

Yet when the government announced that those in violation are deemed “moharreb,” or Enemies (of God), and subsequently blamed Mousavi and Karoubi for instigating the event, the reformist leaders then in turn blamed the government for staging the incident it in order to discredit the opposition as irreverent and sacrilegious. Subsequently, the Green party urged the opposition to carry pictures of Khomeini to demonstrations in reverence and to never burn or disrespect the late Ayatollah again. In the end, Khomeini actually emerged more popular and even more of a central player in the backdrop of the movement.

It is still not clear who was behind the original burning of the pictures, but the more poignant revelation was how radical the Iranian momentum has become. So incendiary was this incident that it triggered a fad across several continents of posting videos of burning Khomeini’s picture. There are dozens of such groups on Facebook and Youtube created for the cause. Groups such as “I burned Khomeini’s picture” on Facebook has almost 2,000 members. There is even a video capturing a “Burning Khomeini’s picture party” that takes place in Europe, that shows a large group of expatriate Iranians burning the Ayatollah’s picture.

These cyber campaigns, seeking to eradicate Khomeini’s legacy, were created in reaction to the regime’s campaign to exalt it. Freedom-seeking Iranians are warning their countrymen of what can happen if Iranians fail to recall history and fall into the trap of the regime once again.

Why Fear Big Government?

By Victor Davis Hanson
http://pajamasmedia.com/
February 8th, 2010

Who is Afraid of Big Government?

There is no reason to review all the standard reasons why the American people are terrified of an all-powerful federal or state government. The case has been made in thousands of elegant treatises and books, and is best reflected in the Constitution and the written work of the Founding Fathers.

But let me list a few other, less elegantly expressed worries, many anecdotal in nature.

1) Juvenal’s “Who will police the police?”

One of the scariest things about government is its exemption from laws by virtue of its monopoly on lawmaking and enforcement. I see this every day, from the mundane to the profound.

Go to any downtown in America, and one can see how some supposedly efficient, job-creating con-artist once promised a new hotel, stadium, or enterprise zone, then convinced the city council to steal land from some and hand it over to others (e.g., him) — and left an ungodly mess in his wake.

That power to condemn creates a real paranoia in our own lives. While we can defend our homes from the intruder, there is no remedy against eminent domain, especially once we have lost faith in the collective wisdom of those who flock to political office.

On the more mundane level, this week I saw the following examples of government exemption. A local police car randomly did a running stop at a 4-way intersection (should I have called 911?); a city bus driver (very common) cell phoning against California law (report him to the cop running the intersection?); a city garbage truck spewing trash out its top as it sped down Freeway 41 (call his cousins at the state EPA?).

We are all routinely pulled over for any of the above infractions. But the larger the government, the more its power, and so the more its employees feel that they are royal and exempt from enforcement. In other words, big government creates millions who feel the law does not pertain to themselves. Ask Tom Daschle, Duke Cunningham, Chris Dodd, or Timothy Geithner. The result is an increasingly lawless society.

2) The Power of Envy

Government service offers veritable tenure and steady wages for the price of bypassing the American dream of “getting rich” in the private sector. Most follow the odds and realize that a federal bird in the hand is better than two in the private bush.

Yet legions of government (and often union) employees by needs must audit often far richer others, whether at the IRS, the county planner’s office, the zoning authority, or the state regulator. And here the public auditor can, by virtue of his unassailable position, quite easily stymie his private sector upstart counterpart.

A few examples from my own modest experience: Going into the DMV to deal with SEIU T-shirted employees is to face petty humiliation and impediment. I watched dozens of hurried customers stand in line while bored employees at the window lackadaisically redirected them to other bored employees. The subtext was “You need my form and stamp, so calm down, take a deep breath, and wait on my time. It’s not like I have to work for your rat-race company.”

Two years ago, the IRS sent me an “urgent” letter about supposedly not reported W-2s (one thing I learned from my late mother is never, never short the IRS, and so I usually overpay). My accountant in about 2 minutes showed me how an auditing clerk (or computer) had screwed up. He wrote an explanatory letter.

I worried (I didn’t have the demanded supplemental fee) for about 3 months. And then matter-of-factly, 90 days later another letter arrived — admitting the matter was now resolved and I need not pay anything. No apology or explanation. In other words, a single government official was able to try to extort thousands (I am sure many thousands who get such letters are terrified and just pay the bogus supplemental) without explanation. No one in private business can quite get away with that. (I am sure the employee, who hits a button to print such form letters demanding more money, never has his pay docked when the request is shown to be invalid). When the inanimate gasoline pump claims we must pay for 20 gallons for an actual 10 pumped, the gas station owner goes to jail.

I am all for codes, building inspectors, and plant regulators, but an excess of such investigators quickly creates a priestly class who take their own frustrations out on supposedly better off others.

3) Patronage

In California there are hundreds of worthless state boards with six-figure, governor-appointed officials. We assume that in our term-limited state, these sinecures are the refuges of former state assembly and senate politicians. In fact, as soon as we elect our state officials, we accept that they will cut deals with state executives to provide for their upcoming retirements — “I’ll vote for this, if in 4 years I get that spot on the state water board or the state fair practices committee.”

We know that if a local supermarket goes broke or a propane dealer goes under, our lives are affected. But in the case of many government entities, their absence would mean absolutely nothing deleterious in our daily lives — and actually much good.

The Blago Chicago mess shows how our tax monies are used to put cronies, cousins, and sometimes worthless people on the public payroll. And the larger the government, the more powerful these constituencies. Here again in California, the public employee unions rail daily that any cuts, layoffs, or furloughs are equivalent to some sort of collective and heartless felony, as if the state in 1998, 2001 or 2004, with thousands fewer employees, was once rendered helpless.

4) The Greek four-step

I once lived in Greece for over two years, and visit there every other summer. Any casual observer could have predicted its present fiscal meltdown, which is emblematic of big government socialism. Here is the creed of many of the EU socialist states.

1) Praise socialism in the abstract and demonize capitalism, especially the American model, as cruel and heartless.

2) Cheat in every way imaginable on your taxes. On any average day in Greece, a shopkeeper, repairman, or business person would offer a product or service for a 30% discount if paid in cash and kept off the books. Tax-dodging was a national pastime — and this from dyed-in-the-wool socialists. (e.g., we are back to the paradigm of this nation’s leading tax-enforcer and tax-lawmaker both being tax dodgers).

3) Connive for every imaginable state entitlement. In Greece, inventing a disability, fudging for an age subsidy, keeping a dead beneficiary on the books are likewise national pastimes. The notion that the EU had to send more monies southward than went back in taxes to Brussels made it all the better, as there was a sort of endemic “us/them” or Michelle Obama-like “raise the bar” mentality that something was “owed” to Greece anyway, so why not take advantage of richer European cousins? No honor among socialists?

