Archived news and commentary: February 2 - 8, 2004

2004/03/29 - 2004/04/04
2004/03/22 - 2004/03/28
2004/03/15 - 2004/03/21
2004/03/08 - 2004/03/14
2004/03/01 - 2004/03/07
2004/02/23 - 2004/02/29
2004/02/16 - 2004/02/22
2004/02/09 - 2004/02/15
2004/02/02 - 2004/02/08
2004/01/26 - 2004/02/01
2004/01/19 - 2004/01/25
2004/01/12 - 2004/01/18
2004/01/05 - 2004/01/11
2003/12/29 - 2004/01/04

Sunday, February 8, 2004

News and commentary:

"Bush Suggests Saddam Removed Iraq Weapons" (Deb Reichmann, AP/Yahoo! News, 2004/02/08)
"President Bush denied he marched America into war under false pretenses and said the U.S.-led invasion was necessary because Saddam Hussein could have developed a nuclear weapon.
"I don't think America can stand by and hope for the best," the president said. Bush suggested Saddam may have destroyed or spirited out of the country the banned weapons the Bush administration cited as a main rationale for the war.
"I expected to find the weapons," Bush said in an Oval Office interview broadcast Sunday on NBC's "Meet the Press."
"Sitting behind this desk, making a very difficult decision of war and peace, I based my decision on the best intelligence possible," the president said." (See also the full transcript: "Meet the Press: Transcript for Feb. 8th" (MSNBC, 2004/02/08))

"An Auschwitz in Korea" (Jeff Jacoby, The Boston Globe, 2004/02/08)
"I witnessed a whole family being tested on suffocating gas and dying in the gas chamber. The parents, a son, and a daughter." The speaker is Kwon Hyuk, a former North Korean intelligence agent and a one-time administrator at Camp 22, the country's largest concentration camp. His testimony was heard on a television documentary that aired last week on the BBC. "The parents were vomiting and dying, but till the very last moment they tried to save the kids by doing mouth-to-mouth breathing." ...
Soon Ok-lee, who spent seven years in another North Korean camp, described the use of prisoners as guinea pigs for biochemical weapons.
"An officer ordered me to select 50 healthy female prisoners," she testified. "One of the guards handed me a basket full of soaked cabbage, told me not to eat it, but to give it to the 50 women. I gave them out and heard a scream. . . . They were all screaming and vomiting blood. All who ate the cabbage leaves started violently vomiting blood and screaming with pain. It was hell. In less than 20 minutes, they were dead."
Gas chambers. Poisoned food. Torture. The murder of whole families. Massive death tolls. How much more do we need to know about North Korea's crimes before we act to stop them? How many more victims will be fed into the gas chambers before we cry out "never again!" - and mean it?" (See also: "Revealed: the gas chamber horror of North Korea's gulag" (Antony Barnett, The Observer, 2004/02/01))

"This isn't about Blair's future. It is much more serious" (Matthew d'Anconca, The Sunday Telegraph, 2004/02/08)
"As the debate has become more introspective and introverted, the horizons of British politics have narrowed dangerously. The global perspective which followed September 11 has been replaced by a shabby insularity. The threat posed by rogue states and fundamentalist groups is all but forgotten.
Yet that threat has not gone away. Last Monday, ricin was found in the US senate. On Wednesday, Dr Khan's televised confession revealed the full, terrifying extent of the illicit trade in nuclear technology. On Thursday, al-Qaeda emerged as the prime suspect behind the suicide bombing in Arbil, northern Iraq, which killed at least 105 people a week ago. On Friday, Arab television broadcast a videotape showing terrorists loyal to Osama bin Laden preparing a bomb attack in Riyadh. In Westminster, meanwhile, the politicians, officials and spooks tear at each other's flesh over a single sentence in a dossier which has come to matter more than the war it sought to justify. It should go without saying that this is exactly what the terrorists want."

"Islamic rappers' message of terror" (Antony Barnett, The Observer, 2004/02/08)
"It's rap, jihad-style. A music video with blood-curdling images, fronted by a young British Muslim rapper brandishing a gun and a Koran is the latest hit in radical Islamic circles.
The rap song is called 'Dirty Kuffar' - Arabic for dirty non-believer - and it praises Osama bin Laden and the attack on the World Trade Centre in New York. ...
The song starts with images of US marines in Iraq cheering as one of them shoots a wounded Iraqi lying on the floor. At the end of the video, it features shots of the hijacked planes flying into the Twin Towers with sounds of the rappers laughing. There is then a list of 56 countries they claim have been the 'victims of American aggression' since 1945.
The four-minute rap is essentially a repeated diatribe against the 'dirty non-believers' Tony Blair and George Bush, urging listeners to 'throw them on the fire.'" (See also the video, which is mirrored on The Investigative Project: "Consider the irony: radical fundamentalism, sworn to destroy Western culture and beliefs, uses that culture to market its hate. Paralleling the same deception, the Islamic organization that produced and marketed this video claims to be an Islamic "human rights" group but in reality is a group sworn to support the killing of Jews, Christians and moderate Muslims.")

"Activists resign en masse from Fatah" (Khaled Abu Toameh, The Jerusalem Post, 2004/02/08)
"Fatah leaders were reeling on Sunday under an onslaught from discontented activists who resigned en masse, accusing them of corruption, cronyism, and abuse of power. Some 400 activists representing the younger generation of local leaders signed a public letter of resignation over the weekend, triggering the first major challenge to Yasser Arafat's leadership of Fatah, the largest of the PLO factions.
In their petition, the disgruntled activists said they were also angry over mismanagement and a lack of direction in how the organization handles the conflict with Israel. They complained that Fatah leaders were ignoring their demand for holding elections for the organization's governing institutions. Although Fatah laws call for elections every five years, none has taken place since 1989.
In Ramallah, Arafat convened the Fatah Central Committee for an emergency meeting to discuss the repercussions of the resignations." (See also: "Something important is happening in the PA" (Nazir Majally, Haaretz, 2004/02/05))

"1789 to 2004: France Has a State Religion: Secularism" (Elaine Sciolino, The New York Times, 2004/02/08)
"In contrast to pluralist societies that try to accept, or even celebrate, cultural differences among their citizens, the French ideal envisions a uniform, secularized French identity as the best guarantor of national unity and the separation of church and state.
These days, a small but determined minority of France's Muslims has begun to make demands that clash vividly with that ideal. They include calls for sex-segregated gym classes and swimming pools for girls and prayer breaks within the standardized baccalaureate exams at the end of high school. Some teachers complain that hostility from Muslim students toward Israel has made it impossible to teach about the Holocaust. Some Muslim men have refused to allow their wives or daughters to be treated by male doctors in hospitals.
The visibility of Islam is striking. Because of a shortage of mosque space, thousands of Muslims pray on public sidewalks and in the streets outside their places of worship.
Then there is outright criminal behavior. A young Arab-Muslim underclass is blamed for anti-Semitic acts, yelling racial slurs in public and destroying Jewish property.
In this atmosphere, the law of laïcité, or secularism, has taken on a do-or-die, us-against-them urgency, and the proposed ban on the veil in school is an effort to draw a line against any further demands."

