Though hardly mentioned by the media nowadays, al Qaeda had set-up a global network long before the March 2003 invasion of Iraq. Richard Clarke told PBS' Frontline that by the end of 2000 al Qaeda had a presence "in probably between 50-60 countries [and] that they had trained thousands, perhaps over 10,000 terrorists at the camps in Afghanistan." Many ended up in Southeast Asia.

From the Associated Press:

Official Ties al-Qaida to Indonesia Terror

By ZAKKI HAKIM, Tue Feb 28, 12:23 PM ET

The al-Qaida terror network helped fund suicide bombings in Indonesia over the past four years through a courier system set up by the reputed mastermind behind the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the United States, a senior police official said Tuesday.

Former al-Qaida No. 3 Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who was captured in 2003, was personally involved in setting up the courier system, in which money was carried from Thailand to Malaysia and finally to Indonesia's Sumatra island, said Col. Petrus Reinhard Golose of Indonesia's counterterrorism task force.

Golose said the money was used to help the regional militant group Jemaah Islamiyah launch attacks in the world's most populous Muslim country from 2002-2005.

Jemaah Islamiyah is blamed for the 2002 nightclub attacks on the resort island of Bali that killed 202 people, attacks in the capital Jakarta in 2003 and 2004 that together killed 21, and triple suicide bombings on Bali in October that killed 20.

Indonesian authorities have claimed for years that al-Qaida helped finance the terror network, but never before provided the level of detail given by Golose, who was directly involved in the investigations of the bombings.

Golose said several members of Jemaah Islamiyah met directly with bin Laden in Afghanistan and signed agreements with him before launching the attacks, but he did not elaborate. He also did not say from where the al-Qaida funds originated or the nationalities of the couriers.

"Thirty thousand U.S. dollars was sent for the first Bali bombing," Golose said, adding that "tens of thousands of dollars" was sent for the 2003 bombing of the J.W. Marriott Hotel in Jakarta.

Some of the leftover cash was used for the 2004 attack on the Australian Embassy in Jakarta, he said. He said he was uncertain how much al-Qaida money was used for the latest attack on Bali, targeting three crowded restaurants.

Jemaah Islamiyah, which has roots back to the 1980s, is believed to be fighting for an Islamic state across Southeast Asia. It has been hard hit by a regionwide crackdown in the last four years, resulting in at least 200 arrests, including Abu Bakar Bashir, a Muslim cleric who allegedly helped co-found the terror network.

Golose said Indonesian militant Abu Dujana has replaced Bashir, who is eligible for release from prison in June, as Jemaah Islamiyah's top leader. Dujana's whereabouts are not known.

During a speech today accusing President Bush of being weak on defense, Dean stated that,

under no circumstances will a Democratic Administration ever allow Iran to become a nuclear power.

What is Dean exactly saying here? Why use the phrase "nuclear power"?

Is this a "no tolerance" policy that Democrats would not allow Iran to acquire a single nuclear weapon?

Or, is Dean saying Democrats would allow Iran to build nuclear weapons so as it didn't build enough of them to qualify as a "nuclear power"?

Also, let's remember that it was the Clinton administration that rewarded North Korea -- see here -- by letting that government keeps its nuclear weapons and cheat on the "Framework" it signed. Republicans should ask Dean if he has something similar in mind for Iran.

If Iran strikes a nuclear agreement with Russia, it won't be a shock to learn that Moscow also agreed (perhaps in a Gore-like secret side deal) to block any substantial Security Council action against Tehran. Beijing may also be in on the deal given China's huge energy interests in Iran. Such a deal would help Iran guard against the possibility that the West rejects the nuclear agreement and goes for UN sanctions against Tehran. To see the Moscow-Beijing alliance in action, look no further than Sudan.

From ABC News:

The U.N. Security Council remained divided Monday on imposing punitive measures over the conflict in Darfur despite calls for sanctions against Sudanese allegedly blocking peace in the region.

U.S. Ambassador John Bolton, on the next to last day of the U.S. presidency of the council, scheduled a closed-door meeting to discuss a report by a U.N.-appointed panel that recommended sanctions against key figures from all groups.

Most of the 15-member council were in favor of sanctions, led by the United States, Britain, France and Denmark but Qatar, China, and Russia were strongly opposed, council diplomats said. Qatar is the only Arab member of the council, China is a major buyer of Sudanese oil, and Russia traditionally opposes sanctions.

Perhaps Bolton haters can lighten up a bit and support him on this one.

Frequent Weekly Standard contributor Tom Joscelyn has some interesting material here on pre-war Iraq-al Qaeda contacts.

(Update II: Uribe supporters won big in yesterday's congressional elections, paving the way for passage of the U.S-Colombia free trade deal. With strong support in Congress and probable reelection in May, Uribe's offensive against the FARC will likely intensify. All of this is pretty remarkable given that just a few years ago the FARC greeted the newly elected president by firing mortars at the presidential palace while he took the oath of office inside. The attack, which killed dozens, led many analysts to offer grim assessments on Colombia's future. Uribe, who came to office after the fail of several "peace initiatives," has proven them wrong.)

(Update: FARC terrorists continue their killing spree in their effort to destabilize Colombia's democracy. This time, AP reports, they gunned down eight unarmed town officials while they ate lunch.)

Venezuela's Hugo Chavez gets lots of media attention with his anti-American rants. But in bordering Colombia, President Alvaro Uribe is a friend of America and an anti-terror ally. In a nation where tens of thousands have been killed and many more scarred physically and emotionally from decades of violence and terror, things are looking a bit brighter these days. Killings and kidnappings are down. Drug production has been cut. Foreign investment is rising; the economy has stabilized; and for the first time in almost a decade Standard & Poor’s boosted its rating for Colombian debt. Not bad for a man derided as a “hardliner” by his political opponents whose election, they warned voters, would be a disaster for Colombia. Right now, Uribe is on track to score another impressive election victory in May and that doesn't sit well with Colombia's FARC terrorists who on Saturday, the Associated Press reports, ambushed a civilian bus with gunfire, killing nine.

"We don't understand how they can attack the unarmed civilian population in this way," Mendoza [Col. Jose Angel Mendoza, police chief of Caqueta state] said in an interview with RCN Radio....

More than a week ago, FARC rebels began distributing pamphlets warning drivers to stay off the highways in Caqueta and Putumayo states. The FARC said the traffic ban was aimed in part to protest the re-election bid of President Alvaro Uribe, a hard-line leader with whom the rebels have shunned peace talks.

Uribe, who is well-liked by most Colombians and seems likely to coast to victory in presidential elections set for May 28, has sought to wipe out the guerrillas militarily.

Uribe's prospective reelection follows in the footsteps of other friends of America. Australia's John Howard won a fourth term, while Tony Blair was elected to an unprecedented third. German and Canadian voters followed up by rejecting candidates who ran anti-American campaigns. Now, that's quite a story.

"What the alternative to promoting freedom in the Middle East?" ask the editors of the Wall Street Journal today. They also point out that the years before September 11

coincided with the rise of al Qaeda, Hamas and Hezbollah, the first World Trade Center bombing, the bombings of U.S. embassies in East Africa and the USS Cole, the outbreak of the terrorist intifada in Israel, and September 11. Mr. Fukuyama may or may not be right that promoting democracy does not resolve the problem of terrorism in the short-term. What we know for sure is that tolerating dictatorship not only doesn't resolve the terrorist problem but actively nurtures it....

Leaving aside the niggling examples of Japan and Germany, exactly how are we to know that country X does not want democracy, except democratically? Afghans, Iraqis, Palestinians and Lebanese have all made their democratic preferences plain in successive recent elections. And with the arguable exception of the Palestinians (arguable because Fatah was as undemocratic as Hamas), they have voted to establish considerably more liberal regimes than what existed previously.

Indeed, Princeton economist Alan Krueger analyzed terrorism data collected by the U.S. State Department over the years. Here's what he found:

Once a country's degree of civil liberties is taken into account ... income per capita bears no relation to involvement in terrorism. Countries like Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, which have spawned relatively many terrorists, are economically well off yet lacking in civil liberties. Poor countries with a tradition of protecting civil liberties are unlikely to spawn terrorists. Evidently, the freedom to assemble and protest peacefully without interference from the government goes a long way to providing an alternative to terrorism.

Tossing the president's democracy agenda overboard, as some critics advocate, would be a huge strategic blunder.

State Department officials in Iraq produce a daily summary of overnight pan-Arabic and regional Iraqi TV news reports. Regarding the coverage of the mosque bombing, they note:

The Iraqi media continues to be focused on pushing national unity and the idea that the government is in control and taking action. The pan-Arab media has offered a grimmer picture, but still not as dark as its Western counterparts, who continue to push the message that civil war in Iraq is just around the corner.

The full summary follows:

"OVERNIGHT PAN-ARABIC & REGIONAL IRAQI TELEVISION NEWS REPORT

AS OF 0600, 26 February, 2006

Intent: This product is intended to provide information and situational awareness regarding the nightly news/early morning (from 2000 to 0600) broadcasts that are influencing Iraqi opinions and perceptions. Stations monitored are Al Jazeera, Al Arabiya, Al Sharqiya, Al Fourat, and Al Iraqiya.

Executive Summary:

Overnight broadcast news was slow and focused mainly on repeating early evening stories, such as Al Sadr meeting with Association of Muslim Scholars (AMS) officials, the attack on the funeral procession of the slain Al Arabiya journalists, and the extension of the curfew. Details regarding the meeting at the Iraqi prime minister’s house of leading Iraqi figures did emerge, and it appears it was a productive gathering for building national unity.

Curfew. Al Iraqiya reported throughout the night that the vehicular curfew had been extended in Baghdad from 6 am to 6 pm on Sunday, and that no vehicles are allowed to enter Baghdad during this time. Meanwhile, Al Sharqiya mentioned that Iraq has postponed the purchase of 1.5 million tons of wheat because of the curfew.

Iraqi Leaders Meet. Al Iraqiya provided live coverage of a meeting at Prime Minister Al Jaafari’s residence between Iraqi government officials, Iraqi politicians, and leading clerics from all groups. The meeting lasted three hours, and the participants discussed how to ensure the current situation does not worsen into sectarian strife. The gathering finished with a joint prayer in which all participated.

Al Sadr And AMS. Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya reported that Muqtadah Al Sadr and his supporters met with AMS leadership to absolve the Sadrist movement of any connection with attacks on Sunnis or Sunni mosques. The two sides held a joint press conference in which they blamed the “occupation” for the country’s current problems and called for a timetable for when the occupation would withdraw from Iraq. The meeting ended with a joint prayer.

US Ambassador Says Risk Of War Diminished. Al Jazeera reported Ambassador Khalilzad said during a lengthy interview (not sure with whom) given on Saturday that there is still danger in Iraq, but the risk of war has been greatly diminished. He also added that America is ready to help Iraq in any manner and that Iraq’s failures are America’s failures too.

Miscellanous. Al Fourat aired many protest images, and concentrated heavily on the female presence in the demonstrations, something our nightly monitor said was rare, as women are not normally seen in such processions with men. Meanwhile, Al Arabiya continued to focus heavy coverage on the death of its three journalists and their 25 February funeral procession that was attacked.

AL-IRAQIYA:

-- The curfew remain for Sunday starting 6am until 6am on Monday but for only cars and it's going to be no vehicles coming to or leaving from Baghdad.

-- Aljaafari hold a meeting in his house with talibani and with the presence of US ambassador and top political leaders and after three hours meeting jaafari said:" The only enemy Iraqis have is terrorism , there is no Sunnis against Shiites, All or most expressed the importance of accelerating the political initiative without any delay". Sunnis politician who had pulled out of talks before attend the meeting.

-- Alhakim urge Iraqis to calm down and united to not fail into terrorists (Attakfirieenes and Sadamieenes) trap.

-- Foreign - Libyan minister in a phone call with Iraqis foreign minister condemn the attack on Samara

-- The top Egyptian Sheikh of Al-Aazhar in a joint news conference with the Iraqi ambassador address people of Iraq to united and destroy the differentiation between sunnis and shiia's and be just a Muslims without secretarians.

-- Atwar Bahjat funeral was attacked in Abu-Ghrib.

ALSHARQIYA:

-- Religious leaders Sunnis and Shiites agree to united and they pray together for this accord to not attack each other.

-- A joint press conference between MOI and MOD early afternoon they both confirm that they going to take a serious measures against terrorism and the media that support terrorist acts.

-- ustrian airlines postpone their flights to Arbil north of Iraq

-- raq postpones the purchase of 1.5 million ton of wheat because of the curfew.

ALJAZEERA:

-- Aljaafari meet with Kurdish and Arab Sunnis leaders at his house and call the Iraqis to unite and fight terrorism.

-- Us Ambassador who has been criticized by shia's leaders this week for pushing to have Sunnis brought into government, said a unity government would help avert the risk of civil war, the risk he said had diminished on Saturday "There is still a danger" He told the reporter "But the risk of going to war because of the bombing has diminished." In a lengthy interview he assured Iraqis that Washington was ready to help in any way:" The USA has a lot invested in Iraq. Iraq's failures are ours"

-- Earlier, Moktada Alsadr aides meet with Sunnis religious and political leaders and call for Muslim unity.

-- Bush urges all Iraqi leaders on all sides to work together.