4) Institutionalized lethargy. When one cannot be fired, then one immediately begins to plot to slow down, how to do the least imaginable work for the greatest pay. The beaches near Athens in the afternoon had plenty of government power, water, and phone panel-vans, as employees went out on a “service call” to the sea. Banks might have ten employees, five customers, and no one at the customer service windows. Again, the government electrician or mechanic would invariably proposition to come back later in the evening to do the work faster for cash without notification to his superiors.

Here are the apparent protocols of such big government socialism: no one believes in it; everyone seeks to cheat the system and others in it; no one wishes to criticize the system when it is easier to con it; the public pretension of humanitarianism encourages private selfishness — sort of like the noble French in 2003 going to the beach for their annual August vacation in scorching temperatures while the state was supposed to keep their aged parents, who died in the thousands, alive in non-air-conditioned flats.

Repressed anger is the national creed: those who work the hardest and pay the most for others less industrious or gifted barely constrain a seething resentment; those on the receiving end constantly channel envy and jealousy as mechanisms to justify why “they” should redistribute income to themselves, the more deserving.

5) Ministry of Truth

Government has the power of symbols to create alternate, scary realities. This week driving to and from the coast, I crossed several stretches of “The Honorable Joe Blow” freeway, and saw dozens of signs that essentially said “this project brought to you by big government stimulus.”

But why should I believe that a state or federal representative who channels pork deserves a freeway stretch named after him — or that his benefaction with someone else’s money was absolutely critical to his state? And why does borrowing billions more to fix an overpass have to be advertised by government billboards (why not a fair practice statute: next to such propaganda some private organization could blare out in a rival sign: “This questionable project meant that we borrowed another $1 billion from China.”)

First, we had a “war on terror” (did we declare war on Japanese kamikazes or SS camps?), then “overseas contingency operations.” What’s next?

“Stimulus,”“man-made disasters” and “no child left behind” mean almost nothing, and surely not “massive borrowing,” “radical Islamic warmaking” or “a failed therapeutic curriculum in our schools.” Orwell was on to something in his focus on the government’s power of language to manufacture truth out of fantasy.

We all need government for defense, security, and infrastructure. But the more of it, the more dangerous — and creepy — our lives become.

Audi’s Gorewellian Super Bowl Ad

The ad is absurd, of course, but not nearly as absurd as Audi thinks.

By Jonah Goldberg
http://www.nationalreview.com/
February 10, 2010 12:00 A.M.

I watched the Super Bowl in the chilled air of the G.F.I.S.Z. (that’s Goldberg Family Ice Station Zebra). Here in Washington, we haven’t seen this much snow since at least 1922. The blizzard of 2010 took out our electricity for a day. Digging out from “snowmageddon” was nothing less than an Augean challenge, though my lower back is, alas, less than Herculean. Meanwhile, snow canceled my daughter’s seventh birthday party Saturday and her school Monday. We’re slated for another foot by Wednesday.

Suffice it to say I’m not panicking about global warming right now.

Perhaps that’s why I was bemused and intrigued by Audi’s Super Bowl ad.

Audi’s “Green Police” (click on article title to see video) depicts an America where citizens are arrested — roughly — for even minor environmental infractions. A man at the supermarket asks for a plastic shopping bag and has his head slammed against the counter as he’s cuffed by a Green Police officer. “You picked the wrong day to mess with the ecosystem, plastic boy,” quips the cop. When officers find a battery in the wrong suburban garbage bin, one big cop yells, “Battery! Let’s go! Take the house!”

It’s a fascinating commercial. They even got Cheap Trick to rerecord “Dream Police” as “Green Police.” But just as the satire becomes enjoyable, the message changes. Until the pitch for Audi intrudes, you’d think it was a fun parody from a right-wing, free-market outfit about the pending dystopian environmental police state.

The pitch involves an “eco roadblock.” A man driving an Audi A3 TDI is singled out by an inspector. “We’ve got a TDI here,” he says. “Clean diesel,” he adds approvingly.

“You’re good to go, sir,” the cops inform the driver. The smiling Audi owner accelerates to happiness on the open road. The screen fades to black and the tagline appears — “Green has never felt so right.”

So, instead of some healthy don’t-tread-on-me mockery, the moral of the story is that we should welcome our new green overlords and, if we know what’s good for us, surrender to the New Green Order.

Some eco-bloggers disliked the ad because it reinforces the association of undemocratic statism and PC bullying with environmentalism. Perhaps that’s why the New York Times dubbed it “misguided.”

Meanwhile, some conservatives didn’t like it because it makes light of what they believe is actually happening. After all, in America and Europe the list of environmental crimes is growing at an almost exponential rate. The ad is absurd, of course, but not nearly as absurd as Audi thinks.

What was Audi’s intent? Presumably, to sell cars.

“The ad only makes sense if it’s aimed at people who acknowledge the moral authority of the green police,” writes Grist magazine’s David Roberts on the Huffington Post. The target audience, according to Roberts, is men who want to “do the right thing.” He’s certainly right that the ad isn’t aimed at people (whom he childishly mocks as “teabaggers”) who worry that their liberties are being eroded.

But the message is hardly “do the right thing.”

To me, the target demographic is a certain subset of spineless, upscale white men (all the perps in the ad are affluent white guys) who just want to go with the flow. In that sense, the Audi ad has a lot in common with those execrable MasterCard commercials. Targeting the same demographic, those ads depicted hapless fathers being harangued by their children to get with the environmental program. MasterCard’s tagline: “Helping Dad become a better man: Priceless.”

The difference is that MasterCard’s ads were earnest, creepy, diabetes-inducing treacle. Audi’s ad not only fails to invest the greens with moral authority, it concedes that the carbon cops are out of control and power-hungry (in a postscript scene, the Green Police pull over real cops for using Styrofoam cups). But, because resistance is futile when it comes to the eco-Borg, you might as well get the best car you can.

It will be interesting to see whether the ad actually sells cars. The premise only works if you take it as a given that this Gorewellian nightmare is inevitable. But the commercials arrive at precisely the moment when that inevitability is unraveling like an old pair of hemp socks. The global-warming industry is imploding from scientific scandals, inconvenient weather, economic anxiety, and surging popular skepticism (according to a Pew Research Center survey released in January, global warming ranks 21st out of 21 in terms of the public’s priorities).

This week, I don’t want a car that will get past the Green Gestapo. I’m looking for something that can power through the frozen tundra separating me from the supermarket.

— Jonah Goldberg is editor-at-large of National Review Online and the author of Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning. © 2010 Tribune Media Services, Inc.

The Bizarre Mystique of Jerry Salinger

A Further Perspective

By Michael Johnson on 2.10.10 @ 6:07AM
The American Spectator
http://spectator.org/

Okay, I remember a few little things about The Catcher in the Rye from my adolescence many years ago -- who doesn't? -- but what I recall most is getting bogged down in a very boring story about halfway through.

I lived in New York and could not escape the cultish atmosphere that kept literary superstars in ink. With each new droplet of prose from J.D. (Jerry) Salinger, readers of The New Yorker held their breath. A book became a major news story.