"I had a good time at Guantanamo, says inmate" (Rajeev Syal, The Sunday Telegraph, 2004/02/08)
Hm, this doesn't sound like Germany under Hitler and the Soviet Union under Stalin: "An Afghan boy whose 14-month detention by US authorities as a terrorist suspect in Cuba prompted an outcry from human rights campaigners said yesterday that he enjoyed his time in the camp.
Mohammed Ismail Agha, 15, who until last week was held at the US military base in Guantanamo Bay, said that he was treated very well and particularly enjoyed learning to speak English. His words will disappoint critics of the US policy of detaining "illegal combatants" in south-east Cuba indefinitely and without trial.
In a first interview with any of the three juveniles held by the US at Guantanamo Bay base, Mohammed said: 'They gave me a good time in Cuba. They were very nice to me, giving me English lessons.'"

"Terrorist bid to build bombs in mid-flight" (Jason Burke, The Observer, 2004/02/08)
"Islamic militants have conducteddry runs of a devastating new style of bombing on aircraft flying to Europe, intelligence sources believe.
The tactics, which aim to evade aviation security systems by placing only components of explosive devices on passenger jets, allowing militants to assemble them in the air, have been tried out on planes flying between the Middle East, North Africa and Western Europe, security sources say. ...
Officials in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere are believed to have warned that at least 12 dry runs may have been completed and to have said that the terrorists are aiming to try out their plans on flights around the Mediterranean and the Middle East before attempting to bomb a transatlantic route, where security precautions are now very tight. Militants know that individual components are far easier to smuggle through airport security than an assembled bomb."

"PA hastily opens trial in US convoy attack" (Khaled Abu Toameh, The Jerusalem Post, 2004/02/08)
"The Palestinian Authority on Saturday pressed charges against four Palestinians accused of involvement in an attack on a US diplomatic vehicle in the northern Gaza Strip on October 15.
Three Americans were killed and another seriously wounded when a roadside bomb was detonated by remote control as their vehicle passed. ...
Palestinian journalists in Gaza City said they were surprised on Saturday morning to receive a message from the PA announcing the beginning of the trial of the four activists before a military court.
"Until now we have been told that the security forces were still searching for the culprits," said one journalist. "It's clear this is a play intended to appease the Americans." ...
On Thursday, the US advertised a $5 million reward for information leading to the capture of the killers in Palestinian newspapers. After the ads appeared in the newspapers, PA Chairman Yasser Arafat instructed the PA security forces to step up their efforts to arrest the perpetrators and bring them to trial." (See also: "Gaza blast kills 3 Americans" (CNN.com, 2003/10/15))

"At Least 7 Nations Tied To Pakistani Nuclear Ring" (Peter Slevin et al., The Washington Post, 2004/02/08)
"The rapidly expanding probe into a Pakistani-led nuclear trafficking network extended to at least seven nations Saturday as investigators said they had traced businesses from Africa, Asia and Europe to the smuggling ring controlled by Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan. ...
U.S. and U.N. investigators say Khan's nuclear trading network represents one of the most egregious cases of nuclear proliferation ever discovered. Using suppliers and middlemen scattered across three continents, the network delivered a variety of machines and technology for enriching uranium, a key ingredient in nuclear weapons. In the case of Libya, at least, it provided blueprints for the bombs themselves. ...
Companies or individuals in at least seven countries, including Pakistan, were involved, knowledgeable officials said. Among the countries known to be involved are Malaysia, South Africa, Japan, the United Arab Emirates and Germany. A company in another European country was also involved, two diplomats said."

Saturday, February 7, 2004

News and commentary:

"Permanent State of Emergency" (Dan Jönsson, Dagens Nyheter, 2004/02/07)
Here's a glimpse of the intellectual climate in Sweden, which could only be described as being in a permanent state of lunacy. According to Jönsson, Guantánamo and Bagram prove that Bush's America is similar to Germany under Hitler and the Soviet Union under Stalin — but apparently even worse, as it is on a global scale this time:
"In his book "Homo sacer", the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben has shown how the possibility to proclaim a state of emergency, which is to disable the rule of law, constitutes the foundation for all supreme power. Absolute sovereignty is therefore connected to a permanent state of emergency — and in the modern world the camp has become the incarnation of such a condition, most evidently in the systems established in Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union.
The "global detention system" (New York Times 18/12) which America now is establishing is therefore no innovation in a technical sense.
The novelty is that it is globally encompassing."

"The War Against Israel and Growing European Nationalism" (Ilka Schroder, The Sprout, from the February 2004 issue)
A speech by Ilka Schroder — a radical German member of the European Parliament:
"For me it is obvious that the Middle East has become one of the most important fields of European military superpower ambitions after the NATO-led war against Yugoslavia in 1999. You might say that this is the exaggerated mistrust of leftists, but wise Israeli politicians predicted this already during the bombing of Belgrade.
The primary goal of the EU is the internationalisation of the conflict in order to underline the need for its own mediating role. Here is the prevailing European view: The longer the conflict continues and the deeper it gets, the more evident is the incapability of the US to moderate a peace process. ...
The Palestinians are playing the ugly role of being the cannon fodder for Europe's hidden war against the US. It can be noted on the side that this is not considered an anti-Arab policy by those who otherwise easily use this word. ...
The greatest danger today is that the globalisation critique, anti-Americanism and anti-Zionism which exist in the heads of millions of people is amalgamated into a common sense that is supported and used by European policy. There is no difference in the consciousness of an average Member of the European Parliament and an average German peace demonstrator and I consider this to be a mixture of naivete, moralism, anti-Americanism, anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism and an altogether serious danger.
It is against these trends that my efforts are directed." (Hat tip: Angus Cook.)

"The Wreck of the BBC" (Gerard Baker, The Weekly Standard, from the 2004/02/16 issue)
"Its news is increasingly tinged by the corrosive liberal bias that permeates so much of the global media. Its reporters and editors share a worldview that would sit perfectly with the denizens of the New York Times, and they hold the same conviction that theirs alone is an objective account of the truth. ...
The Kelly story was not an isolated incident. It was merely the most infamous example of a left-liberal bias that refracts all news coverage through the prism of the BBC's own distinctive worldview. ...
If anti-Americanism is on the rise in the world, the BBC can take a fair share of the credit; much of its U.S. coverage depicts a cartoonish image of a nation of obese, Bible-wielding halfwits, blissfully dedicated to shooting or suing each other.
Its suppositions are recognizable as those of self-appointed liberal elites everywhere: American power is bad; European multilateralism is good; organized religion is a weird vestige of unenlightened barbarism; atheism is rational man's highest intellectual achievement; Israel (especially Ariel Sharon) is evil; Palestinians (especially Yasser Arafat) are innocent victims; business is essentially corrupt, or at best simply boring; poverty is the result of government failure; economic success is the product of exploitation or crookedness. And so on."