ALFOURAT:

-- Frequently showing today demonstrations of people protesting and the camera was concreting on the heavy presence of women and this is unusual in Islam word Women don appear out with men in such occasions and without any comment.

-- Prayers and Koran lectures

-- Few times they show the joint press conference of MOD and MOI.

-- Out of the air staring midnight.

AL-ARABIYA:

-- Funeral of Atwar Bahjat take the big part in today broadcasting the funeral was attacked three death and four injuries. on the way back a car bombing explode the convoy change direction to faluja instead to Baghdad

-- Joint press conference of MOD and MOI.

-- Showing some sad pictures of women crying for death and of there love one in Iraq and Palestine.

-- Sunnis and Muqtadah Alsadr Shiite leaders meet earlier to promote peace with a joint accord and blaming what is going one on the occupation asking the coalition to give agenda of pulling of Iraq as soon as possible, and they end the meeting with a joint prayer."

From Sunday's Chattanooga Times Free Press:

Friday afternoon, McCain attended a crowded Latin Builders Association lunch [in Miami].

"As for torture, we know what's going on as we speak in Castro's prisons," said McCain, who spent five years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam. "The real answer is the removal of this kind of government."

McCain said that while he was in a Vietnamese prison, Cuba sent a specialist in interrogations to his prison. "He was responsible for the death of some of my friends," McCain said.

Lawrence Kaplan is back from Iraq and reports in the current New Republic on what he found, including this strange encounter with Prime Minister Ibrahim Jafiri.

As a television in the corner of the room conveys images of the carnage outside, Jafari admits to being partial to the works of Noam Chomsky. Why won't Chomsky come to Iraq? he asks. The commissioners don't know what to say. And, apart from expressing doubts about a Chomsky visit, neither do I.

Some politicians and others have argued that allowing the U.A.E.'s DP World to manage six major US ports would inject an additional layer of security risk that we don't need. The White House disagrees. But for argument's sake, let's assume the deal will be scuttled on "security grounds." Opponents will claim victory. But they shouldn't if they're serious about their argument. Each year millions of containers are off-loaded at US ports. But a port's vulnerability doesn't begin at docking. It's just as vulnerable as soon as a ship enters its harbor. Hundreds of containers are on a ship, so a weaponized one buried deep inside isn't likely to be detected before detonation. That's why the Bush administration created the Container Security Initiative to monitor US-bound cargo as it's loaded onto a ship at a foreign port. DP World's takeover of the British firm, P & O, will add about two-dozen foreign ports to their current operations, which span the globe. Doesn't DP World's management of these ports also add security risk? Shouldn't opponents of the deal like Senators Clinton and Frist also be calling for a separate security regime for all ships entering US ports that have docked at a DP World foreign port beforehand or are they just playing politics? Congress is right to review the pending deal but it would be nice if they do so in a responsible way.

William Bennett and Alan Dershowitz write in today's Washington Post on the hypocrisy of the major media on the cartoon issue. The Vatican also weighs in on the controversy today.

"Port security has been totally neglected," said New York Sen. Chuck Schumer during a press conference with his fellow Democrats in July 2004. But as with so many other federal programs -- from the Army Corps to education, transportation and health care -- Congress, on a bipartisan basis, is also guilty of negligence. Spending is often not prioritized and is doled out according to a politicians' wishes leading to ridiculous results, such as the one described in this 60 Minutes episode in July 2005.

KROFT: The 9/11 commission recommended that homeland security money be allocated to protect the most vulnerable strategic targets from attacks that would cause the most casualties or economic damage.

But Congress, led by a group of powerful senators from smaller states, had a different plan. It decided to ignore the recommendations and distribute the money much the same way it hands out federal highway funds, with everyone getting a share.

Rep. COX (R-CA): It's pork barrel. It's the kind of distribution of funds that Washington always makes when politics comes before substance. And here we find that the monies are being doled out not necessarily according to national security risks, but rather according to political formulas.

Mr. TOM SCHATZ: Everybody wants a piece of this pie. And after September 11th, it's one of the biggest pies around.

KROFT: (Voiceover) Tom Schatz, who runs a group called Citizens Against Government Waste, estimates that pork barrel spending on homeland security this year will reach $1.7 billion.

Mr. SCHATZ: Members of Congress have figured out how to get their hands on homeland security pork.

(Footage of barges)

KROFT: (Voiceover) Why else, he asks, would the state of Oklahoma get federal funds designated for port security?

I mean, Oklahoma's a landlocked state. I didn't know that they had any ports.

Mr. SCHATZ: They have a river somewhere and that is included under this maritime security provision that was passed by Congress. And in this case, if you have a maritime facility of some kind in the United States, it may get money under this port security grant program.

Iran's talks with Moscow and now Beijing appear to be moving forward with Tehran "sounding more receptive to an enrichment joint venture with Russia...." But is any deal better than no deal?

Back in 1994, Sen. McCain was a vocal opponent of the deal President Clinton struck with North Korea. He told PBS's Robert MacNeil that the US would come to "regret [the deal] very, very much" because Pyongyang gets to keep the handful of nuclear weapons it had already likely produced but also much more. McCain continued that even though North Korea has "violated the nonproliferation treaty egregiously time and time again, ... we are now rewarding them.... And not only are we saying it's okay to Korea, but we'll be saying that it's okay to Iran and other countries who will demand a similar deal."

Today the Russians are doing the primary negotiating, but in the end Washington and Europe will have to make a judgment on whether to sign on to any deal struck. To this end, Gary Milhollin and Valerie Lincy of the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control have offered some useful yardsticks in which to judge any "breakthrough" agreement.

From the February 1, 2006 New York Times:

...There is little doubt what this cooling-off period is intended for: further negotiations on a proposal that would have Iran shift its large-scale, energy-related uranium enrichment work to Russia.

The Americans, British, French, Germans and Chinese have all shown support for the Russian proposal. Iran, however, showed little interest before mid-January, when it became clear the West was intent on getting tough. Last Wednesday, Iran's chief nuclear negotiator called the Russian suggestion "positive" and predicted that it could be "perfected" through further talks.

While this may seem hopeful, the Russian deal actually poses more problems than it solves.

First, even if Russia took over Iran's nuclear energy work, the religious radicals in Tehran would be left with a huge amount of dangerous equipment. The deal covers only the commercial-scale enrichment program Iran has planned for its plant at Natanz. But Iran also has a string of shops for manufacturing centrifuges — which can be used to enrich uranium to weapon grade — a large inventory of centrifuge parts, a stockpile of uranium gas needed to feed the centrifuges (plus a factory to produce more), and a pilot-scale enrichment plant under construction.

Second, Iran draws a distinction between the energy-related work that would go to Russia and other enrichment activity that it likes to call "research." When Iran broke the international seals at three enrichment sites last month and resumed work, its Foreign Ministry said the move was done only for scientific interests and had nothing to do with weapons. Even with a Russian deal, Iran is likely to insist on its right to continue such research, which would allow its scientists to develop the skills necessary to process uranium for bombs.

Last, the proposal, if accepted, would shatter the coalition of states that is finally working together to restrain Iran. Russia would certainly end its tepid support for Security Council action and would agree to let the Iranians continue their "research." The United States is equally certain to refuse such a concession. The Europeans would be torn between the desire to see a successful end to their years of diplomatic effort and their belief that Iran's nuclear ambitions would not be adequately contained.

If we are going to negotiate with Iran, we must hold out for a solution like the one Libya accepted in 2003. Libya allowed everything useful for enriching uranium to be boxed up and carted out of the country. It also answered all questions about its nuclear past and it revealed the names of its shady suppliers, allowing the West to counter the nuclear smuggling network run by the Pakistani scientist A. Q. Khan. Only greater pressure from the Security Council is likely to force Iran to accept a similar agreement.

The Russian proposal is a red herring aimed at helping Iran, a major trading partner of Moscow's, get out of harm's way at the very moment when the world is uniting against it. A Security Council referral came into play only because of Iran's recent behavior: the inflammatory anti-Israel statements of its president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and its ill-timed decision to resume nuclear work. If Iran snaps up the Russian offer, our last, best chance to pressure Iran in the Security Council may be lost.

UN Ambassador John Bolton remains focused on reform in the face of the usual obstructionism that pervades Turtle Bay.

I haven't made up my mind on whether the Dubai deal harms U.S. national security. I'll wait to hear what Bush officials have to say tomorrow before the Senate Armed Services Committee. But many others, who have obviously studied the pending deal with a fine toothcomb, have. Hotline reports that Ol' Blood n' Guts Martin O'Malley, the Democratic mayor of Baltimore and gubernatorial candidate, invoked the Stars & Strips in his call to arms. "We want to turn over the Port of Baltimore, the home of the 'Star Spangled Banner,' to the United Arab Emirates? Not so long as I'm mayor, and not so long as I have breath in my body." Give me a break. I don't remember the mayor fighting to his last "breath" efforts by many in his party to shut down the NSA program monitoring al Qaeda communications to people inside the U.S. -- perhaps even Baltimore. Others, as today's Wall Street Journal points out, are stoking the Dubai issue to bolster their protectionist cause. I doubt most of the people making categorical statements on the wisdom of the deal have a clue as to the nuts and bolts of port operations/security, the role the U.A.E. has played in the war on terror, or if there is another intelligence component to this that hasn't been made public. The current deal may or may not be a good idea but the debate, so far, is about as phony as Washington can get. In the end, my guess is that a compromise will be struck allowing an amended deal to move foward.

North Carolina Republican Sue Myrick sent, and released to the press, the following "letter" to President Bush:

February 22, 2006

The Honorable George W. Bush
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue
Washington, DC 20500

Dear Mr. President:

In regards to selling American ports to the United Arab Emirates, not just NO-but HELL NO!

Sincerely,

Sue Myrick
Member of Congress

One can disagree with the Dubai deal, but cheap media stunts like this one are usually reserved for Democrats.

(Austin Bay has more here related to my post from last week)

The Combating Terrorism Center at West Point has posted on its web site several al Qaeda-related documents that have been "captured in the course of operations supporting the GWOT." Two letters, dated September 30, 1993 and May 24, 1994, relate directly to al Qaeda operations in Somalia. The letters are from "Hassan al-Tajiki" to the "African Corps." Assuming their authenticity, the letters are consistent with the propaganda of bin Laden in the 1990s that Mogadishu and other events showed that America was "a paper tiger" and "a weak horse." He and his followers would use such imagery as a recruiting tool for al Qaeda, "the strong horse" in bin Laden's words, throughout the 1990s. In fact, though little reported in the media, al Qaeda had recruited and trained thousands before September 11, 2001. Indeed, Richard Clarke told PBS' Frontline that by the end of 2000 al Qaeda had a presence "in probably between 50-60 countries [and] that they had trained thousands, perhaps over 10,000 terrorists at the camps in Afghanistan."

The September 30, 1993 letter called for attacks "to expel" US forces "from Somalia." (Later, a U.S. government indictment charged that bin Laden and other al Qaeda members had trained those who attacked the U.S. Rangers.)

Therefore, the most important need is to expel them from Somalia, even were a semi-Islamic, semi-democratic, semi-etc. government subsequently to assume power....

When you entered Somalia, the Somali arena was barren and futile. The situation changed, however, after the intervention by America and the Knights of the Cross. You most resembled a hunter aiming his rifle at the dead branch of a tree, with no leaves or birds on it. Suddenly, a bald eagle lands on the branch of the tree, directly in line with the rifle. Shouldn’t the hunter pull the trigger to kill the eagle or at least bloody it? The American bald eagle has landed within range of our rifles. You can kill it or leave it permanently disfigured....

The May 24, 1994 letter congratulates the Africa Corps for the "great victory" in the American withdrawal. It notes that the "victory in Somalia over the Americans has profound implications ideologically, politically, and psychologically..." and that the U.S. "fled in panic before their true capabilities could be exposed." Furthermore, "the Somali experience confirmed the spurious nature of American power and that it has not recovered from the Vietnam complex. It fears getting bogged down in a real war that would reveal its psychological collapse at the level of personnel and leadership. Since Vietnam America has been seeking easy battles that are completely guaranteed."

We congratulate you, ourselves, and all Muslims for that great victory in the land of Islamic Somalia....

I would have liked to write on this subject unemotionally and somewhat objectively, were in not for my overwhelming desire to kiss the heads and hands of all those who took part in this action....

General observations on the operation:
1. The Africa Corps did not enter the Somali arena with a clear vision, specifically a strategic vision, either militarily or politically.

2. Likewise, Americans did not enter the Somali arena with a clear vision of the objectives of its presence. Moreover, its vision of East Africa and the Horn of Africa failed to crystallize. I believe that the buffoon Clinton was motivated by election considerations and a personal inclination toward flamboyance, as if for a fleeting moment he believed the falsehood that he was the leader of the most powerful country in the world.

These are not just my words. Rather, this is the considered opinion of many inside America and abroad. What was the result? The result was that our amazing Corps was equal to America for the first time, but in a limited area —the area of darkness regarding a strategic vision. So how were our amazing Corps and its starving African Muslim allies able to be victorious over the greatest power in the world today?