Plowing through other people's prose has always been one of my strengths but I stumbled again on about page 25 of Franny and Zooey, and even sooner in "Raise High the Roofbeams, Carpenters."

And in 1965, when his short story "Hapworth 16, 1924" appeared in The New Yorker, the critical eyebrows of Gotham were raised in collective consternation. Wrote Janet Malcolm in a famous New York Review of Books essay, "It seemed to confirm the growing critical consensus that Salinger was going to hell in a handbasket."

Franny and Zooey (F&Z) brought barbs from Alfred Kazin, Mary McCarthy, Joan Didion, and John Updike.

Although Malcolm's essay came down in defense of Salinger, she conveyed the F&Z reception in spades: "I don't know of any other case where literary characters have aroused such animosity, and where a writer of fiction has been so severely censured for failing to understand the offensiveness of his creations," she wrote.

I was relieved that nothing further came from the New Hampshire recluse but occasional reports of bizarre behavior. It saved me from striving vainly to keep up with trendier friends.

Joyce Maynard, one of the few outsiders to be invited in, wrote a book about her trials with the New Hampshire hermit, At Home in the World. After living with Salinger for less than a year, she was abruptly told to get out. She was 18, he was 53. She wrote that she has spent the rest of her life wondering what she did wrong.

So when Jerry died recently at 91, I was astonished to see he could still do it -- he provoked a torrent of praise and grief from otherwise careful critics and writers.

Fortunately I now live in France and could escape the immediate fuss. Distance brings focus.

Looking again at Salinger's only novel worthy of the name, I feel vindicated. Catcher reads like a period piece from the 1950s, and, if it still sells to grownups, it appeals to their inner 15-year-old. That ranks it one step above a pretty good children's book.

A well-read friend put it this way: "If it were published today it wouldn't make a ripple."

Catcher protagonist Holden Caulfield's experiences, wrote one critic, dramatize the "despoliation of childhood innocence and integrity by insensitive, superficial adults." This strikes a chord with most adolescents and has ensured a long life for the book on high school reading lists. A literary reputation, however, that rests largely on a single title, raises questions.

Lacking any proof that he locked his brilliant later novels in a safe somewhere, he simply does not compare with the varied and prolific output of writers such as Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, John Updike, Norman Mailer and Joyce Carol Oates.

The outpouring at his death seems to come from a combination of nostalgia for the 1950s, combined with an intense desire to conform to literary convention and compassion for a man apparently suffering from a monumental writer's block.

A shame, really, for maybe he would have improved.


Michael Johnson spent 17 years at McGraw-Hill, including six years as a news executive in New York. He now writes from Bordeaux in France.

Miranda wrongs

By RALPH PETERS
New York Post
http://www.nypost.com/
February 9, 2010

In a breathtakingly cynical example of playing politics, the White House just accused Republicans of playing politics over its Miranda-rights Christmas gift to the crotch bomber.

With fumbling terrorism czar John Brennan walking point, administration spokesmen attacked those who believe that treating would-be suicide-bomber Umar Abdulmutallab the way we handle shoplifters harms our national security.


John Brennan
Getty Images

The White House position is a PR blend of lies, half-truths and ignorance. Let's strip out the politics and lay out the facts from an intelligence professional's perspective:

* The administration claims Abdulmutallab is now cooperating. That's either dishonest or idiotic -- or both.

If he is cooperating, jeez, you don't tell the terrorists. Why on earth leak it that the guy's blabbing, thus warning the enemy? Could the administration -- just possibly -- be playing politics?

* Even if he's talking now, Abdulmutallab won't provide actionable intelligence. It's too late: His contacts had time to vacate the premises and alter their modes of operation.

The best information that a low-level operative like the Jockey-shorts jerk possesses is highly perishable -- the captive isn't privy to long-term plans, just the immediate details of his mission and a few basic contacts.

Information that might have been valuable on Dec. 26 may be worthless by Jan. 26. Yet, in that critical early window we convinced Abdulmutallab to clam up -- thanks to the folly of treating him to a lawyer.

In the intelligence world, where I served for decades, we derided such useless data as we're getting now as "history lessons."

* What plea bargain did we have to grant Abdulmutallab to get him to talk? Why should we ever have to plea-bargain with terrorists? Can any serious lawyer show us where in the laws of land warfare (which include the Geneva Convention) or in the broader sphere of international law it specifies that terrorists must be read their Miranda rights upon capture?

We're doing this to ourselves, folks. And it's going to kill more Americans.

With its desperate counteroffensive on this issue, the White House is struggling to recover from the PR debacle over the decision to award Abdulmutallab (and other terrorists) rights to which they are in no way entitled.

But this administration has other disastrous policies in place, too.

Retired Army Col. Stu Herrington -- the most noteworthy military interrogator of his generation -- highlights a particularly destructive one: making it next to impossible to keep terrorist captives isolated while they're imprisoned.

When dealing with top-end prisoners (the KSMs, not the Abdulmutallabs), interrogations can last for months or even years. The last thing you want is to allow prisoners to communicate with and discipline one another.

You don't want terrorists coordinating their stories, bolstering each other's morale or bringing pressure on those who might be cooperating. Just the ability to monitor a prisoner's absences from his cell can tip fellow captives that he's talking.

A consistent advocate of humane interrogations, Herrington would treat terrorists more mildly than I would -- but we agree that interrogations require sensible flexibility. You can't protect Americans by bolstering the terrorists' camaraderie and cohesion.

Both sides of the aisle seek political gains from the terrorism issue -- too often forgetting the essential goal of protecting the United States. This time, though, the White House is unquestionably in the wrong -- trying to deceive the American people on an issue of life and death.

In the end, there is no reason -- legal, moral or practical -- to treat foreign terrorists bent on massacre as if they were citizens of the country they dream of destroying.

Ralph Peters' latest book is "The War After Armageddon."

Education & the Fallacy of "Fairness"

By Thomas Sowell
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/
February 9, 2010

A recent flap in a Berkeley high school reveals what a farce "fairness" can be. Because this is ultra-liberal Berkeley, perhaps we should not be surprised that a proposal has been made to eliminate four jobs as science teachers and use the money saved for programs to help low achievers.

In Berkeley, as in many other communities across the country, black and Latino students are not performing as well as Asian and white students. In fact, the racial gap in academic achievement at Berkeley High School is the highest in California-- no doubt a special source of embarrassment in politically correct Berkeley.

According to the principal, "Our community at Berkeley High School has failed the African-Americans." Therefore "We need to bring everybody up-- that's what this plan is about."

Surely no one, not even in Berkeley, seriously believes that you will "bring everybody up" by eliminating science teachers. This is a proposal to redistribute money from science to social work, by providing every student with advisors on note-taking, time management and other learning skills.