Friday, February 6, 2004

News and commentary:

"Weapons of Mass Hysteria" (Victor Davis Hanson, National Review, 2004/02/06)
"The United States has lost less than 350 American dead in actual combat in Iraq, deposed the worst tyrant on the planet, and offered the first real hope of a humane government in the recent history of the Middle East — and is being roundly condemned rather than praised for one of the most remarkable occurrences of our age. ...
So it turns out that the emphasis on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and the subsequent effort to take out Saddam Hussein have had a powerful effect on such arsenals far beyond Baghdad. Without the removal of the Baathists, Libya would never have confessed to its nuclear roguery. Without the recent war, Iran would never have professed a desire to follow international protocols. Without the recent conflict, Pakistan would never have investigated its own outlaw scientists.
Whether we like it or not, the precedent that the United Sates might act decisively against regimes that were both suspected of pursuing WMD acquisition and doing nothing to allay those fears, has had a powerful prophylactic effect in the neighborhood. Only in this Orwellian election year, would candidates for the presidency decry that the war had nothing to do with the dilemma of WMDs — even as Libya, Iran, and Pakistan by their very actions apparently disagreed. ...
We live in a sick, sick West if we investigate Mr. Bush's and Mr. Blair's courageous efforts to end Iraqi fascism, while ignoring the thousands of Europeans and multinational corporations who profited from his reign of terror."

"A wounded passenger..."
(AP Photo/Misha Japaridze, 2004/02/06)
"A wounded passenger, rescued from Moscow's subway, stands outside the Paveletskaya subway station Friday, Feb. 6, 2004. An explosion tore through a subway car in the Moscow metro during morning rush hour Friday, killing 39 people and wounding more than 120 others in the deadliest terrorist blast to hit the capital since Russia launched its second war in Chechnya."

"At Least 39 Killed in Bomb Blast in Moscow Subway" (Steven Lee Myers, The New York Times, 2004/02/06)
"A bomb exploded inside a crowded subway train here during the morning rush hour today, killing at least 39 people and wounding 122 in what officials said appeared to be the latest and one of the worst terrorist attacks linked to the war in Chechnya.
The bomb — said to be hidden inside a backpack or suitcase — tore the second car of a subway train as it approached the Avtozavaodskaya station at 8:45 a.m. and hurled bodies and body parts from the train. Hundreds of passengers — some of them bloodied, many of them dazed — had to stagger hundreds of yards through smoke-filled tunnels to reach safety.
As they emerged, they described a scene of fear, confusion and carnage deep beneath the heart of the Russian capital. Officials said the death toll would almost certainly rise; the force of the explosion tore many bodies into pieces, complicating the identification of the dead."

"Egyptian Government Daily: Suicide Bombings are Legitimate Even if Children Are Killed" (MEMRI, Special Dispatch Series - No. 658, 2004/02/06)
An enemy with no morality indeed. A translation of an editorial from the Egyptian government daily Al-Masaa:
"We have no argument regarding the question of the legitimacy of these operations, because they are considered a powerful weapon used by the Palestinians against an enemy with no morality or religion, [an enemy] who has deadly weapons prohibited by international law, that is not deterred from using them against the defenseless Palestinian people.
Even if during [a martyrdom operation] civilians or children are killed – the blame does not fall upon the Palestinians, but on those who forced them to turn to this modus operandi.
Ultimately, we should bless every Palestinian man or woman who goes calmly to carry out a martyrdom operation, in order to receive a reward in the Hereafter, sacrificing her life for her religion and her homeland and knowing that she will never return from this operation."

"Abusing Islam" (Amir Taheri, New York Post, 2004/02/06)
Taheri on the Abdul Qadeer Khan affair: "What is alarming, however, is the reaction of many Pakistanis. AQK has received thousands of emails and letters telling him that, regardless of what the law might say, they approve of what he did. Pakistani media are full of op-ed pieces and editorials praising his devotion to Islam and claiming he was "doing his duty as a Muslim" by helping other Muslim states acquire weapons available to "Jews and Crusaders."
This is a scandalous claim.
A Muslim's duty is to believe in the oneness of God, Muhammad's prophecy and the Day of Judgment. A Muslim is also required to pray every day, fast in Ramadan and live a life of good deeds and decency. Helping others make atomic bombs is certainly not part of those duties.
Efforts to explain away AQK's behavior highlights the moral bankruptcy of the Islamist philosophy. That philosophy divides humanity into Muslim and non-Muslims. It then transforms Muslims into a tribe whose members must remain loyal to it and to one another regardless of moral imperatives common to humanity.
Such an approach abolishes ethics, leaving us not with such concepts as good and evil but "Muslim" and 'non-Muslim.'"

"Missed Signals On WMD?" (David Ignatius, The Washington Post, 2004/02/06)
"The intelligence failure in Iraq began with U.N. weapons inspectors, who gathered detailed evidence that Saddam Hussein had destroyed his weapons of mass destruction in 1991 but never presented those findings forcefully to the world, according to Iraq's top nuclear scientist.
Jafar Dhia Jafar, who ran Iraq's nuclear program from 1982 on, revealed new details of his country's dealings with U.N. inspectors in a telephone interview yesterday from the United Arab Emirates, where he now lives. ...
The comments from Iraq's most prominent scientist add a new perspective to the intense debate over Iraq's alleged WMD programs. Jafar, 61, who received his doctorate in physics in Britain in 1965, said his chief complaint concerned the U.N. inspectors, who, he said, "had all the facts but evidently did not present them convincingly enough to the United Nations Security Council." ...
If Jafar is right, the U.N. inspectors had detailed evidence to rebut the arguments about Iraqi WMD made in the intelligence dossiers compiled by Britain and the United States that were a main justification for their March 2003 invasion. In the supercharged political atmosphere before the war, that evidence was either diluted, suppressed or ignored."

"Musharraf pardons Abdul Qadeer Khan" (Simon Denyer, Reuters, 2004/02/06)
"President Pervez Musharraf pardoned the scientist who leaked nuclear arms secrets to Iran, Libya and North Korea, saying on Thursday he remained a national hero for developing the country's atomic bomb.
The uniformed general angrily rebuffed calls for an independent inquiry into the military's role in the nuclear leaks, saying Pakistan would not hand over any documents or allow U.N. supervision of its atomic program.
The United States strongly defended Musharraf, reflecting a balancing act between its usual aggressive stance on punishing proliferation and its firm support for Musharraf - a key ally in the U.S. anti-terror war. ...
Mohammed ElBaradei, head of the U.N.'s International Atomic Energy Agency, said in Vienna that Khan had help from people in many countries and was "the tip of an iceberg for us."
Western diplomats and local commentators also doubted Khan could have acted independently of Pakistan's military, which controls the nuclear arsenal, and said he had been used as a scapegoat for the army, which Musharraf heads."