... The Muslim victory in Somalia over the America has profound implications ideologically, politically, and psychologically that will require lengthy studies. You have the duty to record notes about these implications and keep them until it is time to study them in depth. Just the same, there is an important observation that we must not ignore, which is that the Americans were not defeated militarily in Somalia. Effective human and economic losses were not inflicted on them. All that happened was that the Somali battle revealed many of their psychological, political, and perhaps military weaknesses.

5. The Somali experience confirmed the spurious nature of American power and that it has not recovered from the Vietnam complex. It fears getting bogged down in a real war that would reveal its psychological collapse at the level of personnel and leadership. Since Vietnam America has been seeking easy battles that are completely guaranteed. It entered into a shameful series of adventures on the island of Grenada, then Panama, then bombing Libya, and then the Gulf War farce, which was the greatest military, political, and ideological swindle in history.

The outcomes were 100 percent guaranteed. Even so, the Americans brought with them forces from 30 countries to take the blows on their behalf, should events not turn out the way they were supposed to. In the end, the Arabs, the Europeans, and Japan paid the costs of the war, plus fees!

America wanted to continue this series of farces. It assumed that Somalia was an appropriate space for another ridiculous act. But the Muslims were there—so the great disaster occurred. They fled in panic before their true capabilities could be exposed.

6. In Mogadishu and Beirut, urban deterrence operations caused the American forces to flee in a shameful and humiliating manner. Doesn’t this demonstrate the importance of this type of warfare and the need to develop our warfare capabilities in terms of personnel, training syllabi, equipment being used, its level of technological advancement, development of security syllabi, development of security procedures, and training of competent elements for the security field.

What's clear is that the supposed "stability" of the 1990s was illusory.

Sen. McCain released the following statement on the Dubai port controversy:

“We all need to take a moment and not rush to judgment on this matter without knowing all the facts. The President’s leadership has earned our trust in the war on terror, and surely his administration deserves the presumption that they would not sell our security short. Dubai has cooperated with us in the war and deserves to be treated respectfully. By all means, let’s do due diligence, get briefings, seek answers to all relevant questions and assurances that defense officials and the intelligence community were involved in the examination and approval of this transaction. In other words, let’s make a judgment when we possess all the pertinent facts. Until then, all we can offer is heat and little light to the discussion.”

According to Time magazine,

Pentagon officials have been saying for some time that Iraqis must take more responsibility for securing their country. But can these local forces protect its critical infrastructure without U.S. help? Top American officials disagree, and that has caused friction between the State and Defense departments and may complicate the planned reduction of U.S. troops.

The State Department's top official in Iraq, Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, argues vigorously that the U.S. needs to maintain a robust military presence around areas such as oil pipelines and power grids, targeted by the insurgents.

A Washington Post piece a month ago indicated similar friction.

From the BBC:

A curfew has been imposed in Bauchi in northern Nigerian after at least 13 people were killed in a sectarian riot. It began as an argument between a teacher and a pupil over the confiscation of a Koran in school.

But rumours swept the city that the book had been desecrated and that was the cue for youths, some armed with machetes, to rampage in the streets.

From the caption accompanying a photo in a Washington Post piece on rioters in Afghanistan:

"Ataullah Najafi, ... in Herat, in West Afghanistan, shows the remains of hundreds of Korans burned by Sunni rioters who descended on the mosque on Feb. 9.

A few disgruntled folks at the State Department have again run to the Washington Post to air their grievances -- anonymously, of course. This time they're not happy with Secretary Rice's reorganization plan that reportedly doesn't include rogue operators walking the halls of Foggy Bottom.

Rice and her top aides have sought to heal the damaging rifts that existed with the Pentagon and other agencies. Some State Department officials privately acknowledge that they used to be thrilled by the department's reputation as a renegade in President Bush's first term, but they say the message has become clear in the past year that such attitudes are no longer acceptable.

"Thrilled" at sticking to their boss, the elected President of the United States? But the Post story gets better. A paragraph later one of the anonymous officials claims that they're really just professionals with no political axe to grind.

"The suspicion is we would undermine the policy," said one of the officials who have felt sidelined. "That is what all of us find most offensive. We are here to serve any administration."

But apparently, as the Post piece reveals, going around the back of their immediate boss was not "offensive" to their collective conscience. What was "offensive" to them was the White House's skeptical view of IAEA head Mohamed ElBaradei, along with other "administration positions," which had made "several" of them "embarrassed for the United States."

Thank you, Secretary Rice.

Newt Gingrich pulled no punches late today when asked about the pending port deal by radio host Sean Hannity. Gingrich was a vocal critic of the Panama Canal Treaty in his younger days. And the architect of that treaty, Jimmy Carter, has endorsed the port deal.

It was odd that one of the biggest barriers to lifting nations out of chronic poverty -- rampant government and business corruption -- didn't appear on the radar screen at the World Economic Forum at Davos a few weeks back. There wasn't a single panel discussion on a problem that some say costs poorer nations up to twenty-five percent of their national income. Nonetheless, instigated by people tired of empty promises, horrible living conditions, and out-right thievery an anti-corruption wave, has gathered some momentum. The BBC reported on this campaign over the weekend. While today's Washington Post reports on anti-corruption efforts in Kenya --

"'We're a thirsty land of empty promises. Other countries have droughts and you never see their people dying,' Ciira said in this town 50 miles northwest of Nairobi. As she spoke, people gathered around her, some waving copies of one of Kenya's daily newspapers, the Nation, with a three-page spread detailing the largest scandals."

Last week, dramatic details of two of the largest scandals have implicated high-level officials, some of whom allegedly pocketed a total of $1.3 billion in public funds, money that critics say should have gone to irrigation and road projects to help protect farmers from the devastating effects of recurring droughts.

As the country's worst drought in 20 years wears on, many Kenyans are blaming government corruption, not Mother Nature, for their dire situation. The crisis highlights how government fraud and mismanagement can worsen, and in some cases create, food shortages.

-- and at the World Bank under the leadership of Paul Wolfowitz.

The bank has frozen lending to Chad, whose government had reneged on a promise to spend its oil revenue on poverty reduction. Although Chad is a small country, the frozen loans were high-profile: They were an attempt to defy the "curse of oil" and make petrodollars serve development. It took some courage to admit that the curse of oil remained unbroken.

The bank has canceled 14 road contracts in Bangladesh because of corrupt bidding. Two government officials have since been fired, and Wolfowitz plans to ban the private firms involved from future World Bank contracts.

The bank has frozen five loans to Kenya because of corruption, though it did go ahead with a project to improve Kenya's financial management. On a recent stopover in London, Wolfowitz made a point of having dinner with John Githongo, a senior Kenyan official who left the country after issuing a report exposing cabinet ministers' corruption.

The bank has interrupted a project in Argentina that topped up the wages of poor workers. Some of the money seems to have greased the ruling Peronist Party's electoral machine before elections in 2003, and the government has brought charges against one senior official and fired 10 others. The bank's Argentina team responded by building in a few corruption safeguards and pressing to resume lending. But Wolfowitz has demanded that the safeguards be expanded further still. The project has yet to be reauthorized.

Finally, the bank has postponed debt relief for Congo. A team from the International Monetary Fund had certified that the country deserved relief, and the bank was supposed to fall in line last Thursday. But a newspaper report about the Congolese president's extravagant hotel bills was passed around by Wolfowitz's top staff, who noted that KPMG, the firm that audits Congo's state oil company, had refused for three years running to sign off on its financial statements. On Tuesday Wolfowitz called the IMF's boss and asked whether Congo really merited debt relief. On Thursday he refused to go ahead with it.

Since the early 1990s, radical Islamists have targeted Somalia. Back then, American forces and U.N peacekeepers were the target. Today, as in other regions of the world, they are also increasingly aiming their gun sights on moderate Muslims. From the BBC:

The fighting pits a new group, the Alliance for the Restoration of Peace and Counter-Terrorism, against the Islamic Courts' militia....

Our correspondent says at least five warlords-cum-ministers in the transitional government are behind the new alliance, which is battling the Islamic Courts.

The courts have set up Mogadishu's only judicial system in parts of the capital but have been accused of links to al-Qaeda.

Their critics accuse the courts of being behind the killing of moderate Muslim scholars.

"Aid to Iran..."

"... And Cuts for Russia"

"Iran's hardline spiritual leaders have issued an unprecedented new fatwa, or holy order, sanctioning the use of atomic weapons against its enemies," reports the Telegraph.

In yet another sign of Teheran's stiffening resolve on the nuclear issue, influential Muslim clerics have for the first time questioned the theocracy's traditional stance that Sharia law forbade the use of nuclear weapons.

One senior mullah has now said it is "only natural" to have nuclear bombs as a "countermeasure" against other nuclear powers, thought to be a reference to America and Israel.

The pronouncement is particularly worrying because it has come from Mohsen Gharavian, a disciple of the ultra-conservative Ayatollah Mohammad Taghi Mesbah-Yazdi, who is widely regarded as the cleric closest to Iran's new president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Britain's Sunday Telegram reports on the results of a recent poll of British Muslims here.

And these are the kind of people the University of Washington "wants to produce" nowadays? I hope not. From the Wall Street Journal's John Fund:

'Pappy' Shot Down by Campus Ignoramuses

It's well known that college students today aren't as educated in our nation's history as they should be, but it's still hard to grasp the mind-bending political correctness just displayed by the University of Washington's student senate at its campus in Seattle.

The issue before the Senate this month was a proposed memorial to World War II combat pilot Gregory "Pappy" Boyington, a 1933 engineering graduate of the university, who was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for his service commanding the famed "Black Sheep" squadron in the Pacific. The student senate rejected the memorial because "a Marine" is not "an example of the sort of person UW wants to produce."

Digging themselves in deeper, the student opponents of the memorial indicated: "We don't need to honor any more rich white males." Other opponents compared Boyington's actions during World War II with murder.

"I am absolutely bewildered that the Student Senate voted down the resolution," Brent Ludeman, the president of the UW College Republicans, told me. He noted that despite the deficiencies of the UW History Department, the complete ignorance of Boyington's history and reputation by the student body was hard to fathom. After all, "Black Sheep Squadron," a 1970s television show portraying Colonel Boyington's heroism as a pilot and Japanese prisoner of war, still airs frequently on the History Channel. Apparently, though, it's an unusual UW student who'd be willing to learn any U.S. history even if it's spoonfed to him by TV.

As for the sin of honoring a rich white male, Mr. Ludeman points out that Boyington (who died in 1988) was neither rich nor white. He happened to be a Sioux Indian, who wound up raising his three children as a single parent. "Colonel Boyington is luckily not around to see how ignorant students at his alma mater can be today," says Kirby Wilbur, a morning talk show host at Seattle's KVI Radio. Perhaps the trustees and alumni of the school will now help educate them.

The BBC reports on the anti-corruption campaigns being launched by many African nations.

Corruption costs African countries an estimated 25% of its combined national income, Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo said - some $148bn a year.

Newly-elected members of Hamas have been officially sworn in and now control the Palestinian parliament. But spokesman Sami abu-Zuhri says Hamas isn't interested in peace initiatives.

From the BBC:

"Hamas rejects negotiations with the occupation under the current circumstances, while occupation and aggression continues," he said.

"We re-emphasise the commitment to [armed] resistance as a natural right of our people."

If Hamas won't reject terrorism and accept Israel's right to exist and the legitimacy of the peace process based on the concept of peaceful coexistence, the U.S. government should also consider discouraging private investment in their financial markets.

From Reuters:

The United Nations on Tuesday asked Lebanon to explain reports of arms shipments crossing the Syrian border destined for the Lebanese guerrilla group Hizbollah.

Lebanese Druze leader Walid Jumblatt, a foe of Syria, said over the weekend that truckloads of arms and missiles had crossed the border intended for "armed groups" inside Lebanon. He alleged that the Lebanese army intercepted the shipment but allowed delivery to Hizbollah and possibly Palestinian groups.

The army said on Monday Jumblatt was incorrect and the weapons had been stocked inside Lebanon and shipped south to the "Lebanese resistance."

"We have followed the statements about the recent armed shipments including the statements of the Lebanese army," said a spokesman for U.N. envoy Terje Roed-Larsen.

"If this information were to be confirmed it would be an alarming development in clear violation of resolution 1559," the spokesman said.

Security Council resolution 1559, adopted in September 2004, called for Syria to withdraw troops and intelligence agents from Lebanon and for the disarmament of militias. This would include Palestinian groups and the Hizbollah guerrillas, who dominate southern Lebanon.

Roed-Larsen, who reports on compliance with resolution 1559, asked the Lebanese government for an explanation on Tuesday, U.N. officials told Reuters.

On October 26, Roed-Larsen issued a report that cited "an increasing influx of weaponry and personnel from Syria to some of these groups." It said Syria acknowledged arms and people were being smuggled "albeit in both directions."

Asked about the reports, U.S. Ambassador John Bolton told reporters: "I think it is clear that any assistance that Syria is giving, which it is, to the continued supply of weapons to armed groups inside Lebanon, is a violation of 1559."

Jumblatt also said the main reason for Hizbollah to have arms was to attack Israel's occupation of the Shebaa Farms in the false belief they were Lebanese territory.

This, he said, contradicted legitimate maps from 1962, which, as the United Nations has said, puts the Shebaa Farms inside Syria.

Other maps produced since then, he said, were forgeries. "Lebanon should not remain an open battlefield against Israel and this state-within-state status should end," Jumblatt said.