The point is to close educational gaps among groups, or at least go on record as trying. As with most equalization crusades, whether in education or in the economy, it is about equalizing downward, by lowering those at the top. "Fairness" strikes again!

This is not just a crazy idea by one principal in Berkeley. It is a crazy idea taught in schools of education across the country. A professor of education at the University of San Francisco has weighed in on the controversy at Berkeley, supporting the idea of "projects designed to narrow the achievement gap."

In keeping with the rhetoric of the prevailing ideology, our education professor refers to "privileged" parents and "privileged" children who want to "forestall any progress toward equity."

In the language of the politically correct, achievement is equated with privilege. Such verbal sleight of hand evades the question whether individuals' own priorities and efforts affect outcomes, whether in education or in other endeavors. No need to look at empirical evidence when a clever phrase can take that whole question off the table.

This verbal sleight of hand is not confined to education. A study of incomes of various groups in Toronto concluded that Canadians of Japanese ancestry were the most "privileged" group in that city. That is, people of Japanese ancestry there had higher incomes than members of other minorities and higher than that of the white majority in Toronto.

What makes the "privileged" label a particularly bad joke in this case is a history of blatant discrimination against the Japanese in Canada in years past, including a longer internment during World War II than that of Japanese Americans. But, to some on the left, the very concept of achievement must be banished by all means necessary, regardless of the facts.

Achievement by overcoming obstacles is a special threat to the left's vision of the world, and so must be magically transformed into privilege through rhetoric.

Those with that vision do not want to even discuss evidence that students from different groups spend different amounts of time on homework and different amounts of time on social activities. To admit that inputs affect outputs, whether in education, in the economy or in other areas, would be to undermine the vision and agenda of the left, and deprive those who believe in that vision of a moral melodrama, starring themselves as defenders of the oppressed and crusaders against the forces of evil.

Redistribution of material resources has a very poor track record when it comes to actually helping those who are lagging, whether in education, in the economy or elsewhere. What they need are the attitudes, priorities and behavior which produce the outcomes desired.

But changing anyone's attitudes, priorities and behavior is a lot harder than taking a stance as defenders of the oppressed and crusaders against the forces of evil.

To the extent that doing the latter misdiagnoses the problem, it makes solving the problem even harder. That does no good for those who are lagging, however much it exalts those who pose as their defenders. "Fairness" indeed!

Copyright 2010 Creators Syndicate, Inc.

Between the Covers with John J. Miller

Alex Berenson on The Midnight House

"I don't actually think that what we've been doing over the last eight years is torture...I think when you have lawyers arguing over whether you can keep a detainee at 46 degrees...for two hours, that's not torture. It may be unpleasant, it may be coercive...but let's say what torture actual is, and that's not it," says Alex Berenson, author of The Midnight House.

http://radio.nationalreview.com/betweenthecovers/
February 8, 2010

Defending ‘Don’t Ask’

In the military, open homosexuality harms unit cohesion.

By Mackubin Thomas Owens
http://www.nationalreview.com/
February 9, 2010 4:00 A.M.
Author Archive

In a February 3 Wall Street Journal op-ed, I argued that the current law forbidding homosexual military members to discuss their sexual orientation ought to remain in place. I based my contention on the importance of non-sexual bonding as the glue of unit cohesion, which is an important contributor to military effectiveness. As expected, I received a great deal of feedback, some positive, some negative. I thought it might be useful to respond to my critics’ most common objections.

First, some argued that the studies indicating the importance of cohesion in war have been “discredited.” But the only way that academics can get away with this claim is to redefine cohesion in such a way that it loses all significance.

Here’s how the 1992 report of the Presidential Commission on the Assignment of Women in the Armed Forces described cohesion: the relationship that develops in a unit or group in which 1) members share common values and experiences; 2) individuals in the group conform to group norms and behavior in order to ensure group survival and goals; 3) members lose their identity in favor of a group identity; 4) members focus on group activities and goals; 5) unit members become totally dependent on each other for the completion of their mission or survival; and 6) group members must meet all the standards of performance and behavior in order not to threaten group survival.

A number of people observed that my argument regarding the potential impact of open homosexuals on unit cohesion could just as well be applied to women. They are correct, of course. Indeed, in 1993, I first deployed my argument about the importance of non-sexual bonding to the issue of women in combat. And while many military specialties have been opened to women since then, service in ground combat remains closed to women for exactly this reason.

Second, some argued that the integration of open homosexuals into the military was merely a manifestation of the quest for civil rights that began with African-Americans after World War II. According to this argument, lifting the ban against military service by open homosexuals would be analogous to President Truman’s executive order racially integrating the military services. They echo the claim of James Carroll in a Boston Globe column some years ago: “Today’s soldiers and sailors reluctant to serve shoulder to shoulder with homosexuals are the progeny of racist and sexist soldiers and sailors who were told to get over it or get out.”

But Truman’s order was motivated by concerns about military effectiveness, not civil rights. For a variety of reasons, segregated African-American units generally did not perform well on the battlefields of World War II. Truman’s actions were in response to military-manpower experts who believed that integration would improve the military effectiveness of black soldiers.

In addition, many African-Americans take offense at the comparison between their struggle and homosexuals’. As Colin Powell noted in his memoirs, the reaction among African-American groups in 1993 to the argument linking gay rights and the civil-rights movement was mixed: “The Congressional Black Caucus favored removing the ban on homosexuals in the armed services. But other leaders were telling me that they resented having the civil rights crusade hijacked by the gay community for its ends.”

General Powell was not alone. Testifying before a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on this issue on April 29, 1993, Lt. Gen. Calvin A. H. Waller, a highly respected African-American military leader, responded to a query by the chairman, Sen. Sam Nunn (D., Ga.), concerning whether he agreed with equating homosexual rights and civil rights for racial minorities. Waller replied, “We are talking about the lifestyle or the sexuality of a person who wants to be open with their sexuality or with their lifestyle into a force or into the Armed Forces where I think that is detrimental to readiness and to good law and order and discipline.” Waller further commented that he strongly disagreed with the racial analogy: “I am opposed to that. I do not like that analogy. I do not think it is the same in any respect.”

The late Charles Moskos, testifying on the same day, suggested that the black/white analogy was less appropriate than the male/female analogy. While personal animosity to homosexuals has always been present and still exists, as a group they have never faced the organized legal obstacles that African-Americans did.

Third, my critics claimed that homosexuals are victims of military “witch hunts.” A reader of the New York Times and the Washington Post could be forgiven for believing that homosexuals are being “drummed out” of the military on a regular basis. But the numbers don’t support this contention. In FY2008, the last year for which figures are available, the Pentagon discharged 633 men and women under the ban. In a military with millions of members, this hardly constitutes a witch hunt.