Thursday, February 5, 2004

News and commentary:

"German court acquits 9/11 suspect" (BBC News, 2004/02/05)
"A German court has acquitted a Moroccan man accused of assisting three of the 11 September hijackers.
Abdelghani Mzoudi had admitted being a friend of the three men while they lived in Hamburg, but denied any prior knowledge of the US attacks in 2001.
Mr Mzoudi, 31, had faced charges of aiding and abetting the murder of several thousand people.
The trial judge said the evidence was not strong enough for a conviction, but said doubts remained over his conduct.
"You have been acquitted and this may be a relief to you, but it is no reason for joy," Judge Klaus Ruehle told him.
"You were acquitted not because the court is convinced of your innocence, but because the evidence was not enough to convict you."

"Top Iraq Cleric Survives Assassination Bid - Aide" (Khaled Farhan, Reuters/Yahoo! News, 2004/02/05)
"Iraq's most powerful Shi'ite cleric, Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, survived an assassination attempt Thursday when gunmen opened fire on his entourage, a security official in his office said.
"At 10 o'clock (2 a.m. EDT) this morning, gunmen opened fire on Ayatollah Sistani as he greeted people in Najaf, but he was not hurt," the official told Reuters on condition of anonymity.
Sistani, revered by Iraq's Shi'ite community, which makes up about 60 percent of the country's 25 million population, is rarely seen in public and seldom leaves the holy city of Najaf, about 100 miles south of Baghdad.
Residents said Sistani was traveling by car from his office to his home in Najaf and stopped to greet well-wishers when his entourage was fired on."

"The AP is recycling the 'imminent threat' line..." (Glenn Reynlods, InstaPundit, 2004/02/05)
"The AP is recycling the "imminent threat" line yet again:

CIA Boss: Iraq Not Called Imminent Threat
By KATHERINE PFLEGER WASHINGTON (AP) - In his first public defense of prewar intelligence, CIA Director George Tenet said Thursday that U.S. analysts had never claimed Iraq was an imminent threat, the main argument used by President Bush for going to war.

I've mentioned this before, but let's repeat USA Today's excellent summary of this issue:

However, when Bush laid out the case for the war in his 2003 State of the Union address, he said the United States should not wait for an imminent threat."

(See also: "CIA Boss: Iraq Not Called Imminent Threat" (Katherine Pfleger, AP/My Way, 2004/02/05))

"The Origins of Occidentalism" (Ian Buruma, The Chronicle Review, from the 2004/02/06 issue)
"What, then, is new about the Islamist holy war against the West? Perhaps it is the totality of its vision. Islamism, as an antidote to Westoxification, is an odd mixture of the universal and the pure: universal because all people can, and in the eyes of the believers should, become orthodox Muslims; pure because those who refuse the call are not simply lost souls but savages who must be removed from this earth.
Hitler tried to exterminate the Jews, among others, but did not view the entire West with hostility. In fact, he wanted to forge an alliance with the British and other "Aryan" nations, and felt betrayed when they did not see things his way. Stalinists and Maoists murdered class enemies and were opposed to capitalism. But they never saw the Western world as less than human and thus to be physically eradicated. Japanese militarists went to war against Western empires but did not regard everything about Western civilization as barbarous. The Islamist contribution to the long history of Occidentalism is a religious vision of purity in which the idolatrous West simply has to be destroyed." (See also: "Occidentalism" (Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit, The New York Review of Books, from the 2002/01/17 issue))

"Something important is happening in the PA" (Nazir Majally, Haaretz, 2004/02/05)
"Something important is happening on the Palestinian street, especially among the second and third generation of its leadership, as relates to Israel and the conflict and the vision of the future of the Palestinian Arab people. The change appears to be genuine, and also strategic. ...
Imad Shakur, one of the Palestinian Authority chairman's many advisers, described the prevailing attitude in the territories in a courageous article published in the mass-circulation Arab newspaper A-Sharq al-Awsat last week. In it, he calls not just for a halt to the intifada, but also for the dismantling of all the armed organizations, including the Fatah Tanzim. He even expresses contempt for the term "the blessed intifada" and severely criticizes the leadership that refuses to recognize its mistakes and is not internalizing the changes in the world and the region. Shakur reminds his readers of the fate of President Saddam Hussein, who promised to wage a victorious war against the United States. He argues that a genuine and dignified solution to the Palestinian matter can only come from a drastic change in the patterns of thinking and governing to move toward a real democratic and pluralistic system." (Hat tip: Moshe Vardi.)

Added in archive:
"Syrians call for democratic reforms in petition to Assad" (AP/Billings Gazette, 2004/01/31)
"The reign of the thugs" (Bassam Eid, Haaretz, 2004/01/28)

Wednesday, February 4, 2004

News and commentary:

"Revealed: the nationalities of Guantanamo" (John C. K. Daly, UPI, 2004/02/04)
"At least 160 of the 650 detainees acknowledged by the Pentagon being held at the United States military base at Guantanamo, Cuba - almost a quarter of the total - are from Saudi Arabia, a special UPI survey can reveal.
In UPI's groundbreaking and detailed breakdown of the nationalities of the detainees, some arrested far from the 2001 battlefield of Afghanistan, the other top nationalities being held are Yemen with 85, Pakistan with 82, Jordan and Egypt, each with 30.
Afghans are the fourth largest nationality with 80 detainees, according to the detailed UPI survey that has now for the first time established the homelands of 95 percent of the total number of prisoners.
One member of the Bahraini royal family is among those detained, according to his lawyer Najeeb al-Nauimi of Doha, Qatar, who was Qatar's 1995-97 justice minister and has power of attorney from the parents of about 70 prisoners."

"The Mother of All Probes" (Amir Taheri, New York Post, 2004/02/04)
Taheri on the "Don't touch Saddam" lobby: "These guys would never have been satisfied with any number of resolutions, and now won't be content with any number of inquiries. Last March, they wanted to stop the film of history from moving forward. Today, they want to rewind it to cast doubt on the justice of the liberation of Iraq. ...
So, if we are going to have yet another inquiry let us have a "Mother of All Inquiries." ...
Our "Mother of All Inquiries" should establish a full list of companies that sold Saddam pieces of his death machine over three decades. Is it too much to ask who sold Saddam an estimated $100 billion in weapons and materiel between 1975 and 2000? ...
Let us establish the circumstances under which the 4,000 mass graves came about and who were the 300,000 skeletons found in them. And should we not find out who organized those gas attacks that killed tens of thousands of Iraqi Kurds and Iranians in what is now regarded as the biggest use of chemical weapons since 1918? ...
Our "Mother of All Inquiries" would show one thing above all else: It was a shame that the so-called international community, ignoring its own resolutions, chose to appease Saddam and, in some cases, even prop up his murderous regime for more than a decade after the first Gulf War."