(Update II: Today's Wall Street Journal has a piece by a former CIA intelligence officer on the "dodgy disclosures" of Paul Pillar and how his actions "will end up making the CIA even less relevant than it is today--if that is possible.")

(Update I: Senate Intelligence Committee chairman Pat Roberts (R-KS) told Tim Russert on Sunday's Meet the Press that Paul Pillar said nothing about subtle political pressure on analysts when he was interviewed as part of the committee's investigation of pre-war intelligence. "Now we interviewed over 250 analysts during the WMD—the WMD inquiry, including this gentleman [Mr. Pillar]. Not one, except him now, post after all this is done, said that they were pressured in any way. And that was backed up by the WMD commission.")

Not surprisingly, the Washington Post's Walter Pincus reports on an upcoming Foreign Affairs piece by Paul Pillar, the CIA's national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia from 2000 to 2005. Pillar's views are old news, of course, as Stephen Hayes points out. He believed that "containment" was working and that Saddam could have been kept "in his box" -- a favorite phrase of Secretary of State Albright during the Clinton years. Fine. But the president, elected by the voters to make policy judgments, and many others disagreed then and still do today with Pillar's "in his box" assessment -- see here. Since the Iraq invasion, Pillar hasn't apparently been shy in letting people know "privately" and also publicly about the wisdom of the CIA and the ignorance of the Bush White House.

Pincus writes:

The Bush administration, Pillar wrote, "repeatedly called on the intelligence community to uncover more material that would contribute to the case for war," including information on the "supposed connection" between Hussein and al Qaeda, which analysts had discounted.

Of course, Mr. Pillar's dismissive comments are puzzling given that, at the time, U.S. intelligence had no high-level, human assets in Saddam’s inner circle let alone inside the top ranks of al Qaeda. For example, consider these two congressional reports, the Joint Inquiry into Intelligence Community Activities before and after the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001 (pp. 90, 91), and the Report on U.S. Intelligence Community’s Prewar Intelligence Assessments on Iraq (pp. 322, 323, 351, 355):

“The U.S. Intelligence Community was not able to penetrate al Qaeda’s inner circle successfully before September 11, despite the fact that human penetration of that organization was considered a priority.”

“According to senior CTC [Counterterrorist Center] officials, CIA had no penetrations of al Qaeda’s leadership and never obtained intelligence that was sufficient for action against Usama bin Laden.”

“CIA acknowledged the poor intelligence collection on both the Iraqi regime and al Qaeda leadership.”

“CIA stated it did not have specific intelligence reports that revealed Saddam Hussein’s personal opinion about dealing with al Qaeda.”

“There was no robust HUMINT collection capability targeting Iraq’s links to terrorism until the fall of 2002.”

“Despite four decades of intelligence reporting on Iraq, there was little useful intelligence collection that helped analysts determine the Iraqi regime’s possible links to al Qaeda.”

“The CIA had no…sources on the ground in Iraq providing reporting specifically on terrorism.”

But then again, perhaps the people who wrote these reports were "subtly" pressured to reach these conclusions.

Not that facts matter anyone more in the Iraq debate, but Nightline's report last night on Saddam's tape-recorded meetings, specifically the April/May 1995 one, is key to understanding the 2003 decision to invade. On the tape, Saddam's son-in-law, Lt. Gen. Hussein Kamal, briefs Saddam on his efforts to hide weapons information from UN inspectors. A short time later, in August, Kamal would defect to Jordan. His defection would fully expose the massive concealment campaign the Iraqi government had conducted of its weapons programs. UNSCOM chief Richard Butler told to the Security Council “that a program of concealment, run at a very senior level in Iraq, must have operated successfully for over four years without detection by the Commission.” He added that with the defection,

[i]mmediately, the entire basis upon which the Commission was conducting its assessments and analysis was undermined. It became clear that Iraq’s declaration of March 1992 was itself a fraud; everything had NOT been declared to the Commission; everything had not been destroyed.

From then on, the UN inspection team's conclusions on the state of Iraq's disarmament were to be solely based on "obtaining verifiable evidence including physical materials or documents; investigation of the successful concealment activities by Iraq; and, the thorough verification of the unilateral destruction events." In other words, Saddam had to prove he got rid of the stuff to ensure that he did not just stash it away somewhere beyond the eyes of the UN. Clinton Defense Secretary Cohen explained it this way in 1998:

[Inspectors] have to find documents, computer disks, production points, ammunition areas in an area that size [California]. Hussein has said, 'we have no program now.' We're saying, 'prove it.' He says he has destroyed all his nerve agent. [W]e're asking 'where, when and how?'"

Here's what UNMOVIC head Hans Blix said on the verification standard in late January 2003.

Resolution 687 (1991), like the subsequent resolutions I shall refer to, required cooperation by Iraq but such was often withheld or given grudgingly. Unlike South Africa, which decided on its own to eliminate its nuclear weapons and welcomed inspection as a means of creating confidence in its disarmament, Iraq appears not to have come to a genuine acceptance—not even today—of the disarmament, which was demanded of it and which it needs to carry out to win the confidence of the world and to live in peace.

As we know, the twin operation “declare and verify,” which was prescribed in resolution 687 (1991), too often turned into a game of “hide and seek.” Rather than just verifying declarations and supporting evidence, the two inspecting organizations found themselves engaged in efforts to map the weapons programmes and to search for evidence through inspections, interviews, seminars, inquiries with suppliers and intelligence organizations.

January 27, 2003

The discovery of a number of 122 mm chemical rocket warheads in a bunker at a storage depot 170 km southwest of Baghdad was much publicized. This was a relatively new bunker and therefore the rockets must have been moved there in the past few years, at a time when Iraq should not have had such munitions…. They could also be the tip of a submerged iceberg. The discovery of a few rockets does not resolve but rather points to the issue of several thousands of chemical rockets that are unaccounted for.

March 6, 2003

The result, so far, is that no underground facility of special interest has been found. Although they may be easier to find than mobile facilities, they are still a difficult target and it is always possible that inspectors have missed a hidden entrance. Like mobile facilities, any dedicated underground CW or BW facility could also have been dismantled prior to inspection. UNMOVIC does not dismiss the possibility that such facilities exist and will continue to investigate reports as appropriate. Given the vast number of potential underground “sites” capable of hosting CW or BW production or storage facilities in Iraq, inspections in this area will have to be dynamic and rely on specific intelligence information….

The long list of proscribed items unaccounted for and as such resulting in unresolved disarmament issues was neither shortened by the inspections, nor by Iraqi declarations and documents.

The fact the Saddam Hussein never complied with UN disarmament resolutions led Defense Secretary William Cohen to state on CNN one month AFTER coalition forces entered Iraq:

I am convinced that he has them. I saw evidence back in 1998 when we would see the inspectors being barred from gaining entry into a warehouse for three hours with trucks rolling up and then moving those trucks out. I am absolutely convinced that there are weapons. We will find them.

Tom Ricks of the Washington Post reports on the achievements of the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment in Iraq under the command of Col. H.R. McMaster. It's an encouraging read until the concluding paragraphs.

Even now, McMaster said, he understands that his success is "fragile." The city's mayor, Najim Abdullah Jabouri, is unhappy that McMaster and his unit are leaving Iraq this month. "A surgeon doesn't leave in the middle of the operation!" the mayor said intently to McMaster over a recent lunch of lamb kabobs and bread. He waved his finger under the colonel's nose. "The doctor should finish the job he started."

McMaster and Hickey tried to calm him down. "There's another doctor coming," Hickey ventured. "He's very good."

The mayor wasn't mollified. He said he has seen other American units here before, and they didn't coordinate with Iraqi forces like McMaster's has. "When you leave, I will leave, too," the mayor threatened. "What you are doing is an experiment, and it isn't right to experiment on people."

Nor is it clear that McMaster's example can be followed elsewhere by American commanders in the country. The biggest problem U.S. troops in Iraq face is Baghdad, a city about 30 times the size of Tall Afar. With the current number of American troops in Iraq, it would be impossible to copy the approach used here, with outposts every few blocks.

"Baghdad is a much tougher nut to crack than this," said Maj. Jack McLaughlin, Hickey's plans officer, who attended Robinson Secondary School in Fairfax, Va. Standing in the castle overlooking the city, he said, "It's a matter of scale -- you'd need a huge number of troops to replicate what we've done here."

The Combating Terrorism Center at West Point has posted on its web site several al Qaeda-related documents that have been "captured in the course of operations supporting the GWOT." Two letters, dated September 30, 1993 and May 24, 1994, relate directly to al Qaeda operations in Somalia. The letters are from "Hassan al-Tajiki" to the "African Corps." Assuming their authenticity, the letters are consistent with the propaganda of bin Laden in the 1990s that Mogadishu and other events showed that America was "a paper tiger" and "a weak horse." He and his followers would use such imagery as a recruiting tool for al Qaeda, "the strong horse" in bin Laden's words, throughout the 1990s. In fact, though little reported in the media, al Qaeda had recruited and trained thousands before September 11, 2001. Indeed, Richard Clarke told PBS' Frontline that by the end of 2000 al Qaeda had a presence "in probably between 50-60 countries [and] that they had trained thousands, perhaps over 10,000 terrorists at the camps in Afghanistan."

The September 30, 1993 letter called for attacks "to expel" US forces "from Somalia." (Later, a U.S. government indictment charged that bin Laden and other al Qaeda members had trained those who attacked the U.S. Rangers.)

Therefore, the most important need is to expel them from Somalia, even were a semi-Islamic, semi-democratic, semi-etc. government subsequently to assume power....

When you entered Somalia, the Somali arena was barren and futile. The situation changed, however, after the intervention by America and the Knights of the Cross. You most resembled a hunter aiming his rifle at the dead branch of a tree, with no leaves or birds on it. Suddenly, a bald eagle lands on the branch of the tree, directly in line with the rifle. Shouldn’t the hunter pull the trigger to kill the eagle or at least bloody it? The American bald eagle has landed within range of our rifles. You can kill it or leave it permanently disfigured....

The May 24, 1994 letter congratulates the Africa Corps for the "great victory" in the American withdrawal. It notes that the "victory in Somalia over the Americans has profound implications ideologically, politically, and psychologically..." and that the U.S. "fled in panic before their true capabilities could be exposed." Furthermore, "the Somali experience confirmed the spurious nature of American power and that it has not recovered from the Vietnam complex. It fears getting bogged down in a real war that would reveal its psychological collapse at the level of personnel and leadership. Since Vietnam America has been seeking easy battles that are completely guaranteed."

We congratulate you, ourselves, and all Muslims for that great victory in the land of Islamic Somalia....

I would have liked to write on this subject unemotionally and somewhat objectively, were in not for my overwhelming desire to kiss the heads and hands of all those who took part in this action....

General observations on the operation:
1. The Africa Corps did not enter the Somali arena with a clear vision, specifically a strategic vision, either militarily or politically.

2. Likewise, Americans did not enter the Somali arena with a clear vision of the objectives of its presence. Moreover, its vision of East Africa and the Horn of Africa failed to crystallize. I believe that the buffoon Clinton was motivated by election considerations and a personal inclination toward flamboyance, as if for a fleeting moment he believed the falsehood that he was the leader of the most powerful country in the world.

These are not just my words. Rather, this is the considered opinion of many inside America and abroad. What was the result? The result was that our amazing Corps was equal to America for the first time, but in a limited area —the area of darkness regarding a strategic vision. So how were our amazing Corps and its starving African Muslim allies able to be victorious over the greatest power in the world today?

... The Muslim victory in Somalia over the America has profound implications ideologically, politically, and psychologically that will require lengthy studies. You have the duty to record notes about these implications and keep them until it is time to study them in depth. Just the same, there is an important observation that we must not ignore, which is that the Americans were not defeated militarily in Somalia. Effective human and economic losses were not inflicted on them. All that happened was that the Somali battle revealed many of their psychological, political, and perhaps military weaknesses.

5. The Somali experience confirmed the spurious nature of American power and that it has not recovered from the Vietnam complex. It fears getting bogged down in a real war that would reveal its psychological collapse at the level of personnel and leadership. Since Vietnam America has been seeking easy battles that are completely guaranteed. It entered into a shameful series of adventures on the island of Grenada, then Panama, then bombing Libya, and then the Gulf War farce, which was the greatest military, political, and ideological swindle in history.

The outcomes were 100 percent guaranteed. Even so, the Americans brought with them forces from 30 countries to take the blows on their behalf, should events not turn out the way they were supposed to. In the end, the Arabs, the Europeans, and Japan paid the costs of the war, plus fees!

America wanted to continue this series of farces. It assumed that Somalia was an appropriate space for another ridiculous act. But the Muslims were there—so the great disaster occurred. They fled in panic before their true capabilities could be exposed.

6. In Mogadishu and Beirut, urban deterrence operations caused the American forces to flee in a shameful and humiliating manner. Doesn’t this demonstrate the importance of this type of warfare and the need to develop our warfare capabilities in terms of personnel, training syllabi, equipment being used, its level of technological advancement, development of security syllabi, development of security procedures, and training of competent elements for the security field.

What's clear is that the supposed "stability" of the 1990s was illusory.