And as Moskos pointed out in 1993, 80 percent of homosexuality-related discharges resulted from voluntary statements, a figure that has not changed. Furthermore, almost all discharges for homosexuality occur in the first term of enlistment, and more than half in the first year. The fact that so many of those who voluntarily claim to be homosexuals do so early in their enlistment is an important point. As Gen. Carl Mundy, former commandant of the Marine Corps, observed, this “is a very demanding period during which it is not uncommon for those who are not equal to the challenge of military life to seek opportunities for release from the service. A claim to be homosexual, whether factual or not, provides such an opportunity.”

While discussing this issue with my Naval War College seminar, a student related an anecdote that illustrates the problem. He was the executive officer of a ship about to make a six-month deployment. Over a period of weeks, a female sailor approached him with a number of reasons why she could not make the deployment. He rejected them and advised her that she would indeed deploy with her ship. Finally he received a call from the JAG advising him that she would not deploy because she had confessed to being gay.

Fourth, some commentators claimed that the ban on homosexuals spawns anti-gay violence. Exhibit one is the case of PFC Barry Winchell, a homosexual soldier at Fort Campbell, Ky., who was brutally murdered in 1999. Homosexual groups immediately portrayed the murder as an example of anti-homosexual bigotry run amuck in the Army. But in Paul Harvey’s formulation, “the rest of the story” is somewhat more complicated. It turns out that the murder was inspired by a “love triangle” involving Winchell, another soldier, and a performer in a Nashville gay bar who was in transition from male to female.

Fifth, correspondents observed that other Western countries have lifted their bans on open service by homosexuals without suffering adverse effects. But with the exception of the Netherlands and the Scandinavian countries, such militaries still discriminate, banning homosexuals from service in ground combat units and special-operations forces. According to Moskos, “there is no country in Europe, much less Israel, that American advocates of gay rights would find a suitable model.”

Finally, some critics of my piece simply accused me of bigotry. This charge is similar to the one that claims opposition to President Obama’s policies is motivated by racism. I can’t speak for others who share my view, but in fact my late brother was homosexual. I never stopped loving him because of his homosexuality and got along fine with him and his friends, all of whom were cognizant of my views.

I am as opposed to bigotry as anyone. Homosexuals should and do possess the equal civil rights of their fellow citizens. But there is no “right” to serve in the military, and there, effectiveness should trump all other considerations.

— Mackubin Thomas Owens is a professor at the Naval War College and editor of Orbis, the journal of the Foreign Policy Research Institute. He is a Marine-infantry veteran of the Vietnam war.

The Railroading of Geert Wilders

by Robert Spencer
http://frontpagemag.com/
Feb 9th, 2010

The Stalinist-show-trial aspect of the Geert Wilders “hate speech” trial in the Netherlands was thrown into sharp relief last week when the Amsterdam District Court refused to allow Wilders to call fifteen of the eighteen witnesses he had hoped to bring forward in his defense. Wilders in response was characteristically direct: “This Court is not interested in the truth. This Court doesn’t want me to have a fair trial. I can’t have any respect for this. This Court would not be out of place in a dictatorship.”

The three witnesses the court allowed Wilders are the Dutch Islamic scholars Hans Jansen and Simon Admiraal, along with the Wafa Sultan. Hans Jansen’s work on Islam is superb and groundbreaking, and he will be an excellent witness, as will Admiraal and the exemplary freedom fighter Wafa Sultan.

Nonetheless, this decision indicates the hollowness of Dutch justice and the court’s bias against Wilders. For some who would have been Wilders’s most effective witnesses were disallowed. He had wanted to call Mohammed Bouyeri, the murderer of Theo Van Gogh.

Why Bouyeri? Wilders, in the bizarre inquisition that has replaced justice in the Dutch courts, is accused of offending Muslims by pointing out that Muslims invoke the Qur’an and Muhammad’s example to justify violence. However, Bouyeri quoted the Qur’an in the note threatening Wilders and others that he stabbed into Van Gogh’s body, and invoked the Qur’an repeatedly during his trial as well. “Kill them, and Allah will help you and guide your hand,” he said. “There’s no room there for doubt or interpretation there.”

Bouyeri would have proven Wilders’ point immediately: he is simply telling the truth about how Islamic teachings incite all too many Muslims to violence – and if telling the truth is now illegal in the Netherlands, so much the worse for the Netherlands. By disallowing Wilders from calling Bouyeri and others, the court has hindered Wilders’ ability to make this case – suggesting (and by no means for the first time) that the Dutch authorities are determined to convict Wilders, and are not going to let any inconvenient facts get in the way of their doing so.

It is not exaggerating to say that the Geert Wilders trial is a defining moment in the history of Western civilization. One would have to go back centuries to find a court case with as much significance for the future course of the free world. If the farrago of “hate” charges against Wilders stick, and he is convicted, it will herald the end of the freedom of speech in the West, as a precedent will have been set that other Western nations (urged on by the Organization of the Islamic Conference, which is the organization most responsible for the global assault on free speech) will be certain to follow. The era of enlightenment and the understanding that all human beings are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights will be definitively drawing to a close, and a new darkness will descend over Europe and the free world in general. For once the precedent is established that a man can be jailed and destroyed for offending a privileged class, the idea that every human being has rights that cannot be infringed will be damaged beyond repair.

And even if Wilders prevails, enough damage has been done already. The Dutch law (and there are others like it in other Western countries) that stipulates that someone can actually be tried and jailed for offending another person will remain on the books. Other trials will follow. The law will be used by the governing elites who developed it in order to maintain their power and silence independent and dissenting voices.

For that is, of course, the point of all this. The Dutch authorities stand arrayed on one side, with Wilders standing alone on the other. Yet despite the fact that he has nothing like their numbers, wealth, or resources, he threatens to topple their entire multicultural house of cards – for he has on his side a weapon that all of their power cannot defeat, the weapon of truth. And so they are desperate to silence him, and end forever his truth-telling about jihad and Islamic supremacism.

Yet even if they do silence him, the truth will still be the truth. They will not be able to obliterate it forever. But will they be able to help initiate a long, perhaps centuries long, period of darkness and oppression in Europe and its civilizational children?

Certainly.

Troops Feel Growing Rage in Afghanistan

February 01, 2010
Agence France-Presse
http://www.military.com/

Anger, frustration and a hunger for revenge are running high among U.S. Marines as casualties mount on the frontline of the battle against the Taliban in southern Afghanistan.

On a base near Marjah, a Taliban stronghold in Helmand province, Marines are grieving the deaths of a sergeant and corporal killed by the remote-controlled bombs that have become the scourge of the long-running conflict.

Commanders try to keep the men's rage in check, aware that winning over an Afghan public wary of the foreign military presence and furious about mounting civilian casualties is as crucial as any battlefield success.

"It causes a lot of frustration. My men want revenge, that is only natural," says First Lt. Aaron MacLean, 2nd Platoon commander of Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 6th Regiment.

"But I keep telling them that the rules are the rules for a reason. If we simply go crazy and start shooting at everything, in the long run we will lose this war because we will lose the support of the population."