"Scientist: Pakistan Didn't Know of Leaks" (Burt Herman, AP/Yahoo! News, 2004/02/04)
Khan II: "In a startling confession made on national television, the founder of Pakistan's nuclear weapons program said Wednesday that he — not the government — leaked secrets to countries abroad.
Abdul Qadeer Khan's solemn speech begging forgiveness came after the government indicated that an apology would help him avoid a messy public prosecution for providing nuclear technology to Libya, Iran and North Korea, intelligence officials told The Associated Press.
The Cabinet was to meet Thursday to decide whether to recommend a trial.
"I have chosen to appear before you to offer my deepest regrets and unqualified apologies to a traumatized nation," Khan said, hours after meeting with President Gen. Pervez Musharraf to submit a plea for clemency. "I take full responsibility for my actions and seek your pardon." ...
Khan's apology came amid widespread suspicion that the government, despite years of denials, played a role in leaking nuclear technology. President Bush has called Iran and North Korea part of an "axis of evil."
Although a trial would satisfy the international community, it could also lead to embarrassing revelations about top government and military officials — and expose Musharraf to considerable anger among Pakistanis who regard Khan as a national hero.
Opposition parties said they believed Khan's televised statement Wednesday was made under coercion."

"Musharraf knew I was selling secrets, says nuclear scientist" (James Astill, The Guardian, 2004/02/04)
Khan I: "The disgraced founder of Pakistan's nuclear programme has informed investigators that he supplied rogue states with nuclear technology with the full knowledge of the country's ruling military elite, including President Pervez Musharraf, a friend of the nuclear scientist was reported as saying yesterday.
Abdul Qadeer Khan has confessed to selling nuclear secrets to Iran, Libya and North Korea, senior officials said on Monday.
Many analysts and most Pakistanis suspect the government of seeking to pin the blame on Mr Khan for a potentially lucrative trade of which, they say, the country's all-powerful army chiefs must have been aware. ...
Mr Khan reportedly told his friend that two former military chiefs - General Mirza Aslam Beg and General Jehangir Karamat - and Gen Musharraf had been "aware of everything" he was doing. "I am also convinced that he couldn't act unilaterally," Mr Khan's friend said."

Tuesday, February 3, 2004

News and commentary:

"U.S. Capitol police dressed in biochemical hazard gear..."
(Mannie Garcia/Reuters, 2004/02/02)
"U.S. Capitol police dressed in biochemical hazard gear make their way into an elevator at the Dirksen Senate Building in Washington, February 2, 2004. The powder found in Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist's mail room tested positive for ricin in a field examination, CNN reported, citing a Department of Homeland Security official. Ricin is a deadly toxin derived from castor beans."

"Cyanide Salt Block Found in Iraq" (FOX News, 2004/02/03)
"A 7-pound block of cyanide salt was discovered by U.S. troops in Baghdad at the end of January, officials confirmed to Fox News.
The potentially lethal compound was located in what was believed to be the safe house of Abu Musab Zarqawi, a poisons specialist described by some U.S. intelligence officials as having been a key link between deposed Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein and the Al Qaeda terror network.
Cyanides salts are extremely toxic. According to the U.S. Department of Energy's Ames Laboratory, exposure to even a small amount through contact or inhalation can cause immediate death."

"Death Toll in Iraq Blasts Soars to 101" (Scheherezade Faramarzi, AP/Yahoo! News, 2004/02/03)
"A video camera captured images of a man shaking hands with a Kurdish official seconds before blowing himself up in one of the two suicide bombings during holiday celebrations. The death toll soared to 101, the U.S.-led coalition said Tuesday. ...
The video shows the suicide bomber mingling with hundreds of well-wishers greeting officials of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, or PUK, on Sunday, the first day of the Muslim holiday Eid al-Adha. A second attacker slipped into a gathering of the Kurdish Democratic Party across town. ...
The PUK video shows only the back of the bomber's head as he joined the line. The man, apparently in his 20s or 30s, shook hands with one of the Irbil office's deputy chiefs, then stepped forward and put his hand in that of another, Shakhwan Abbas.
"That's when he blew himself up," said Azad Jundiyani, head of the PUK's media department." (See also: "Bomb attacks shatter Kurdish city" (BBC News, 2004/02/01))

"The Coming Anarchy" (Daniel Pipes, danielpipes.org, 2004/02/03)
"A sure sign of the depths of the Middle East's political troubles is the way it see-saws between brutal autocratic control and no less brutal anarchy. It's harder to say which is worse, but possibly anarchy is, for autocracy at least has some rules while anarchy lacks even that. Regions currently suffering from severe autocracy include Libya, Syria, Saudi Arabia, and Iran. Anarchic areas include significant parts of Sudan, Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan.
Now we see the same process underway in areas nominally under control of the Palestinian Authority, as vividly brought out by a Reuters dispatch today reporting on the gang-dominated scene in Nablus. And while, of course, many Palestinians blame this chaos on Israel, 'for many the heart of the matter is lawless Palestinian governance, a system with no one in charge below a remote President Yasir Arafat.'" (See also: "Anarchy in Nablus Evokes Disorder of Arafat's Rule" (Mark Heinrich, Reuters, 2004/02/03): "Similar complaints were voiced by relatives of some of the other 32 people shot dead recently in Nablus, a toll that included the businessman brother of Mayor Ghassan Shaqa.
No one has been arrested or prosecuted. Some of the dead fell in feuds over flourishing rackets in stolen cars, drugs and extortion.
Some were "collaborators" said to have steered Israeli forces toward wanted militants in the city of 150,000, the historical hub of Palestinian nationalism.")

"A Historian's Take on Islam Steers U.S. in Terrorism Fight" (Peter Waldman, The Wall Street Journal, 2004/02/03)
An article on the political influence of Bernard Lewis: "Call it the Lewis Doctrine. Though never debated in Congress or sanctified by presidential decree, Mr. Lewis's diagnosis of the Muslim world's malaise, and his call for a U.S. military invasion to seed democracy in the Mideast, have helped define the boldest shift in U.S. foreign policy in 50 years. The occupation of Iraq is putting the doctrine to the test. ...
At the Harvard Club in New York last spring, guests crowded the main hall beneath a huge elephant head, sipping cocktails and waiting for a word with the historian before his speech. On a day when Baghdad was falling to U.S. forces, one woman wanted to know if the American victory would make Arabs more violent. Mr. Lewis politely deflected the question. ...
Up on the podium, Mr. Lewis lambasted the belief of some Mideast experts at the State Department and elsewhere that Arabs weren't ready for democracy -- that a "friendly tyrant" was the best the U.S. could hope for in Iraq. "That policy," he quipped, "is called 'pro-Arab.'"
Others, like himself, believe Iraqis are heirs to a great civilization, one fully capable, "with some guidance," of democratic rule, he said. "That policy," he added with a rueful smile, 'is called 'imperialism.''" (Hat tip: Malcolm Smordin.)