First, Al Gore's pandering and now the EU's citadel of strength, Javier Solana, does the same in that paragon of religious tolerance otherwise known as Saudi Arabia. From Australia's The Age:

EU chief tries to calm cartoons dispute February 14, 2006

The European Union and a major group of Islamic countries say they support United Nations action to stop "defamation of religion" after cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad sparked violent protests.

The Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC) is lobbying for the United Nations to include language against blasphemy in the tenets of a new human rights body and EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana said he supported the idea.

"We agreed to take different measures including at the level of the United Nations to guarantee these acts will not be repeated," OIC Secretary General Ekmelettin Ihsanoglu said in Jeddah.

The head of the 57-nation body was speaking at a press conference with Solana, who arrived overnight in the birthplace of Islam at the start of a Middle East tour to try and calm the furor over caricatures.

"We have been talking today on how we can send a message to the people in both communities, the Islamic and European, that we need this not to happen again ... We strongly hope that people will be now sensible to understand that," Solana said.

"Be sure we are going to do our utmost for this not to happen again, because we need each other... I don't think honestly it will happen again," he added.

Ihsanoglu said he also wanted the EU to pass blasphemy laws. "I have proposed many ideas, legislative measures to be taken by the European Union," he said.

Solana, who later met King Abdullah in Riyadh, made no comment on the idea of EU measures.

But a European official close to the talks said the EU was careful to avoid promises on legislative prohibitions against offending Muslims.

"We deviated from the word 'laws' and moved to concentrate on conventions, resolutions and such things. We have to be careful of Western public opinion," the official said.

Though Muslims consider any portrayal of the Prophet blasphemous, many in Europe have supported the freedom of the press to publish the cartoons.

Solana's spokeswoman Cristina Gallach said the delegation now felt the tide was turning in the cartoon furor.

"They want mechanisms to guarantee this is not repeated and we should be able to find it in UN conventions on human rights," she said....

Max Boot of the Council on Foreign Relations weighs in, and Frederick Kagan of the American Enterprise Institute does the same here.

Vice President Gore is probably collecting lots of cash nowadays in speaking fees. There's nothing wrong with that, of course. But it would be interesting to know who paid Gore to travel to Saudi Arabia, the breeding ground of Islamic extremism, to accuse America of committing "terrible abuses" against Arabs after September 11. Who exactly invited him and who paid his expenses and fees? I'm sure Gore, who was an advocate for transparency while in government, would gladly release this information if asked by the media.

Many of the so-called cartoon protests have drawn perhaps a few thousand radical Islamists at best. Their protest tools include organized acts violence and threats to kill those who publish material they don't like. But in Lebanon, the contrast between violent and non-violent protest could not be greater. On February 5, Muslim extremists, numbering perhaps in the thousands and cheered on by the Assad government, torched the Danish embassy in Beirut. But today, hundreds of thousands of mainly Sunnis marked the first anniversary of the Syrian orchestrated assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri in a very different way. From the AP:

Hundreds of thousands of flag-waving Lebanese packed a square in central Beirut on Tuesday to mark the anniversary of the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, a momentous event that ended Syria's long domination of its smaller neighbor....

The demonstration in Martyrs' Square next to Hariri's grave drew mostly Sunni Muslims from the former leader's sect and Christian and Druse allies; the main pro-Syrian Shiite Muslim groups, Hezbollah and Amal, were not taking part.

The participants included women in both headscarves and jeans. Some carried signs calling for "The Truth" and shouted the name of Hariri's son and political heir, Saad Hariri.

Others carried placards critical of Syria and its president, Bashar Assad. "Isn't it enough, Bashar?" said one, listing the names of anti-Syrian Lebanese who have been slain in other bombings in the last year.

"Those who killed Hariri meant to kill Lebanon, but they failed. A new united Lebanon was born," said Samia Baroudy, a 52-year-old housewife from the Christian suburb of Rabieh. Holding a Lebanese flag, she said Hariri's death was both "a disaster" and "a miracle" that brought the Lebanese together.

Mohammed al-Ali, a 24-year-old Muslim barber from the northern province of Akkar, said he came to "to affirm the country's unity and Muslim-Christian coexistence."

...Anti-Syrian groups were hoping Tuesday's rally would be a repeat of a March 14 protest in which about 1 million flag-waving Lebanese converged on Martyrs' Square to demand the Syrian army leave Lebanon and that an international investigation look into Hariri's slaying.

Syria's troops left in April under international pressure, and a United Nations probe into Hariri's murder has implicated top Syrian and allied Lebanese security officials. The pro-Syrian administration was also ousted from office.

But anti-Syrian groups have continued to accuse Syria of interfering in Lebanese affairs and carrying out a campaign of bombings and assassinations in the past year that has killed 11 people, including three prominent anti-Syrians. Damascus has denied involvement in the Hariri murder and other attacks.

The demonstration was carried live by most Lebanese television stations.

However, Syria's official media did not broadcast any live footage. "We want all the truth," headlined one front-page editorial in Al-Thawra newspaper, a reference to Syria's claim it was being unfairly accused in the murder.

Most Americans haven't heard of the International Republican Institute, but for over 20 years IRI has helped advance democracy in the world. IRI has monitored elections in over 160 nations with little or no history in democracy -- and supports democracy efforts in many others. But the New York Times published a lengthy piece, "Mixed U.S. Signals Helped Tilt Haiti Toward Chaos," two weeks ago highly critical of IRI's role in Haiti, accusing IRI of undercutting official U.S. policy there and worse. IRI's president, Lorne Craner, penned a response to the Times' accusations but they have refused to print it without "substantive edits." As a result, Craner responds to the New York Times in today's Washington Times. Also, a point by point rebuttal may be found on the IRI web site. The entire text of the Washington Times piece follows:

A false picture of Aristide

By Lorne W. Craner

"Mixed U.S. Signals Helped Tilt Haiti Toward Chaos," claimed a recent New York Times headline. The three-page article charged that rogue Bush administration officials connived with the International Republican Institute to undermine democracy in Haiti.

I sent a 189-word response to the Times. They refused to print it without substantive edits, in part, they said, because "the News Department disputes the accuracy of" a sentence in my letter. The Times contends that IRI "undercut the official United States policy and the Ambassador [Dean Curran] assigned to carry it out." IRI allegedly did so in collusion with rogue administration officials who differed with Secretary of State Colin Powell's Haiti policy. "As a result the United States spoke with two sometimes contradictory voices," which, says Mr. Curran, "made efforts to foster political peace 'immeasurably more difficult.' "

The article charges that IRI consorted with rebels who overthrew President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Mr. Aristide is depicted as a man who "wanted to raise the minimum wage and force businesses to pay taxes" but "did not know much about the games that politicians play."

The article's problems start with its title. Haiti did not tilt toward chaos in 2004. Sadly, it has been chaotic for most of the last two centuries. Second, the article's underpinning, that a rogue group under Colin Powell opposed his Haiti policy, was contradicted by Mr. Powell himself before the article was published. Asked in an e-mail from the Times if there was a policy difference between him and the officials, Mr. Powell responded: "I don't accept that view." The Times neglected to mention Mr. Powell's response, maintaining the article's false foundation.

Third, former Ambassador Curran's complaints about IRI are echoed by neither his predecessors nor his successors (indeed, the Times cropped Mr. Curran's predecessor, who praised IRI, from a photo of IRI officials). Furthermore, both the Clinton and Bush administrations granted every IRI request for Agency for International Development Haiti funding.

Mr. Curran's charges are backed by three Haitians, all of whom are onetime Aristide allies and have obvious motivations to criticize IRI. More to the point, IRI did not "undercut" Mr. Curran by urging Haiti's opposition to forego negotiations with Mr. Aristide. In fact, IRI's vice president (at the request of one of the rogue officials) phoned opposition leaders to urge them to reach an accommodation with Mr. Aristide. If Mr. Curran did feel "undercut" by rogue officials or IRI, why did he fail to raise the issue directly with Mr. Powell or through the State Department's "dissent channel"? Used more than 200 times since 1971, it enables any foreign service officer to send policy dissents straight to the secretary.

A fourth problem is the charge that IRI consorted with the rebels who overthrew Mr. Aristide. The source, an accused death-squad leader, is hardly the quality one once expected of the Times. As the article notes, the charge was investigated and found false by AID's inspector-general.

A fifth problem is the depiction of Mr. Aristide, whose tendencies are gently implied ("Aristide... had little experience with the give and take of democracy"). The article's author, Walt Bogdanich, said recently "Haiti doesn't have a democracy and hasn't had one in two years" since Mr. Aristide's 2004 departure. Past Times editorials were more honest. The November 2000 Times editorial "Haiti's Disappearing Democracy," said Mr. Aristide's "almost certain return to power in Sunday's elections was achieved by trampling on democratic procedures. The weeks before the voting were marred by bombings and other politically motivated violence." A February 2004 editorial, "Haiti's Descent," said "Aristide was once hailed as Haiti's democratic champion. Now, his second presidency is declining into despotism." For the reasons those editorials detailed, IRI did, as charged, work solely with Haiti's democrats from 2001-2004.

President Reagan did not help create IRI to work with those practicing "despotism." Doing so would also contravene longstanding AID policy. Career AID officials approved IRI's approach to helping level Haiti's political playing field, and knew who IRI was training because they attended every session.

Last but not least, in stringing together disparate rumors while omitting contradictory facts, the Times merely echoed 2004 Mother Jones and Salon.com articles. The author of the latter says the Times "story was remarkably similar to a story I wrote nearly two years ago. On Jan. 3, 2005 a New York Times staffer named Ursula Andrews e-mailed me, asking for help with research. I was excited that the newspaper of record was finally picking up on the story and complied with their request. When the Times published its story, it contained no citation of my work."

IRI is not the reason for Haiti's chaos, or the reason Mr. Aristide had to flee. No one would have been happier than IRI if democracy had advanced under Mr. Aristide. Instead, as Mr. Powell states, Mr. Aristide was "a man who was democratically elected, but did not govern democratically, or govern well." And he has to bear a large burden, if not the major burden, for what has happened.

Does Hillary Clinton agree with the remarks made by Vice President Gore at the Jiddah Economic Forum? Does she believe it was appropriate that Al Gore told "mainly Saudi audience ... that the U.S. government committed 'terrible abuses' against Arabs after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks"? Does she agree with Gore that "Arabs had been 'indiscriminately rounded up' and held in 'unforgivable' conditions" and that "the Bush administration was playing into al-Qaida's hands by routinely blocking Saudi visa applications."? If the Senator doesn't, will she let the public know that Gore's comments do not reflect the view of other Clinton administration officials?

Outside of its current shareholders, no one is exactly sure. RosUkrEnergo is a Swiss-registered company, formed in the aftermath of the Kremlin's cut off of the Ukrainian gas supply in January, that is now supposed to be the guarantor of Ukraine's gas supply -- and make billions and billions doing so. But who will get these billions is a good question. Bruce Jackson, who heads The Project on Transitional Democracies, believes the money belongs to "the people of the Ukraine" and wants to make sure that happens.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Thursday, February 09, 2006

Project on Transitional Democracies Announces Bid for RosUkrEnergo

Washington, DC. At 9:30am this morning, The Project on Transitional Democracies announced a bid for the shares of RosUkrEnergo held by Ukrainian investors. RosUkrEnergo is a Swiss-based joint venture between Ukraine and Russia which on January 4, 2006 signed an agreement with GAZPROM and the Government of Ukraine to supply Ukraine with gas on a temporary basis and to lease Ukrainian gas storage and pipelines through 2030.

Bruce P. Jackson, President of the Project on Transitional Democracies, announced, “We are responding to Prime Minister Yuriy Yekhanurov’s announcement yesterday that he will order the State Property Fund to announce a tender for any part of RosUkrEnergo which belongs to Ukraine. We are bidding.”

On February 8, Prime Minister Yuriy Yekhanurov told journalists, "I will order the State Property Fund to immediately announce a tender if somebody finds that any part of RosUkrEnergo belongs to Ukraine. It will be sold for one hryvna (4 U.S. cents, 3 Euro cents)."

The Project on Transitional Democracies is a non-profit US Corporation based in Washington, DC. Its Board of Directors and International Advisors are evenly divided between Europe and United States. Mr. Jackson was unwilling to divulge the details of the Project’s bid until after the publication of the Ukrainian tender. Mr. Jackson did disclose that the US-European bid would be “all cash” and that “Due to the Corporation’s non-profit status, we will commit to return all profits to the people of Ukraine who are the legal owners of the assets from which the Project would otherwise be improperly and illegally profiting.”

In response to questions about the source of PTD financial backing, Ms. Irina Krasovskaya, PTD Board Member and President of WE REMEMBER, a world-renowned human rights group in Belarus, stated, “Those of us in Belarus could not let the Ukrainian people be sold into the same slavery to which our people have been condemned. We have gathered our hryvnas and are prepared to meet the Prime Minister’s price for the economic sovereignty of our friends in Ukraine. It is the least we could do.”

Mr. Jackson added, “The opportunity to get in on the ground floor of the greatest asset-stripping operation in European history for a less than a dollar was something our Board could not pass up. At a minimum, our representatives will be able to attend the secret Board meetings in Switzerland and St. Petersburg where they will get to drink champagne with the FSB and the mafia bosses who have stolen the future of Ukraine.”