He too is frustrated, accusing the Taliban of manipulating the rules of engagement by using women and children as shields and shooting from hidden positions before dropping their weapons and standing out in the open.

"They know we can't shoot them if they don't carry guns or without positive identification. They are fighting us at another level now," MacLean said.

US Marines pay tribute to Sergeant Daniel Angus and Lance Corporal Zachary Smith who were killed on January 24 on the outskirts of Marjah in central Helmand. The violent deaths of Angus and Smith underscore how quickly things can go from bad to worse in the frontline battle against the Taliban in southern Afghanistan.(AFP/File/Christophe Simon)

MacLean recently led his unit on a routine foot patrol near Marjah, expected to be the scene of a major offensive this month to drive the insurgents from one of their last bastions of control.

What the Marines encountered was a likely precursor of the battle to come.

They were met by fierce gunfire from Taliban gunmen who pinned them down for three hours at the expense of two of their men.

One corporal stepped on an improvised explosive device (IED) --- the remote-controlled bombs now the main weapon in the Taliban arsenal and which military intelligence officials say claim up to 90 percent of foreign troop lives.

The corporal's legs were blown off and he was thrown yards into the air.

A second IED killed a sergeant who rushed to the corporal's aid as bullets flew everywhere, MacLean said.

Three others were wounded in the clash, making it one of the bloodiest days for U.S. Marines since President Obama's December announcement of a fresh troop surge in the war to eradicate the Taliban.

The death toll of foreign soldiers fighting in Afghanistan under U.S. and NATO command hit 44 in January --- the highest for the month since the war began more than eight years ago --- compared with 25 in January 2009.

The number of Americans who died last month in the conflict now in its ninth year was almost double the number for January last year, at 29 compared with 15, according to the icasualties.org website, which keeps a running tally.

The U.S. and NATO currently deploy 113,000 troops in Afghanistan, with another 40,000 due over the course of the year as part of a renewed strategy that emphasizes development and the "reconciliation" of Taliban fighters.

Most of the incoming troops will be deployed in Helmand, which along with neighboring Kandahar province has been the hub of the insurgency since the Taliban regime was removed from power in late 2001.

MacLean's unit is among the first Marine outfits to be sent into Helmand since the surge was announced.

On the day of the ambush, Marines hunkered down in tents inside the camp as information about the encounter came in.

Some had tears in their eyes as the names of casualties were made known. Others held tightly to their weapons and yelled at their enemy on the horizon.

"We were attacked treacherously. We came under fire from everywhere, but the rules of engagement prevent me from doing my job," said Lance Cpl. Mark Duzick, who was in the unit that was ambushed.

Outside a tent housing the Marine unit responsible for firing mortars stands an improvised cross bearing the inscription: "Here lies the 81st, death by stand down."

Last year was the worst yet for foreign troops fighting in Afghanistan, with 520 soldiers dead, up from 295 in 2008. More troops will mean more casualties, military experts say.

For the Afghan people, too, 2009 was the deadliest, with the U.N. putting civilian deaths at 2,412 for the year, compared to 2,118 in 2008.

While most are caused by the Taliban, the insurgents easily exploit civilian casualties to spread distrust among the public for foreign and Afghan troops.

As the nature of the fight has changed, with the Taliban increasingly using suicide attacks and IEDs, there had been no traditional winter hiatus and defence ministry spokesman General Zahir Azimi said spring is likely to be ferocious.

"We will have the most intense clashes come the spring, and will shed the most blood this year," he told AFP.


© Copyright 2010 Agence France-Presse. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Politicizing Intelligence

The Obama administration leaks and spins.

By Stephen F. Hayes
The Weekly Standard
February 15, 2010, Vol. 15, No. 21
http://www.weeklystandard.com/

Last week, a little more than 24 hours after the FBI warned senators not to disclose the sensitive information that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was cooperating with the FBI, the White House shared the information with the news media.

An indignant Christopher “Kit” Bond, the ranking Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee, immediately wrote to President Obama, complaining that he had been told by FBI Director Robert Mueller that the cooperation of the Nigerian terrorist who tried to bomb a Northwest passenger jet over Detroit was extremely sensitive information and was to be kept quiet. It was so sensitive, in fact, that the entire committee wasn’t briefed, just Bond and the committee chairman Dianne Feinstein.

“On Monday afternoon, the leadership of the Senate Intelligence Committee received notification from the Federal Bureau of Investigation concerning Abdulmutallab’s recent willingness to provide critical information,” Bond wrote. “FBI officials stressed the importance of not disclosing the fact of his cooperation in order to protect on-going and follow-on operations to neutralize additional threats to the American public; FBI Director Bob Mueller personally stressed to me that keeping the fact of his cooperation quiet was vital to preventing future attacks against the United States.”

White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs during his daily press briefing at the White House, in Washington, Thursday, Feb. 4, 2010.
(AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)

At the White House briefing Thursday afternoon, Press Secretary Robert Gibbs attacked Bond for politicizing intelligence and haughtily demanded an apology: “No briefing is done here or anywhere in this administration where classified information is used in a place where it shouldn’t be,” Gibbs said. “And I would suggest that somebody that alleges that, when they know it doesn’t happen, owe[s] people an apology.”

The White House contends that the sensitive information about cooperation from Abdulmutallab was unintentionally disclosed during a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on Tuesday. At the hearing, Mueller responded to concern from Senator Olympia Snowe that the decision to mirandize the terrorist so quickly meant that the U.S. government missed valuable intelligence. “Let me just add one other point, and that is, it is a continuum. In other words you can look at it in that day, but I encourage you to look at what has happened since then. It is a continuum in which over a period of time we have been successful in obtaining intelligence, not just on day one, but day two, day three, day four, day five and down the road.”

That’s not much of a disclosure. But Gibbs explained that the White House felt the need to provide background briefings about what Abdulmutallab was now saying in order to “contextualize” the information after receiving inquiries from reporters.

Just helping out with the facts, ma’am. But as CNN’s Ed Henry (presumably one of the contextualizees) reported: “The revelation is part of an aggressive attempt by the White House to push back on Republican claims the Obama administration mishandled the terror investigation, with Abdulmutallab being read his Miranda rights shortly after he began cooperating with investigators. ”

Now where could Bond—and many others—have gotten the idea that the White House was using the information to score political points?

So a week that began with the White House struggling to defend its manifest incompetence in the aftermath of the Christmas Day attack ended with a desperate White House press secretary unconvincingly batting down a growing sense that the Obama administration was letting politics—not national security​—​drive its response to the attempted bombing of Flight 253.

What made Gibbs’s job particularly difficult was the fact that some of the criticism was coming from unexpected sources. One day before Bond’s letter, at a hearing of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, Obama’s director of national intelligence, Dennis Blair, worried aloud about the administration’s political use of sensitive intelligence. Representative Peter King repeatedly pressed Blair about whether the White House briefing for reporters on Abdulmutallab had been cleared by the intelligence community. At first, Blair attempted to duck the question. “Again, Congressman King, I’m not going to comment on the internal processes for this investigation right now.”