"Leave God out of the Haj carnage" (Andrew Anthony, The Guardian, 2004/02/03)
Anthony on the "complacency bordering on indifference" regarding the Haj carnage, "the same complacency that has allowed all the previous catastrophies at the Haj to pass with minimal comment":
" The main reason for this, I suspect, is that the west is in no way responsible for these deaths - which in the past 25 years of the Haj run into the thousands. Thus, unlike, say, the victims of the war in Iraq, they are without political significance and therefore moral weight. At the same time, no one else is interested in bringing attention to this recurring carnage because western governments - some of whose citizens are part of the pilgrimage - are afraid of offending the Saudis. And most westerners probably dismiss the whole thing as the strange workings of religious fanaticism."

"The threat to the media is real. It comes from within" (Martin Kettle, The Guardian, 2004/02/03)
"From the start, though, too many newspapers invested too heavily in a particular preferred outcome on these key points. They wanted the government found guilty on the dossier and on the naming, and they wanted Gilligan's reporting vindicated. When Hutton drew opposite conclusions, they damned his findings as perverse and his report as a whitewash. But the report's weakness was its narrowness, and to some extent its unworldliness, not the accuracy of its verdicts.
There was rattle throwing from the right of the pram —"a great disservice to the British nation" (Sir Max Hastings in the Daily Mail) — and from the left —"Lord Whitewash" (Paul "We are paid to be cynical" Routledge in the Daily Mirror). ...
Liddle's article in the current Spectator exemplifies this approach, and incarnates a great deal of what is wrong with modern journalism. Liddle's article is wrong on the facts (Lord Franks, chairman of the inquiry into the Falklands war, was not a judge, much less a law lord), sneering (Lord Hutton's Ulster brogue is mocked, and he is described as anachronistic and hopelessly naive), and unapologetic (the best Liddle can manage is that Gilligan's famous 6.07am report went "a shade too far"). Above all, Liddle's piece is arrogant, embodied in his remarkable final sentence: "I think, as a country, we've had enough of law lords."
Think about the implications of that. To Liddle's fellow practitioners of punk journalism, it can be excused as sparky, or justified on the grounds that it is what a lot of other people are saying. To criticise it is to be condemned as boring or, like Hutton, hopelessly naive. To me, though, it smacks of something bordering on journalistic fascism, in which all elected politicians are contemptible, all judges are disreputable and only journalists are capable of telling the truth, even though what passes for truth is sometimes little more than prejudice unsupported by facts." (See also: "The great whitewash" (Rod Liddle, The Spectator, from the 2004/01/31 issue))

"The alternative to war was simple: defeat" (Mark Steyn, The Daily Telegraph, 2004/02/03)
"So Saddam didn't have WMD. Conversely, Colonel Gaddafi did. And hands up anyone who knew he did until he announced he was chucking it in. The only way you can be absolutely certain your intelligence about a dictator's weapons is accurate is when you look out the window and see a big mushroom cloud over Birmingham. More to the point, it's in alliances of convenience between the dictatorships and freelance groups that the true horrors lie — and for that you don't need big stockpiles, just a vial or two of this or that. You can try and stop it day by day at the gate at Heathrow, but, even if you succeed, you'll bankrupt the world's airlines.
The Left is remarkably nonchalant about these new terrors. When nuclear weapons were an elite club of five relatively sane world powers, the Left was convinced the planet was about to go ka-boom any minute, and the handful of us who survived would be walking in a nuclear winter wonderland. Now anyone with a few thousand bucks and an unlisted number in Islamabad in his Rolodex can get a nuke, and the Left couldn't care less. ...
Conservatives shouldn't assist the Western world's self-loathing fringe in imposing a burden of proof that can never be met. The alternative to pre-emption is defeat. If you want a real "underlying issue", that's it."

"Inquiry is pointless – intelligence is always open to interpretation" (John Keegan, The Daily Telegraph, 2004/02/03)
"It now seems probable that most of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction had been destroyed in the early 1990s, either by the first UN inspection team (UNSCOM) or as a precautionary measure on Saddam's own orders. Saddam was, however, unwilling to admit to such a loss of power, because of the prestige his possession of WMD brought him in the region. His policy of disposing of his WMD while refusing to admit the disposal was completely illogical.
But then almost nothing in Saddam's megalomaniac world was logical. What logical ruler would deliberately provoke two disastrous wars, either of which might have been avoided by the practice of a little prudence?
Finally, what purpose would be served by a further assessment of the dossier? Any inquiry would shortly resolve into a semantic argument about the nature of text editing: a sentence here, a phrase there.
It is supremely ironic that the BBC is demanding such a semantic argument, when the trouble it has got itself into was caused precisely by its failure to undertake any sort of editing at all of an unscripted text by a reporter with a less than perfect reputation for reliability."

"'Several Confirmations' Powder Found in Senate Building Is Ricin" (FOX News, 2004/02/03)
"There are "several confirmations" a white, powdery substance found Monday in the Dirksen Senate Office Building is the poison ricin, Capitol Police said.
The powder was found by a Senate postal worker shortly after 3 p.m. near the office of Sen. Bill Frist, R-Tenn. Initial tests resulted in one positive and one negative for ricin. The substance was then transported by the Capitol Police Hazardous Device Unit to a laboratory, where two out of three tests came out positive for ricin.
"There are several confirmations the substance is ricin," U.S. Capitol Police Chief Terry Gainer said in a press conference late Monday night.
Dirksen and the other two main Senate office buildings were to be closed Tuesday for officials to check other mail in the buildings, but the Capitol was to remain open with the Senate convening Tuesday morning as scheduled."

Monday, February 2, 2004

News and commentary:

"Too diverse?" (David Goodhart, Prospect, from the February 2004 issue)
"And therein lies one of the central dilemmas of political life in developed societies: sharing and solidarity can conflict with diversity. This is an especially acute dilemma for progressives who want plenty of both solidarity - high social cohesion and generous welfare paid out of a progressive tax system - and diversity - equal respect for a wide range of peoples, values and ways of life. The tension between the two values is a reminder that serious politics is about trade-offs. It also suggests that the left's recent love affair with diversity may come at the expense of the values and even the people that it once championed.
It was the Conservative politician David Willetts who drew my attention to the "progressive dilemma." Speaking at a roundtable on welfare reform (Prospect, March 1998), he said: 'The basis on which you can extract large sums of money in tax and pay it out in benefits is that most people think the recipients are people like themselves, facing difficulties which they themselves could face. If values become more diverse, if lifestyles become more differentiated, then it becomes more difficult to sustain the legitimacy of a universal risk-pooling welfare state. People ask, 'Why should I pay for them when they are doing things I wouldn't do?' This is America versus Sweden. You can have a Swedish welfare state provided that you are a homogeneous society with intensely shared values. In the US you have a very diverse, individualistic society where people feel fewer obligations to fellow citizens. Progressives want diversity but they thereby undermine part of the moral consensus on which a large welfare state rests.'"