The Board, its financial condition and beneficiaries are a matter of public record and its activities are both transparent and fully compliant with US and European Union law. The Project will file appropriate notifications of intent to bid with the US Securities and Exchange Commission and the European Union upon the publication of the Ukrainian tender.

For additional information, please contact The Project on Transitional Democracies at 202-986-1949 or bruce@ptdemocracy.org.

The Sunday Times in Britain reports that the onetime counterterrorism czar and Kerry '04 supporter, Richard Clarke, has been coaching former Virginia Gov. Mark Warner on national security affairs.

For his part, Warner has learnt not to question the decision to invade Iraq. As a former governor, rather than a senator like Clinton, he does not have to explain away any embarrassing votes for or against military intervention.

At a time of war, one of Warner’s greatest areas of vulnerability is his lack of foreign policy and national security expertise. He is being coached by several former Clinton White House officials, including Richard Clarke, a former counter-terrorism adviser, and Ivo Daalder, an expert on Europe at the Washington-based Brookings Institution.

A couple of months ago, a senior Democratic strategist with ties to Sen. Kerry's 2004 campaign told me that Hillary Clinton will easily raise $250-300 million for her primary run. He added that her biggest political threat isn't Al Gore or John Kerry but Warner should he decide to tap his personal wealth. With his "moderate" appeal and business background, Warner would also be positioned to raise lots of campaign cash the traditional way. The Washington Post's E.J. Dionne and many others regularly tout Warner's credentials as a popular, centrist Southern Democrat who governed a so-called Red state.

As to foreign policy, though, Warner has been virtually content free. For example, on Iraq he won't say how he would have voted on the war authorization had he been in Congress at the time. He won't tell voters if he would have regretted his vote today had he supported the authorization back then. He won't say whether he believes the president made the right decision to remove Saddam Hussein from power in March 2003 or whether he believes the President should have given UN inspectors more time. Guess he's waiting to see how things look in Iraq a year or so from now.

One New Hampshire Democrat, who recently heard a Warner campaign pitch, put it this way:

Some confessed to mild disappointment. “He was okay,” said one, who did not wish to be named. Another, Stuart West, said Warner was too right-wing. “He avoided gay marriage and women’s rights. And did he condemn the war? No.”

Stay tuned.

On CBS News radio this morning, I listened to an interview with someone from the ABA who cited the results of a recent poll the group commissioned on the NSA surveillance program. You won't be surprised to learn that the ABA poll, unlike other polls, found that a majority of Americans oppose the program. But to get these results they had to "cook the books." The poll results were weighted for age, sex, race and geography but apparently not political affiliation/leanings. But even if one assumes the political distribution was about right, the poll questions, as you'll see here, were misleading, to put mildly, and omitted key facts. For example, perhaps you didn't know that the president, through the NSA program, has suspended "the constitutional freedoms of people like you." And somehow the pollster forgot to mention the name "al Qaeda" or the fact that the program is attempting to rapidly intercept communications from an al Qaeda terrorist outside the U.S. to a person inside the U.S. You know, the situation where an al Qaeda terrorist is picked-up in Malaysia with his pockets stuffed with American phone numbers and names -- or perhaps with those names and numbers on his computer hard drive.

Here's the ABA's press release announcing the poll results:

CHICAGO, Feb.10, 2006 – According to a poll commissioned by the American Bar Association and released today, 52 percent of respondents said that in the fight against terrorism, the President of the United States alone cannot suspend constitutional freedoms, with an additional 25 percent saying he must obtain authorization by a court of law or Congress. Thus 77 percent of Americans express deep reservations about the president’s secret surveillance program....

"While everyone agrees on the need for aggressive deterrence of terrorism, the disclosure of unchecked domestic spying by the president is deeply troubling to many Americans," said ABA President Michael S. Greco, who released the poll results today in a news conference during the ABA’s 2006 Midyear Meeting in Chicago....

Clearly, Greco said, the poll results demonstrate that Americans are deeply interested in and alarmed by issues raised by secret spying on citizens’ communications by the National Security Agency. "It is a time when we should be having conversations about our constitutional freedoms as well as our security," he said.

Nice spin, Mr. Greco. Howard Dean couldn't have done a better job.

(Update: Senate Intelligence Committee chairman Pat Roberts (R-KS) told Tim Russert on Sunday's Meet the Press that Paul Pillar said nothing about subtle political pressure on analysts when he was interviewed as part of the committee's investigation of pre-war intelligence. "Now we interviewed over 250 analysts during the WMD—the WMD inquiry, including this gentleman [Mr. Pillar]. Not one, except him now, post after all this is done, said that they were pressured in any way. And that was backed up by the WMD commission.")

Not surprisingly, the Washington Post's Walter Pincus reports on an upcoming Foreign Affairs piece by Paul Pillar, the CIA's national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia from 2000 to 2005. Pillar's views are old news, of course, as Stephen Hayes points out. He believed that "containment" was working and that Saddam could have been kept "in his box" -- a favorite phrase of Secretary of State Albright during the Clinton years. Fine. But the president, elected by the voters to make policy judgments, and many others disagreed then and still do today with Pillar's "in his box" assessment -- see here. Since the Iraq invasion, Pillar hasn't apparently been shy in letting people know "privately" and also publicly about the wisdom of the CIA and the ignorance of the Bush White House.

Pincus writes:

The Bush administration, Pillar wrote, "repeatedly called on the intelligence community to uncover more material that would contribute to the case for war," including information on the "supposed connection" between Hussein and al Qaeda, which analysts had discounted.

Of course, Mr. Pillar's dismissive comments are puzzling given that, at the time, U.S. intelligence had no high-level, human assets in Saddam’s inner circle let alone inside the top ranks of al Qaeda. For example, consider these two congressional reports, the Joint Inquiry into Intelligence Community Activities before and after the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001 (pp. 90, 91), and the Report on U.S. Intelligence Community’s Prewar Intelligence Assessments on Iraq (pp. 322, 323, 351, 355):

“The U.S. Intelligence Community was not able to penetrate al Qaeda’s inner circle successfully before September 11, despite the fact that human penetration of that organization was considered a priority.”

“According to senior CTC [Counterterrorist Center] officials, CIA had no penetrations of al Qaeda’s leadership and never obtained intelligence that was sufficient for action against Usama bin Laden.”

“CIA acknowledged the poor intelligence collection on both the Iraqi regime and al Qaeda leadership.”

“CIA stated it did not have specific intelligence reports that revealed Saddam Hussein’s personal opinion about dealing with al Qaeda.”

“There was no robust HUMINT collection capability targeting Iraq’s links to terrorism until the fall of 2002.”

“Despite four decades of intelligence reporting on Iraq, there was little useful intelligence collection that helped analysts determine the Iraqi regime’s possible links to al Qaeda.”

“The CIA had no…sources on the ground in Iraq providing reporting specifically on terrorism.”

But then again, perhaps the people who wrote these reports were "subtly" pressured to reach these conclusions.

Jim VandeHei reports in today's Washington Post that Vice President Cheney

suggested last night that the debate over spying on overseas communications to or from terrorism suspects should be a political issue in this year's congressional elections....

VandeHei continued:

His comments reflected the emerging GOP plan to make national security and terrorism the centerpiece of House and Senate elections. White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove telegraphed the strategy last month when he told a Republican audience that "we are dealing with two parties that have fundamentally different views on national security."

Cheney's comments were the closest a top White House official has come to calling for the NSA program to be a political matter.

Democrats have criticized the White House for politicizing national security issues such as the USA Patriot Act and NSA surveillance.

It's unclear whether the GOP strategy will work, however.

And Democrats haven't been using Iraq, Iran, the failure to get OBL, the Patriot Act, the NSA surveillance program and on and on in an effort to gain political advantage? Please. Remember Sen. Harry Reid's stunt a while back forcing the entire Senate into a secret session on Iraq? The problem for Democrats is that the majority of voters don't agree with them, as Sen. Kerry found out.

Andrew Sullivan has the story here.

So while others in America are worried about an Iranian nuclear weapon, the nation's top Democrat has other anxieties about Iran that keep him up at night. Forget about the Iranian president's desire to "wipe" Israel off the map and threat to choke off oil supplies to the West, Chairman Dean is more concerned with an elected president of the U.S. turning our nation into a fundamentalist dictatorship. Consider the following from today's ABC News' The Note:

while discussing domestic surveillance on ABC's Good Morning America, DNC Chairman Howard Dean said many in the Republican Party disagree with the President, adding that all Democrats are asking is that "we don't turn this country into a country like Iran, where the president of Iran can do everything he wants at any time."

Pathetic, but I'm sure Sen. Kerry agrees with him.

From his gimmicky "Home from Iraq by the Holidays" troop withdrawal plan to his filibuster yodel from the Swiss Alps, Sen. John Kerry's free fall continues. In today's Washington Post, Kerry now trots out this gem concerning the violent assault directed at a newspaper published in a free society.

"These and other inflammatory images deserve our scorn, just as the violence against embassies and military installations are an unacceptable and intolerable form of protest."

As Marshall Wittmann over at the Democratic Leadership Council points out,

It is a delusion to believe that these mobs will be appeased by a moral equivalent condemnation of both the cartoons and the violence. Democrats, in particular, must make it clear that this has nothing to do with "offensive" cartoons and everything to do with a war against Western values.

Of course, Kerry's moral equivalence characterization is exactly wrong. His weak-kneed remark will only embolden the radical elements and further undermine Islamic moderates. His words must be music to the ears of people like Mr. Abu-Laban, who, the Wall Street Journal reports, is under pressure "for results."

Under pressure from young radicals for results, Mr. Abu-Laban, the Copenhagen cleric at the forefront of the campaign, and several others formed the "European Committee for Honoring the Prophet," an umbrella group that now claims to represent 27 organizations across a wide spectrum of the Islamic community. (Moderate Muslims dispute this and say the group has been hijacked by radicals.)

Mr. Abu-Laban, who grew up in Egypt and was arrested there in the early 1980s after being expelled from the United Arab Emirates for his preaching, took charge of writing statements for the group and communicating with Muslim ambassadors. He denies holding extremist views, but acknowledges hosting visits to Denmark by Omar Abdel Rahman, before his arrest in New York, where the blind sheik now is serving a life sentence in connection with the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

Thank you Ohio voters!

In an interview yesterday with Neil Cavuto of Fox News, the Secretary of State under the first President Bush didn't pull any punches.

CAVUTO: What do you make of the ferocity of the response to this cartoon?

EAGLEBURGER: Well, first of all, I should tell you, I hope, devoutly, that this tends to unite, as you said -- to unite the West, to begin to understand the kind of threat that we face.

I'm -- I'm going to sound like a racist to some, and I apologize for that. I don't mean it as racist. But you have to see -- you -- you watch this on television, and then you tell yourself that this is not a serious problem in the Muslim world, in terms of the way they look at the West?

This is -- it -- it should be very clear to everybody now that we have a problem for ourselves, not just the United States, but the Western world in general, and, certainly, the Christian world. And it seems to me that it should be very obvious that what is happening now is so irrational and so dangerous that we had better wake up to the fact that the world has changed and this is a part of that change.

CAVUTO: Indeed, Denmark doesn't have a -- exactly a very violent history at all.

It is probably one of the most peaceful nations on the planet. What do you think the message is for fellow peaceful nations, nations like Denmark, Sweden, Switzerland, that try to stay out of this whole debate?

EAGLEBURGER: Well, I hope -- I hope that what this will tell them all is that there has to be some unity now amongst all of us, because this is a threat that isn't going to go away.

And one of the problems in the Western world is that we are so tolerant, we have reached the point that we are tolerant of intolerance. And that's what's going on here now. And if we pooh-pooh it, and if we say, well, it's all the fault of this Danish newspaper, shouldn't have done, we will have been getting all the wrong reactions.

What we ought to be seeing now is that the Western world, if I can use the term, the democratic world, it needs to be awakened to the fact that we now have a serious threat of radical Islam. And, please, don't let me get into the point of trying to say that every Muslim is like this, but what is fairly clear now is that there is a growing number of them.

And we need to be worried about that. And I also have to say, we don't see any of that in the United States. God help us, if we should. But, in Europe now, what we're seeing is a very serious challenge to Western European democracy.

CAVUTO: You know, Secretary, there have been even critics more vocal than you who have said that the same who are ranting and rioting right now didn't say boo when there were pictures of decapitations of hostages...

EAGLEBURGER: Of course not.

CAVUTO: ... and that sort of thing.

EAGLEBURGER: Of course not.

CAVUTO: But they are making a huge deal out of this.

I guess I'm wondering whether that image, that -- that weird juxtaposition, resonates, even in the Muslim world, that there might be a - - a clarion call for -- for the more moderate members of the Muslim world to stand up and say, this isn't us?

EAGLEBURGER: Good -- good for you. Good for you, because that's the only real alternative now, is that the moderate Muslims, who have pretty much kept -- kept their heads down, for good and sufficient reason, when you see this sort of thing happening, are going to have to realize that, if they don't react to this, they're going to be dragged along by a hysterical mob that is going to move all of the Muslim world, all of Islam, in a direction that they ought not want.

And it's totally counterproductive. Yet, at the same time, I have to tell you, there was a poll taken in the United Kingdom in 2004, in which 60 percent of the Muslims living in the United Kingdom said they wanted to live under Sharia, which is the Muslim law that governs the way you live, and includes things like women with their faces covered and things of this sort.