King did not let the issue drop. He ended another long statement accusing the Obama administration of politicizing intelligence by saying, “I just wondered if the entire intelligence community was consulted on that before these political decisions were made [to release information].”

This time, Blair responded, haltingly. “I understand your question, sir,” he said. “As I said before, I—the—but the level of—the level of—the political dimension of what to me ought to be a national security issue has—has been quite—quite high. I don’t think it’s been very—particularly good, I will tell you, from the inside and in terms of us trying to get the right job done to—to protect the United States.”

Politico reported that Blair’s words were a “blast” at the White House, and Blair’s office issued a clarification later in the day attempting to separate Blair’s words from the question that prompted them. Although the question had been about the White House and politicization of intelligence, and although Blair prefaced his answer by saying “I understand your question, sir,” a statement from Blair spokesman Arthur House claimed “the DNI did not criticize the administration in any way.”

Did the White House tell the DNI to clarify Blair’s statement? If so, it wouldn’t be the first time. Two weeks ago, when Blair testified before the Senate Homeland Security Committee, he said that the U.S. government had made a “mistake” by not allowing the high-value detainee interrogation group (the HIG) to question Abdulmutallab. Within hours, under the headline, “Intel Chief’s Comments Infuriate Obama Officials,” Newsweek magazine reported that the “White House has ordered Blair to ‘correct’ his remarks.” Blair did so quickly, noting that the HIG did not yet exist at the time Abdulmutallab was detained.

Obama officials were no doubt embarrassed by the gaffe. But what really made them angry? “Administration officials said the comments by Blair were especially galling because they seemed to vindicate the chief Republican criticism of the handling of the Detroit incident,” Newsweek reported. And in case there were any confusion about his new views, Blair emphasized them again in an odd exchange during the Intelligence Committee hearing on Tuesday. As Senator Bond was questioning Mueller, Blair interrupted, offering his unsolicited support for the Obama administration.

There are decisions that have to be made in which you balance the requirement for intelligence with the requirement for a prosecution and the—the sorts of pressure you can bring on—bring on to the people that you arrest in either form. It’s got to be a decision made at the time, and I think the balance struck in the Mutallab case was a very—was an understandable balance.”

Two weeks earlier Blair had called the interrogation a “mistake.” Now, after his scolding by the White House, he was eagerly defending it.

The administration is apparently so overwhelmed by its spin efforts some officials have continued to push bogus narratives even after they’ve been put to rest, on the record, by senior officials. For example, a Washington Post story Thursday sourced largely to “administration officials” repeated the false claim that Abdulmutallab had already stopped talking when interrogators mirandized him.

According to the Post: “Administration officials have acknowledged that the suspect initially spoke to investigators for less than an hour before being treated for injuries. He then asked for a lawyer, although U.S. officials say he stopped speaking to investigators before he was read his rights.” But three sources familiar with Abdulmutallab’s interrogations told The Weekly Standard that the al Qaeda operative stopped talking only upon being advised of his right to remain silent.

In any case, Mueller, during his testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Tuesday, acknowledged, without qualification, that Abdulmutallab stopped talking once he was provided with a lawyer:

We were then given an opportunity later that night to again interview him, and after consultation—or in consultation with Justice Department attorneys, we determined to follow our protocols, protocols established by the Supreme Court, in terms of how you interrogate and question individuals in custody in the United States. He was—a team went in to talk with him, he talked for a few moments, and then afterwards, after he was given his Miranda warnings, asked for an attorney, and we discontinued the questioning.

Abdulmutallab stopped talking—and the FBI “discontinued the questioning”—after he was given his Miranda warnings and asked for a lawyer, not before. But “administration officials” continue to tell reporters otherwise.

It is understandable that the White House would be eager to try to spin away the incompetence on display in the aftermath of the Christmas Day bombing, and to explain away the deleterious national security implications of the administration’s stubborn insistence on treating terrorists as criminal suspects who need to be read their rights like ordinary criminal suspects.

But it’s also understandable that Kit Bond and other members of Congress are outraged: “After telling me to keep my mouth shut, the White House discloses sensitive information in an effort to defend a dangerous and unpopular decision to mirandize Abdulmutallab, and I’m supposed to apologize?”

The American people have reason to be concerned for our security—and outraged about the administration’s putting politics first.

Super Bowl MVP Drew Brees cements his place in New Orleans lore

By Jeff Duncan, The New Orleans Times-Picayune
http://www.nola.com/superbowl/
February 08, 2010, 3:43AM

MIAMI GARDENS, FLA. - Sunday started in New Orleans with the Rev. Monsignor Crosby W. Kern celebrating Mass with a Drew Brees jersey underneath his vestments.

It ended in Miami Gardens with Brees standing atop a gridiron altar to accept the Pete Rozelle Trophy as the MVP of Super Bowl XLIV after his near flawless performance led the New Orleans Saints to their first world championship.

They elected a new mayor in New Orleans on Saturday.

They will crown a new king of Carnival next week.

But New Orleans is and forever will be Brees' town. He'll never buy another drink, never purchase another meal and never pay another parking ticket.

It's his faubourg. We're just living in it.

The Saints quarterback etched his place in city legend alongside Bienville, Iberville and Armstrong with one of the great passing performances in Super Bowl history.

His 32-of-39, 288-yard, two-touchdown masterpiece vanquished the Colts and four-time league MVP Peyton Manning, who heretofore was known as New Orleans' favorite son.

It also successfully completed what Brees called "a calling" when he signed with the franchise as an unrestricted free agent four years ago only months after Hurricane Katrina devastated the city and region.

"This is incredible, " Brees said. "I mean, are you kidding, are you kidding me? Four years ago, whoever thought this would be happening? It's unbelievable."

Unbelievable would be an accurate way to describe Brees' performance in the final three quarters against the Colts.

The man who set the NFL record for accuracy this season was an uncharacteristic 3-of-7 for 27 yards in the first quarter.

The rest of the way, he completed 29 of 32 passes for 261 yards, two touchdowns and an extra point. Two of his incompletions were a spike to stop the clock and a dropped ball by Reggie Bush in the third quarter.

Brees saved his best for last. With the game on the line, he engineered a drive that will be remembered by Saints fans for all eternity. With the Saints trailing 17-16 with 10 minutes to play, he completed all seven of his passes for 40 yards in a nine-play, 59-yard scoring march that put the Saints ahead for the second time all night. Each completion went to a different receiver.

They were, in order, as follows:

Pierre Thomas for 5 yards.

Devery Henderson for 6.

Reggie Bush for 8.

Marques Colston for 8.

Robert Meachem for 6.

David Thomas for 9.

Jeremy Shockey for the final 2 and the go-ahead touchdown.

Then for good measure, Brees hit Lance Moore for the two-point conversion.

Eight passes, eight receivers. None of the completions traveled more than 9 yards.