"When Palestinians become oppressors" (Robert Fulford, National Post, 2004/02/02)
Fulford on Bassam Eid, the director of the Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group: "He expressed contempt for the European Union, which gives vast sums of money to Palestinian leaders without any honest accounting.
Despite his resentment of the Israelis, he has no illusions about the virtues of the Palestinians. He wondered aloud who was more to blame for Arafat's crimes: Arafat, or the populace that tolerates and even reveres him? He said Palestinians fall into three categories. Those who support the Arafat gang out of self-interest, those who are apathetic, and the rest, who are afraid to speak.
Once he hoped that Palestinians could build a bridge of democracy to the Arab world. "But when the Palestinian Authority arrived, everybody just forgot about democracy." He believes all Palestinians have two faces, one they show each other, one they show the outside world. He tries to reveal the face that's usually hidden. Over dinner someone asked him, "Isn't there anything good you can say about your people?" His reply was chilling. 'At the moment, no.'" (See also: "The reign of the thugs" (Bassam Eid, Haaretz, 2004/01/28))

"Beware Iraqoslavia" (Stephen Schwartz, Tech Central Station, 2004/02/02)
"Nobody was prepared to challenge the Russians over Bosnia. Nobody in the West today is ready to call the Saudis to account for their incitement of jihadist terror in Iraq, recruitment of Saudis to fight and die in Iraq, and similar examples of criminal interference north of their border. To emphasize, the Saudis are no more interested in the success of a Shia-majority democracy in Iraq than the Russians were in the transformation of socialist Yugoslavia into a prosperous free-market society.
In a chilling parallel between the former Yugoslavia and Iraq, Western media flatter Saudi-recruited Wahhabi terrorists by describing them as an Iraqi "resistance" to Western invasion, just as numerous journalists described Serbian aggression against the neighboring republics as revenge against the Croats, Bosnian Muslims, and Albanians for events that occurred during World War II.
I predict "the international community," if allowed to take charge in Iraq, will make accommodation with Sunnis their main priority. This will lead to more, rather than less terrorism, just as international "peacekeeping" in Bosnia-Hercegovina in 1992-95, and "monitoring" in Kosovo prior to 1999, led to more, rather than fewer Serbian atrocities in the former Yugoslavia."

"A strange absence of intelligence" (Melanie Phillips, melaniephillips.com, 2004/02/02)
"So now we know without a doubt, it seems, that all the intelligence on Iraq was false; that all intelligence on everything is false because the intelligence agencies are a bunch of incompetent morons who can't tell a missile from a Mars bar/heroes who fought vainly against the evil war-mongers Bush and Blair who pulled out their toenails until they fabricated evidence about Iraq's WMD; that the war on Iraq was waged on a total fiction; that the weapons inspectors who found and destroyed WMD in the 1990s were hallucinating; that the UN and the intelligence services of every western country including France and Germany who were adamant that Saddam was producing the stuff were all totally wrong; that Saddam destroyed all his WMD material in secret knowing that this risked both sanctions and the eventual invasion of his country; that Saddam believed he had WMD programmes but was led up the garden path by his operatives who, knowing that he had a tendency to feed people into the shredders feet first if they displeased him in any way but especially if he thought they were deceiving him, conducted a deception upon him on a vast scale by fabricating extensive paperwork and other activity documenting WMD programmes; that Dr David Kay has said there were never any WMD and we can all cheerfully ignore the fact that he included the words 'large-scale' and 'stockpiles' in that assertion, along with his report that Saddam was trying to produce weaponised ricin right up to the war along with his re-started nuclear programme and his ballistic missile programme, not to mention the WMD that Dr Kay found had been hidden in Syria (see my article, "The selective reporting of Dr David Kay"); that the agencies warning of a renewed terror threat to air routes to the US are all telling lies and indeed that the very idea that there is an Islamic jihad at all is a total fabrication, as that profound seer Peter Preston vouchsdafes in today's Guardian; that Lord Hutton is an ass and an establishment lickspittle because he was idiotic enough to base his conclusions on the evidence he received; and that black is white, lies are truth and absolutely no-one in authority is to be believed under any circumstances because we all know better than them on the basis of the gospel truth we read in our objective newspapers and hear on the impartial BBC every day." (See also: "Dr Kay is not the useful idiot the anti-war party claims" (Melanie Phillips, The Sunday Telegraph, 2004/02/01) and "All this jaw about jihad is just tosh" (Peter Preston, The Guardian, 2004/02/02): "Where, please, is the evidence of universal threat that underpins this all-justifying "war on terror"?"))

"A Good Reason to Dodge the Hajj" (James Taranto, Best of the Web Today, 2004/02/02)
"Along similar lines, consider this passage from an earlier AP report on the hajj:

In a show of equality, men wear seamless white robes and women are covered from head to foot except for their hands and faces.

Describing Islam's starkly disparate treatment of men and woman as "a show of equality" is downright Orwellian. For whatever reason, Western journalists, commentators and politicians engage in an awful lot of self-censorship and convoluted reasoning to avoid casting an unfavorable light on Islam." (See also: "Two Million Muslims Gather Near Mecca" (AP/ABC News, 2004/01/31))

"Saudi Princess Fahda bint Saud ibn Abd Al-Aziz: Conspiracy Theories and Other Writings" (MEMRI, Special Dispatch Series - No. 653, 2004/02/02)
Translated excerpts from articles by Saudi Princess Fahda bint Saud ibn Abd Al-Aziz:
"On November 15, 2003, writing in the Saudi government daily Okaz, Saudi Princess Fahda bint Saud ibn Abd Al-Aziz wrote an article titled "The Bombings: Who is Behind the Scenes? Who is Behind Terrorism?" The following are excerpts from the article: ...
Wake up, oh Saudis, and look around you... We should comprehend that Islam is the target, and [so is] the undermining of our Islamic values, ideologies, and unity which made us into a safe and cohesive society, and a supreme example in Islam. ...
And let us say together: Wake up Saudis because the conspiracies are surrounding our society and agitating our youth. Let us stand as one and do everything in our power to expose these conspiracies and let us fight our enemy with the weapon that he fears most, our unity, and by organizing an all-inclusive forum, not only for dialogue, but also to reveal the truth to our society and to be able to fight back the great conspiracies and to expose who is planning, financing, and implementing them, and how to get to them, because the country is the victim of this major conspiracy."