When you have 60 percent of those who are living in one of the world's great democracies saying they don't want to live in that democracy, but they want to live in the United Kingdom, you better understand you have a problem.

In his latest piece on Iraq's WMDs, the New York Sun's Eli Lake reports on the work of David Gaubatz, a former member of the Air Force's Office of Special Investigations. He writes:

A former special investigator for the Pentagon during the Iraq war said he found four sealed underground bunkers in southern Iraq that he is sure contain stocks of chemical and biological weapons. But when he asked American weapons inspectors to check out the sites, he was rebuffed....

Between March and July 2003, Mr. Gaubatz was taken by these sources to four locations - three in and around Nasiriyah and one near the port of Umm Qasr, where he was shown underground concrete bunkers with the tunnels leading to them deliberately flooded. In each case, he was told the facilities contained stocks of biological and chemical weapons, along with missiles whose range exceeded that mandated under U.N. sanctions. But because the facilities were sealed off with concrete walls, in some cases up to 5 feet thick, he did not get inside. He filed reports with photographs, exact grid coordinates, and testimony from multiple sources. And then he waited for the Iraq Survey Group to come to the sites. But in all but one case, they never arrived.

Mr. Gaubatz's new disclosures shed doubt on the thoroughness of the Iraq Survey Group's search for the weapons of mass destruction that were one of the Bush administration's main reasons for the war. Two chief inspectors from the group, David Kay and Charles Duelfer, concluded that they could not find evidence of the promised stockpiles. Mr. Kay refused to be interviewed for this story and Mr. Duelfer did not return email. The CIA referred these questions to Mr. Duelfer....

He says the reasons he was given by the survey group were that the areas of the sites were not safe, they lacked manpower and equipment, and at the time the survey group was focusing activities in northern Iraq. "The ISG team was not organized nor outfitted for this mission in my opinion and were only concerned to look in northern Iraq. They were not even on the ground during the first few weeks of the war, and this was the most critical time to go out and exploit sites. I feel very comfortable in saying the sites were never exploited by ISG," he said. In one instance a few inspectors did come out once to follow one lead, Mr. Gaubatz said. But they lacked the equipment and manpower to crack the bunker. "An adequate search would have required heavy equipment to uncover the concrete, and additional equipment to drain the water."

While at this point we have no way of verifying Mr. Gaubatz's bunker claims, we do know that ISG inspections were not extensive and were plagued by many problems. As Duelfer's September 2004 report noted, the ISG “fully evaluated less than one quarter of one percent of the over 10,000 weapons caches throughout Iraq, and visited fewer than ten ammunition depots identified prior to OIF [Operation Iraqi Freedom] as suspect CW [Chemical Weapons] sites.” In addition, the ISG had inspected approximately 10 percent “or less of the total Iraqi munitions stocks” that were estimated at over 600,000 tons.

Rather than visiting every site, inspectors sought out those sites “most likely associated with possible storage or deployment of chemical weapons.” In the end, the Duelfer report stated, the ISG visited only two dozen or so sites. Out of 104 ammunition storage points within the "Red Line" ringing Baghdad, the ISG used “indicators of CW—such as possible decontamination vehicles—to narrow the search to 26 sites.” The result of this search uncovered “no caches of CW munitions.” The Duelfer report concluded: “[A]lthough only a fraction of the hundreds of thousands of tons of Iraqi munitions were inspected, ISG has a high confidence that there are no CW present in the Iraqi inventory.” The report also declared that the “security situation in Iraq has limited the physical verification of Iraq’s unilateral destruction claims—by excavating and counting weapon fragments, for example.” And it noted that the "the amount of inspections ISG was able to carry out was consistent with the resources available, and the safety factors involved in carrying out the inspections of munitions facilities."

A former advisor to Vice President Al Gore offers a Pattonesque battle cry for Democrats:

If Democrats get sucked into a debate over tactics in the war on terror, they will lose. But it's hard to see how they lose if they wage the debate over the rule of law and if they show their willingness to amend the law to strengthen the war on terror.

Most important of all, however, is that they take strong positions, grounded in strong values. So how about this for a start, provided to me by my colleague Bill Galston of the Brookings Institution: "We believe that the conduct of war is consistent with the rule of law."

It could even fit on a bumper sticker.

Democrats better be careful, though. The ACLU may sue them for copyright infringement.

this campaign advice and make RNC chair Ken Mehlman a very happy man.

Somehow I doubt Director Negroponte actually believes this. From The Washington Times:

A new Pentagon strategy report and recent congressional testimony by the director of national intelligence show the Bush administration remains divided on the threat posed by China's rise. The Quadrennial Defense Review report made public last week bluntly states that China is the greatest potential challenge to the U.S. military and is rapidly building up its military. John Negroponte, the director of national intelligence, by contrast, stated in an annual intelligence threat briefing for Congress that China's rise is similar to that of democratic India.... Mr. Negroponte's softer comments on China contrast with those of CIA Director Porter J. Goss last year when he told the same committee that China's modernizing military forces 'threaten' U.S. forces and interests in Asia.

Oh, and here's the latest on China's missile build-up opposite democratic Taiwan.

A piece (sub. req'd) in today's Wall Street Journal, "How Muslim Clerics Stirred Arab World Against Denmark," isn't good news for European governments seeking to avoid future problems by groveling as the European Union's justice minister recently did in suggesting a tighter code of media conduct. Young Islamic radicals are getting better organized under the leadership, in this case, of a cleric who consorted with a 1993 World Trade Center conspirator.

In Aarhus, Demmark's second-largest city, a radical cleric gave an interview denouncing Mr. Rose and reminding him of "what happened" to Theo Van Gogh, a Dutch filmmaker murdered in 2004 by a Dutchman of Moroccan descent. Mr. Rose got a security briefing from police and had his telephone number and address delisted.

Under pressure from young radicals for results, Mr. Abu-Laban, the Copenhagen cleric at the forefront of the campaign, and several others formed the "European Committee for Honoring the Prophet," an umbrella group that now claims to represent 27 organizations across a wide spectrum of the Islamic community. (Moderate Muslims dispute this and say the group has been hijacked by radicals.)

Mr. Abu-Laban, who grew up in Egypt and was arrested there in the early 1980s after being expelled from the United Arab Emirates for his preaching, took charge of writing statements for the group and communicating with Muslim ambassadors. He denies holding extremist views, but acknowledges hosting visits to Denmark by Omar Abdel Rahman, before his arrest in New York, where the blind sheik now is serving a life sentence in connection with the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

Sean Naylor has an interesting piece in the latest Armed Forces Journal. Will U.S. forces leave Afghanistan too soon?

He writes:

The Taliban forces are playing a clever waiting game. According to U.S. Special Forces (SF) officers, whenever possible, the insurgents are lying low, avoiding high-profile attacks on U.S. and coalition forces. Their aim, the SF officers say, is to convince U.S. commanders and their political masters that the Taliban no longer poses a major threat to stability in Afghanistan and that it’s time to withdraw U.S. forces from the country. If that happens before Afghan government forces are ready to assume full responsibility for the country’s security, the officers say, a war that all commanders claim they are winning could still be lost.

From the Washington Post's "In the Loop" column:

"U.N. Ambassador John Bolton , who's president of the Security Council this month, is making some headway in imposing law and order at the notoriously fractious council -- but it's not been easy. At his first session last week, Bolton tried to impose fresh discipline and some new practices. First, he asked top U.N. staff to provide the council with daily briefings on the latest peacekeeping crises, irking council members who abhor changes and sparking groans from staff. Then, he proposed discussions on corruption in U.N. peacekeeping, which is proving unpopular -- the issue's not considered a threat to international peace and security by some. Most controversial of all, he insisted that all 15 Security Council members show up to meetings on time, at 10 a.m. Asked Thursday by a reporter whether he really thought he could start the council meetings on time, Bolton said he had failed. 'I took a list of when they came in. We started just before 10:15. I brought the gavel down at 10. I was the only one in the room, though.'"

While the far left isn't happy with Ambassador Bolton's reform efforts, the rest of America wants him to succeed.

From today's Beirut Daily Star:

"The secretary general is alarmed by the threats and violence, including the attacks on embassies, that have occurred in Syria and Lebanon and other countries over the past few days," a statement attributed to Annan, issued by his spokesman Stephane Dujarric, said.

"While he shares the distress felt by many Muslims at the publication of caricatures which they see as insulting to their religion, he wishes to emphasize that such resentment cannot justify violence, least of all when directed at people who have no responsibility for, or control over, the publications in question."

Shouldn't the Secretary General's spokesman just make a categorical statement against the violence rather than adding the "least of all" qualification?

This 24-page brief on the president's constitutional authority to conduct the NSA surveillance provides a strong and detailed legal defense of the president's actions. Its author is a former career national security official who served during the Clinton administration, as well as the current administration. And over at National Review Online, Andrew McCarthy has an excellent post, "IS THE PRESIDENT 'ABOVE THE LAW?' (scroll down a bit)," on the amnesia of several former Clinton administration officials on the FISA issue.

This piece, "Iraq, Niger, and the CIA," from the current National Journal is linked to by Rep. John Conyers on his blog. Rest assured, Rep. Conyers, who spends lots of time pushing the president's impeachment, wouldn't link to any piece if he believed it flattered the White House. But apart from whether the Journal article accurately reflects the actions and motivations of Bush officials, the piece surely doesn't put elements of the CIA -- an agency many on the Left have nowadays come to love -- in a very good light either. Here's why.

The article notes:

CIA analysts wrote then-CIA Director George Tenet in a highly classified memo on June 17, 2003, "We no longer believe there is sufficient" credible information to "conclude that Iraq pursued uranium from abroad." The memo was titled: "In Response to Your Questions for Our Current Assessment and Additional Details on Iraq's Alleged Pursuits of Uranium From Abroad."

Despite the CIA's findings, Libby attempted to discredit former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who had been sent on a CIA-sponsored mission to Niger the previous year to investigate the claims, which he concluded were baseless....

The new disclosures raise questions as to why Libby and other Bush administration officials continued their efforts to discredit Wilson -- even as they were told that claims about Iraq's having procured uranium from Niger were most likely a hoax.

The answer may lie in part with the already well-known misgivings about the CIA by Cheney, Libby, and other senior Bush administration officials. At one point during that period -- the summer of 2003 -- Libby confronted a senior intelligence analyst briefing him and the vice president and accused the CIA of willfully misleading him and the administration on Niger. Libby was said to be upset that the CIA, in his view, had routinely minimized the extent to which Iraq was pursuing weapons of mass destruction and was now prematurely attempting to distance itself from the Niger allegations....

... In the memo, the CIA analysts wrote: "Since learning that the Iraqi-Niger uranium deal was based on false documents earlier this spring, we no longer believe that there is sufficient other reporting to conclude that Iraq purchased uranium from abroad."

Of course, Libby's lack of confidence in CIA weapons assessments is understandable. After all, the CIA was clueless on Saddam's nuclear program in 1991 -- a program that "resembled the Manhattan project" as the Washington Post described at the time of its discovery. The Agency also played a big role in producing the infamous 2002 NIE on Iraq's wmd programs. And despite the best efforts of many inside the beltway to blame the flawed NIE on White House pressure, two commissions found no evidence to support the allegation.

From the Silberman/Robb Commission:

The Commission has found no evidence of "politicization" of the Intelligence Community's assessments concerning Iraq's reported WMD programs. No analytical judgments were changed in response to political pressure to reach a particular conclusion.

And the Senate's 2004 prewar intelligence report:

The Committee did not find any evidence that Administration officials attempted to coerce, influence or pressure analysts to change their judgments related to Iraq's weapons of mass destruction capabilities.

So it's tough to get a good handle on whether the CIA "minimizes" or "maximizes" its threat assessments -- at least based on its Iraq performance. Anyway, the Journal piece also notes that by June 2003 the CIA told policymakers that

"[s]ince learning that the Iraqi-Niger uranium deal was based on false documents earlier this spring, we no longer believe that there is sufficient other reporting to conclude that Iraq purchased uranium from abroad."

This was quite a reversal from its previous reporting. In the run-up to the Iraq War, the CIA had consistently approved the uranium language that was used in the speeches of administration officials. Again, according to the 2004 Senate intelligence report,

The report on the former ambassador's trip to Niger, disseminated in March 2002, did not change any analysts' assessments of the Iraq-Niger uranium deal. For most analysts, the information in the report lent more credibility to the original Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) reports on the uranium deal, but State Department Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) analysts believed that the report supported their assessment that Niger was unlikely to be willing or able to sell uranium to Iraq. (p. 73)

The same Senate report also concluded:

Even after obtaining the forged documents and being alerted by a State Department Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) analyst about problems with them, analysts at both the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) did not examine them carefully enough to see the obvious problems with the documents. Both agencies continued to publish assessments that Iraq may have been seeking uranium from Africa. In addition, CIA continued to approve the use of similar language in Administration publications and speeches, including the State of the Union.(p. 77)

But even if the CIA eventually changed its Niger assessment (though, the full text of June '03 memo has yet to be made available to the public), the British have stood firm in their intelligence. In fact, the July 2004 Butler report states that the president's uranium reference in his 2003 State of the Union address was "well-founded" and based on intelligence having nothing to do with the forged documents. The report also makes the distinction between "sought" and "purchased."