How's that for finishing strong?

"He was spectacular, " Shockey said.

"His performance was awesome, " Saint guard Jahri Evans said. "He's been awesome all year, and today he showed it."

Brees' heroics fueled a nearly perfect final three quarters of football from the Saints, who spotted the Colts a 10-0 lead, then stormed from behind as they had all season. His 32 completions tied the Super Bowl record set by Tom Brady of the New England Patriots against the Carolina Panthers in 2004.

On the same field where he directed one of the greatest comebacks in club history against the Miami Dolphins three months earlier, he guided the Saints to scores on five of their six series in the final three quarters. They were a failed goal-line play away from going six-for-six.

"He just led, " Saints receiver Colston said. "I'm just so proud of that guy and just so happy to be just associated with greatness in that way."

The signature victory completed an impressive postseason hat trick for Brees. In consecutive games, he outdueled a trio of future Hall of Fame quarterbacks: Kurt Warner, Brett Favre, and, finally, Manning.

His numbers in those three contests were staggering: 72 completions in 102 passes for 732 yards, eight touchdowns and zero interceptions. His passer efficiency rating was 117.0.

"Brees was magnificent tonight, " Saints Coach Sean Payton said. "He played so well, so efficiently. He was fantastic. He was fantastic all year. He's just a winner. Everywhere he's been, he's won it. And now he's won it for us."

Payton might as well have spoken for all of the Saints nation with those words.

Maybe those "Breesus" shirts weren't so blasphemous after all.


New Orleans Saints Coach Sean Payton's aggressive style pays off

By John DeShazier, The New Orleans Times-Picayune
http://www.nola.com/superbowl/
February 08, 2010, 3:07AM

MIAMI GARDENS, FLA. - The gutsiest coach ever to walk the sideline for the New Orleans Saints saved his most daring call for the biggest game in franchise history. Yes, they're made of brass.

And because of that, Sean Payton and the Saints own a prize that's sterling silver -- the Lombardi Trophy, earned by the NFL champion, which New Orleans assuredly and emphatically is after posting a 31-17 victory over Indianapolis in Super Bowl XLIV on Sunday at Sun Life Stadium.

MIAMI GARDENS, FL - FEBRUARY 07: Head coach Sean Payton of the New Orleans Saints holds up the Vince Lombardi Trophy after defeating the Indianapolis Colts during Super Bowl XLIV on February 7, 2010 at Sun Life Stadium in Miami Gardens, Florida. (Photo by Doug Benc/Getty Images)

The title game will be remembered for many things -- Tracy Porter's theft of a Peyton Manning pass and 74-yard return for the clinching score, Drew Brees' pinpoint accuracy (32-of-39 for 288 yards and two touchdowns en route to being selected Super Bowl MVP), and a defensive lockdown which smothered the Colts and held them to a touchdown over the final three quarters. But high on the list will be Payton's aggression.

"You know you're going to be competing to win, " offensive tackle Jon Stinchcomb said. "There's one thing that a player wants, and that's it. You want to know that Coach backs you, he has faith in our group, and he's going to put us in situations to be successful.

"So those aggressive points -- he's putting the ball in our court, saying, 'Go make a play, guys. I've got faith in you. Go make me right.' That's exactly what you want."


Ted Jackson/The Times-PicayuneNew Orleans Saints Coach Sean Payton holds aloft the Vince Lombardi trophy.True, there are days when the swashbuckler in Payton has gotten the best of him and the Saints, days when an ill-timed reverse proved costly or the unwillingness to play it safe proved costlier.

Sunday wasn't one of those days. Sunday was one of those days where the Saints made Payton right, made him look exactly like what he has been -- the most successful coach in team history, author of four of the franchise's five playoff victories and of the first Super Bowl win in the team's 43 seasons.

The onside kick Payton called to open the second half, with the Saints trailing 10-6 and not particularly wanting to hand the ball over to Manning to begin the third quarter, proved to be brilliant.

Thomas Morstead, the rookie punter who was an unpopular draft pick and never had kicked off before this season, perfectly executed his part of the equation. Safety Chris Reis and linebacker Jonathan Casillas did the rest. Reis first got his hands on the ball, couldn't control it and ended up wrestling with Casillas for possession. Casillas came up with it, the Saints took over at their 44, and six plays later, Brees and running back Pierre Thomas collaborated on a 16-yard touchdown pass that culminated with Thomas diving into the end zone at 11:41 of the quarter.

The score gave the Saints their first lead.

The call that set it up was just another glimpse at the nature of Payton.

"Every week we practice that onside kick, " Payton said. "At halftime, I just told those guys, 'You've got to make me look right here.' It was something we'd seen and had practiced all week.

"You get a little nervous -- there's a lot going on the week of the Super Bowl. The key was the kicker; Thomas (Morstead) hit it good."

That play put the swagger in the Saints (16-3). As much, it took a little something out of the Colts (16-3).

"The onside kick was huge, " Colts safety Melvin Bullitt said. "As special teams captain, I feel like we kind of didn't do what we were supposed to do. We always talk about the little things, and that was a little thing that was huge.

"If we would've got the ball right there, maybe on the 40-yard line going in, the game could've went a totally different way. We would've been up by, what, (11) points? So that was a huge turning point in the game."

It wasn't the only sign of Payton pushing the envelope, though.

In the second quarter, he let his offense go for it on fourth-and-goal from the 1. The Colts made the stop, but the Saints' defense forced a punt, and Garrett Hartley kicked a 44-yard field goal as time expired in the first half to pull the Saints to 10-6.

And after the Colts retook the lead at 17-16, they failed to extend their lead when Matt Stover missed a 51-yard field-goal attempt. Brees then directed a nine-play, 59-yard drive that ended with a 2-yard touchdown pass to Jeremy Shockey with 5:46 left.

The two-point conversion pass from Brees to Lance Moore was ruled incomplete on the field. Payton challenged and, presto, the call was overturned (Moore had possession and was down before the ball was kicked out of his hands), and the Saints had a 24-17 lead.

"He came in playing to win this game, " linebacker Scott Fujita said. "I think we knew all week we were going to call that kick at some point. None of us doubted that we were gonna get the ball.

"You like that. As a defensive guy, you like that. He's got a certain swagger about him, it carries over to the offense. And you bring in a guy like (defensive coordinator) Gregg Williams, who has a swagger, as well. Now you've got a lot of guys playing aggressive, playing confident.

"Sean Payton's the leader of the pack. When he needed to count on us to step up and make those plays, guys did it."

Time and again, they did it for Payton this season, until the coach was able to hold aloft the sterling silver prize.

"I just think it's important that -- certainly, you have a plan, you're careful, and yet you want to show your players you're confident, " Payton said.

"All week long we really felt, as underdogs, we had the better team. We liked the spot we were in."

They like the spot of champions a lot better, no doubt.

John DeShazier can be reached at jdeshazier@timespicayune.com