"Ansar al-Islam: Back in Iraq" (Jonathan Schanzer, The Middle East Quarterly, from the Winter 2004 issue)
A fact-filled and timely article on Ansar al-Islam — the group which is believed, for example, to be responsible for yesterday's horrific suicide bombings in Irbil:
"Ansar al-Islam is not only back in Iraq; the group also appears to have gone global — at least, to some extent. Ash-Sharq al-Awsat reported in April that two Tunisians were arrested in Italy for ties to Ansar al-Islam. In August, several suspected Ansar cadres were found with five Italian passports. Italy appears to be a central jumping-off point for Ansar; wiretaps by Italian police confirm this to be true. ...
If Syria is a staging ground for Ansar fighters, as the Italian wiretaps revealed, then Ansar is one more terrorist organization operating with a wink and a nod from Damascus. And finally, if some funding for the group came from Saudi Arabia, as Michael Rubin suggests, then one can assume that the Wahhabi infrastructure is supporting this group.
Unfortunately, there are no definitive answers to these questions. Ansar al-Islam is a new terrorist group; information about it is still emerging. But one thing is clear: Ansar al-Islam is one of the most dangerous affiliates in al-Qa'ida's orbit, with the potential to strike at vital U.S. interests in Iraq. And given its broader links, the group could develop an even wider reach — like al-Qa'ida itself." (See also: "Bomb attacks shatter Kurdish city" (BBC News, 2004/02/01))

"Potemkin WMDs? Really?" (Michael Ledeen, National Review, 2004/0/02)
"Thus, David tells us, Saddam's WMD program. He ordered his loyal servants to make him atomic bombs, chemical and biological weapons, and effective delivery systems. They couldn't manage it, but they couldn't tell Saddam because he would have killed them. So they faked it, producing a vast documentation for a program that did not really exist. The CIA (and the Brits, the French, the Germans, the Israelis, the Russians, etc. etc.) got some of this, and got some of the same false reports as Saddam received, and they went for it, just as Saddam did. ...
But I'm skeptical, and I've got a real reason for my skepticism, which David can easily confirm. Last August I called him in Baghdad to tell him that I had a person — a good person, like himself, a person I trust — who was prepared to take him to an underground laboratory from which a quantity of enriched uranium had been taken a few years ago, and smuggled to Iran. Wow, he said, let's go look. Have the guy call me, we'll check it out.
The guy could never get David on the phone because the CIA decided not to investigate after all. ...
And then there's the story from the Syrian journalist in Paris who claims to have maps from high-ranking military intelligence officials in Damascus, identifying the sites where, he says, some of Saddam's stockpiles were moved. Have we checked that story?
I love the theory. But I have my doubts. Maybe time will tell."

"The BBC got the dossier wrong, so here comes WMD: The Truth" (Barbara Amiel, The Daily Telegraph, 2004/02/02)
"The BBC mindset, post Hutton report, was best summed up by Greg Dyke's petulant remark. Stepping into a media scrum after the board of governors' apology to the Government, he told the cameras: "I don't really know what we're apologising for." ...
The aftermath of the Hutton report was about as credible as a Hollywood B-movie script. By the end of the week, Gilligan was a shoo-in for a TV and Newspaper Award for his courageous misreporting. "Journalism," wrote Max Hastings in the Daily Mail, "is a messy, erratic, undisciplined craft which seeks to find bits of truth amid a morass of official obfuscation and deceit... the choice is seldom between truth and falsehood, but between... offering nuggets of reality snatched from beneath the jaws of Campbells baying in their shadowy caverns, whose business it is to guard them from the daylight." Such a marvellously poetic and lyrical defence of a tendentious inaccuracy. Beverly Hills beckons." (See also: "Civil war splits BBC as staff turn on Ryder" (David Smith, The Observer, 2004/02/01))

"Key Pakistani Is Said to Admit Atom Transfers" (David Rohde and David E. Sanger, The New York Times, 2004/02/02)
"The founder of Pakistan's nuclear weapons program, Abdul Qadeer Khan, has signed a detailed confession admitting that during the last 15 years he provided Iran, North Korea and Libya with the designs and technology to produce the fuel for nuclear weapons, according to a senior Pakistani official and three Pakistani journalists who attended a special government briefing here on Sunday night.
In a two-and-a-half-hour presentation to 20 Pakistani journalists, a senior government official gave an exhaustive and startling account of how Dr. Khan, a national hero, spread secret technology to three countries that have been striving to produce their own nuclear arsenals. Two of them, Iran and North Korea, were among those designated by President Bush as part of an "axis of evil."
If the Pakistani government account is correct, Dr. Khan's admission amounts to one of the most complex and successful efforts to evade international controls to stop nuclear proliferation."

"Bush to Establish Panel to Examine U.S. Intelligence" (David E. Sanger, The New York Times, 2004/02/02)
"President Bush will establish a bipartisan commission in the next few days to examine American intelligence operations, including a study of possible misjudgments about Iraq's unconventional weapons, senior administration officials said Sunday. They said the panel would also investigate failures to penetrate secretive governments and stateless groups that could attempt new attacks on the United States.
The president's decision came after a week of rising pressure on the White House from both Democrats and many ranking Republicans to deal with what the head of the Senate Intelligence Committee has called "egregious" errors that overstated Iraq's stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons, and made the country appear far closer to developing nuclear weapons than it actually was."

See the archive for earlier news and commentary.

 

Copyright © Watch 2001-2006.
Copyrights of quoted materials belong to their respective owners.

"When people accept futility and the absurd as normal, the culture is decadent. The term is not a slur; it is a technical label."

Jacques Barzun

Articles of the week

"Losing the Enlightenment" (Victor Davis Hanson, OpinionJournal, 2006/11/29)

"Allah’s England?" (Daniel Johnson, Commentary. November 2006)

"'Sex in the Park': The latest doings of the Danish imams" (Henrik Bering, The Weekly Standard, 2006/11/18)

"Narcissism on Stilts" (Harold Evans, New York Sun, 2006/11/16)

"Terrorists are recruiting in our schools, says MI5 boss" (Philip Johnston, The Daily Telegraph, 2006/11/10)

› AOTW Archive



From the archives

Oriana Fallaci, R.I.P.

"The Rage, the Pride and the Doubt" (Oriana Fallaci, The Wall Street Journal, 2003/03/13)

"How the West Was Won and How It Will Be Lost" (Oriana Fallaci, The American Enterprise, from the January/February 2003 issue)

"On Jew-hatred in Europe" (Oriana Fallaci, dennisprager.com, 2002/04/13)

"Anger and Pride" (Oriana Fallaci, dennisprager.com, 2001/12/19)

Weekly archive

2006/12/04 - 2006/12/10
2006/11/27 - 2006/12/03
2006/11/20 - 2006/11/26
2006/11/13 - 2006/11/19
2006/11/06 - 2006/11/12
2006/10/30 - 2006/11/05

› From 2001/09/11 -



Monthly index

December 2006
November 2006
October 2006
September 2006
August 2006
July 2006

› From September 2001 -



Author index

› Ajami, Fouad - Johnson, Paul
› Kagan, Robert - Ye'or, Bat



Support Watch

Please feel free to donate if you enjoy the daily content and links Watch provides:

Contact Watch

Email:
watch-at-windsofchange.net