Here are the "relevant" bits, on pages 123 and 125:

We conclude that, on the basis of the intelligence assessments at the time, covering both Niger and the Democratic Republic of Congo, the statements on Iraqi attempts to buy uranium from Africa in the Government’s dossier, and by the Prime Minister in the House of Commons, were well-founded. By extension, we conclude also that the statement in President Bush’s State of the Union Address of 28 January 2003 that:

'The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa'

was well-founded.

And,

From our examination of the intelligence and other material on Iraqi attempts to buy uranium from Africa, we have concluded that:

a. It is accepted by all parties that Iraqi officials visited Niger in 1999.

b. The British Government had intelligence from several different sources indicating that this visit was for the purpose of acquiring uranium. Since uranium constitutes almost three-quarters of Niger’s exports, the intelligence was credible.

c. The evidence was not conclusive that Iraq actually purchased, as opposed to having sought, uranium and the British Government did not claim this.

d. The forged documents were not available to the British Government at the time its assessment was made, and so the fact of the forgery does not undermine it.

No doubt, the Iraq-Niger matter isn't going away anytime soon.

Today's New York Sun has an interesting quote from Wayne White, the former deputy director in the Office of Analysis for Near East and South Asia in the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research.

Mr. Feith's view that questions remain about Iraq's weapons program is also held by the State Department's chief of Iraq intelligence between 2003 and 2005, Wayne White. In an interview this week, Mr. White, said, "Just as the pre-war WMD intelligence was largely wrong, the conclusion after the war that absolutely nothing was in Iraq could also be wrong."

...Mr. White, who counts himself as a critic of the president's decision to go to war, is confident that organized looting from the regime occurred in the first weeks after the invasion. "Efforts were taken by remnants of the Iraqi intelligence services and Republican Guard to destroy portions of sites known to be associated with WMD," he said. "What does that tell you? If there was nothing to hide, why were these sites destroyed? Obviously there was something there. There is evidence to suggest there were files and perhaps even equipment that was destroyed aggressively in the months following the fall of Baghdad."

Mr. White says that in those months after the launch of the war he would often sit in weekly meetings to go over the Iraq intelligence, hear repeated reports of sites systematically looted or destroyed, and shake his head. "I was not making much of this at the time and it was pointless. In most cases I was turning to a person sitting next to me, thinking it was over. Game over. The main problem we had at the time was [the] insurgency," he said.

White's observations were also reflected in a New York Times piece published last March. The article, “Looting at Weapons Plants Was Systematic, Iraqi Says,” reported on a “highly organized operation,” which apparently took place from mid-April to mid-May 2003 at Iraqi weapons sites, “as teams with flatbed trucks and other heavy equipment moved systematically from site to site,” collecting “tons of machinery...capable of making parts for missiles as well as chemical, biological and nuclear arms....”

To be continued?

In September, Roll Call reported that the House Minority Whip, Rep. Steny Hoyer (MD), had cobbled together a dozen or so of his colleagues "to shape the Democratic strategy on national security issues and battle perceptions that the party is weak on defense."

The No. 2 House Democrat, a moderate who supported U.S. involvement in Iraq, said he believes Democrats lost the “national election because of national security” and because of a “lack of confidence of the American public.” He added that many voters had doubts that Kerry and the Democrats were committed to defeating terrorism.

Hoyer, of course, is right. But, as Sen. Lieberman is finding out, the Democratic faithful are not buying Hoyer's line. And apparently neither is one of the members of Hoyer's own group, the one-time deputy of the "centrist" Democratic Leadership Council, Rep. Ellen Tauscher (CA).

She has co-sponsored legislation with Rep. John Conyers (MI), ranking member on the Judiciary committee, calling for the termination of the NSA's terrorist surveillance program -- a program Gen. Hayden says "has been successful in detecting and preventing attacks inside the United States." Tauscher calls the Bush administration's actions "despicable" and is "deeply disturbed" by it all. Meanwhile, her ally spends his days pushing for the impeachment of the president and accusing the White House of "defrauding" the nation into war.

That stone is getting bigger by the day.

Here's what Senate Intelligence committee chairman Pat Roberts had to say at yesterday's hearing on "Current and Projected National Security Threats to the United States."

I am concerned that some of my Democrat colleagues used this unique public forum to make clear that they believe the gravest threat we face is not Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda, but rather the president of the United States.

Where are all the Democrats demanding an investigation to catch the person who did "very severe" damage to U.S. national security?

Realclearpolitics.com notes this item from CBS News:

U.S. intelligence officials told Congress Thursday that disclosure of once-secret projects like President George W. Bush's no-warrant eavesdropping program have undermined their work.

"The damage has been very severe to our capabilities to carry out our mission," CIA Director Porter Goss told the Senate Intelligence Committee, citing disclosures about a variety of CIA programs that he suggested might have been compromised.

One aspect of the program's mission has been to identify any sleeper cells that may be operating inside the U.S. -- a worry that began immediately after the September 11 attacks.

From BBC Worldwide Monitoring:

Iran is massively rearming its nuclear, biological and chemical weapons arsenal. This is the result of the first situation report by the Federal Office of Criminal Investigations and the Customs Office of Criminal Investigations (BKA, ZKA) about illegal arms transfers by German companies. "Indications are mounting that point to a secret military nuclear programme" by the mullah regime in Tehran, the confidential report says. Against this background, customs investigators are investigating six German companies, which illegally conducted 20 deliveries via Russia for the construction of the Iranian unclear power plant in Bushehr.

According to the BKA and the ZKA, Iranian universities have the "know-how" for "biological combat agent programmes". Cover companies of the Iranian intelligence services are trying to get "microbiological and biotechnological laboratory and production equipment". Apparently, the Islamic theocracy is also storing the chemical combat agents mustard gas, tabun, Prussic acid, sarin and VX.

In 2004 Customs initiated 16 criminal proceedings for illegal deliveries to crisis countries. The federal prosecutor general's office is investigating foreign agents in 19 cases in connection with illegal arms exports.

Source: Focus, Munich, in German 31 Jan 06

Music to the ears of Hamas and exactly the WRONG policy approach -- see here.

"Hamas deserves to be recognized by the international community, and despite the group's militant history, there is a chance the soon-to-be Palestinian leaders could turn away from violence, former President Jimmy Carter said Wednesday," CNN reports. "'If there are prohibitions -- like, for instance, in the United States, against giving any money to a government that is controlled by Hamas -- then the United States could channel the same amount of money to the Palestinian people through the United Nations, through the refugee fund, through UNICEF, things of that kind.'"

While interviewing Mayor Giuliani last night on MSNBC, Matthews stated:

...let me just make this historic point, which is factual.

Osama bin Laden offered the Saudi Arabian government his strength, his powers, to the extent he had them, to defend them if there was an attack by Iraq, by Saddam Hussein.

Before all this hell has broken loose the last couple of years, before we went to war in Iraq, Saddam Hussein and Islam and bin Laden were enemies. We brought them together. But how can you say that Saddam Hussein was in league with bin Laden, when bun bin offered Saudi Arabia to defend them against him?

True enough. But as Stephen Hayes point out, Matthews didn't tell the whole story.

Bin Laden did offer the Saudi regime protection...in 1990. But I'm not sure why that is somehow more important than the...

Defense Intelligence Agency-authenticated Iraqi document listing bin Laden as an Iraqi intelligence asset in 1992,

Iraq-al Qaeda non-aggression pact in 1993 (which was later cited in a Clinton administration terrorist indictment),

meetings between senior al Qaeda officials and Faruq Hijazi in 1994,

series of meetings between Iraqi intelligence and al Qaeda terrorists in the mid-1990s,

1997 Iraqi intelligence (IIS) document describing "the relationship" between Iraq and bin Laden and promising to explore future cooperation between the two,

Baghdad meetings in March 1998 between a "trusted confidante" of bin Laden and the IIS,

early 1999 offer of asylum from Iraq to al Qaeda,

fact that the Saudi kingdom was put on alert in 2000 because of anticipated joint attacks by al Qaeda and Iraq,

IIS support for Ansar al Islam from 2001-2003,

and on it goes....

Tom Joscelyn has more here.

Two weeks ago, I wrote:

With Congressional hearings set and as today's front-page New York Times story indicates, the NSA spying controversy isn't going to fade away. Opponents of the program claim the president broke the law, while supporters say the president has the constitutional and statutory authority to conduct the surveillance. There are also some who believe it's a close call but also maintain that the president has the unique responsibility to defend the nation and acted accordingly.

But where does Mayor Giuliani stand? Will Sen. Arlen Specter invite the mayor to give his perspective on the program? My guess is that the mayor generally backs the president's decision to implement the surveillance and given his background is someone the American people should hear from.

Well, last night the mayor strongly endorsed the president's actions.

From Fox News:

COLMES: Let's talk about the war on terror. He used the phrase -- you know, he didn't use domestic surveillance or domestic spying. He called "terrorist surveillance." Isn't he trying to reframe the issue by using phraseology that is not what it really is?

GIULIANI: No, that's exactly the reason that he engaged it, as far as I can tell. I mean, he did it to protect our national security and to try to find out information about people that might attack us and might be preparing an attack on us, in order to secure us, in order to protect us.

And I think, in this particular case, there's a lot of hypocrisy in the criticism of the president. God forbid there is another attack, and the president didn't use these measures when he could have...

COLMES: Yes.

GIULIANI: ... in order to find out about it. And I think, Alan, you know, on the Democratic side, they'd be the first ones to criticize him. And in that case, they would be correct in their criticism...

COLMES: Well, you know what?

GIULIANI: ... because the president of the United States has to have the courage to exercise the power of the presidency to protect the American people. I think Abraham Lincoln would have done the same thing that George Bush did. I have no doubt that Franklin Roosevelt would have done the same thing that George Bush did. And, frankly, they did the same things that he did and more to protect this country.

COLMES: Well, you know, Democrats are not saying we shouldn't use the NSA or shouldn't even do eavesdropping, or domestically, just go to a court first. It's not true the Democrats don't want to use those techniques.

GIULIANI: Well, I've spent most of my life going to court. Sometimes it takes a long time to get to court. The killing, or the murder, or the attack could take place before you can get to court. Sometimes bureaucracy intrudes in the decisions that are made by a court.

The protection of the security of the United States is the responsibility of the president of the United States. And if he believes that it's necessary to act quickly in order to find out about a possible attack on us, then I'm willing to give George Bush -- I'd be willing to give Bill Clinton, I'd be willing to give any of our presidents the scope to do that. And I think the Democratic attack here is really purely political. It's not in the best interests of the country.

From MSBNC:

GIULIANI: The fact is that the evaluation of intelligence is an art, got a science. And you know, you try to gather as much intelligence as you can. You try to figure out what`s going on inside a country.

I think particularly the prediction of September 11 is the most understandable. I mean, I lived through it. I remember it, and I remember how horrible it was. But I think pre-September 11 it probably was hard to understand the significance of a lot of the things that you were hearing.

And I think one of the reasons the Patriot Act was passed and has to be reauthorized and the one of the reasons why the president has authorized a terrorist surveillance program in the United States, is he has he wants to avoid that surprise in the future.

And he realizes how tenuous it is, how difficult it is, that no matter how much you search and how much you look, you can miss the piece of information that connects all the dots. And I think that it`s a little bit disingenuous to be criticizing the president for the terrorist surveillance program and then also criticizing...

Chris MATTHEWS: Right.

GIULIANI: ... because he may have missed September 1 or he may have gotten weapons of mass destruction wrong.

MATTHEWS: He made that point, yes. He made that point tonight. The president made that very point tonight.

GIULIANI: I think President Bush is doing exactly what a President Lincoln or President Roosevelt would have been done in those circumstances. And I think this is very weak around the Democrats, when they attack him for it.

It certainly appears so. From today's New York Times:

The International Atomic Energy Agency says it has evidence that suggests links between Iran's ostensibly peaceful nuclear program and its military work on high explosives and missiles, according to a report from the agency that was released to member countries on Tuesday and will be debated on Thursday....

The four-page report, which officials say was based at least in part on intelligence provided by the United States, refers to a secretive Iranian entity called the Green Salt Project, which worked on uranium processing, high explosives and a missile warhead design.

The combination suggests a "military-nuclear dimension," the report said, that if true would undercut Iran's claims that its nuclear program is solely aimed at producing electrical power.

The agency says it has repeatedly confronted Iran with the allegations, which Tehran dismissed as "baseless," adding that "it would provide further clarifications later," the report said.

Iran also reiterated that all of its nuclear projects were conducted under the authority of its national atomic energy agency and not the military....

It is highly unusual, Western experts said, for a group of uranium conversion experts ostensibly making fuel for nuclear reactors to also have administrative ties to people doing studies on explosives and re-entry vehicles, the technical name for missile warheads....

The agency for the first time stated its own conclusions on the matter and did so quite bluntly, saying the document that Iran obtained from the black market "related to the fabrication of nuclear weapon components."

The I.A.E.A., in a report issued in November, made reference to suspicious documents that the nuclear black market had offered to Tehran. While making no reference to weaponry, the report indicated that the black market had offered to help Iran shape uranium metal into "hemispherical forms," which Western experts said at the time had suggested the making of nuclear bomb cores.