View From a Height

The AP, the LA Times, and Who's Your Chaplain II

One of the more worrying ongoing stories is the arrest of several men for involvement in a conspiracy, hatched in California's Folsom prison to attack Jewish sites and synagogues around the state. What's worrying is that one of the men apparently converted to a radical form of Islam while in prison. For obvious reasons, some attention has been focused on the California Penal system's system for vetting clergy.

The LA Times carried two stories on the subject yesterday, and as usual, the story is the dog that didn't bark. In this case, the dog that didn't ask questions about who was speaking to it.

The first story is about the general threat of radical Islamic recruiting in American prisons, and the tenor of the story is that there's really nothing to worry about:

Recent arrests have focused attention on a potential terrorism danger that federal officials have been warning about -- that inmates in state prison systems are particularly susceptible to radical Islamist ideology.

But prison officials across the nation say they so far have seen more potential for recruitment than real threats.

Then, the last three paragraphs:

The California prison system has 30 full- and part-time Muslim chaplains, civil service employees who undergo background checks and must adhere to mainstream Islam, said Terry Thornton, spokeswoman for the state Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.

Shakeel Syed, a contract chaplain for the U.S. Bureau of Prisons, disagreed that prisons are turning out Islamic radicals. He joined representatives of Muslim groups Friday at a news conference in Los Angeles to say that chaplains can be part of the solution by steering inmates away from radical ideology.

"Those of us who are on the front lines battling extremism are not being utilized by law enforcement," said Salam Al-Marayati, executive director of the Muslim Public Affairs Council.

We've already seen about Mr. Syed. I'm sorry he's not being further utilized by law enforcement.

As for Mr. Al-Marayati, here's what Daniel Pipes has to say about him:

Trouble is, Mr. Al-Marayati, like so many other American Muslim leaders, purveys an extremist political agenda that few people seem to notice or care about.

Mr. Pipes goes on to provide some disturbing examples of Mr. Al-Marayati's rhetoric. CAMERA provides further examples.

The other LA Times article focuses on activities in the California prison system, and the checks (or lack thereof) on who gets to be the voice of Islam on the Inside:

The federal study also found that an aggressive brand of Islam often took root in prisons that lacked professional Muslim clerics, where inmate believers took on leadership roles despite having little training or knowledge of Islam's tenets.

"Sometimes the Muslims within the prisons lead prayers," said Imam Abdul Karim Hasan, a member of the committee that recommends Muslim clerics to the state prison system. "But we don't recommend inmate leadership of Muslim groups inside these institutions."

...

As the wider American Muslim community has grown and diversified along ethnic and national lines, competition for Muslim chaplaincies has increased as well. Hasan said he was less familiar with the views of these newcomers.

"We don't ascribe to Wahhabism or any other ism," Hasan said, referring to the Saudi-based, ultra-orthodox version of Islam, "but the state does use other endorsing agencies. We can't vouch for them. We don't believe they teach extremism, but we don't know."

Joel Mowbray has done a little spadework on Imam Hasan, who runs the mosque attended by the US soldier convicted of a fragging attack on the eve of the Iraqi invasion.

Now, I want to be very careful here. It's likely that Imam Hasan is one of the good guys. He doesn't try to vouch for anyone else, and I aboslutely do not want to claim that he in any way encouraged the fragging attack, or encouraged the soldier who did it to enter the military. I happen to be a good personal friend of a former camp counseler of Baruch Goldstein, and his connection with that mindset or that attack was less than nothing.

But Imam Hasan takes money from Saudis, and has close ties with a Saudi-funded King Fahd Center in LA. He may well not approve of Saudi extremism. But how likely is he to go out of his way to help ferret it out? Maybe he's one of few who would.

But in his case, and in the case of Mr. Al-Marayati and Mr. Syed, the Times and the AP are extremely negligent in how they indentify the players in these stories.

Who's Your Chaplain?

As Frank Gaffney discussed today on Hugh's show, Folsom prison seems to have become a major organizing center for a radical Islamist gang, who seem to have mastered the notion of the revolving door fairly successfully. With three arrests having been made, CAIR held a press conference today to discuss the matter. At this writing, there's no report of how it went, but consider one participant:

Shakeel Syed, Contractor Chaplain with Federal Bureau of Prisons

I'm sure Mr. Syed says all the right things in English, and to interviewers when looking for contract work. Here's what he says to Al-Jazeera:

Nine Eleven "changed everything" has become a popular saying among some. In fact, nothing has changed since 1775. The imperialist mindset remains unchanged. The then founders killed the Native American Indians and believed that they are giving themselves a free America. The current (hopefully outgoing) President apologized to a powerless King, instead to the victims. Their pain is only compounded when the President distances himself from the rhetoric that that behavior was merely the "wrongdoing of a few". Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, however, indicates that the torture was cleared with lawyers. Al-Jazeera, May 30, 2004

Sooner than we think the old footage of blind folded American hostages and the Islamic government of Iran (more democratically elected than the US President) will overwhelm the airwaves. And the global dissent of good people will be ignored to yet another preemptive invasion of Iran and they will be made to forget the bigger monster, Israel from the very discourse of “axis of evil.” Al-Jazeera, November 27, 2004

The United States of America tends to glorify, simplify and sanitize more than two and a quarter centuries of its horrid past. The Declaration of Independence states "all men are created equal," but that was not the case in 1776. Two hundred twenty eight years later, the Declaration still could not home itself in the hearts of all Americans. The 228th year of freedom must see beyond the mundane rituals of afternoon barbecues and evening fireworks.

The lonely Native American female warrior as the statue of freedom atop the Capitol Dome was casted in bronze by a Foundry that housed enslaved labor. Slaves who were paid only in the coins of pain in fact built the house that claims to now home the lady liberty. The Milli Gazette, July 31, 2004

Mr. Syed also holds another official position within the LA Muslim community. He represents that community in discussions with the FBI.

Aren't you glad he's giving spiritual guidance to our hardened criminals.

Community

Parvez Ahmen, board chairman of the execrable CAIR, takes the CAIR party line today in the Powerline Guys' favorite newspaper, the Strib. For the moment, it's not worth fisking the whole article, except to note that the tune is pretty much the same one we're used to: no matter how noble the cause, no matter how deep the grievances, you can't kill civilians. (Are there Israeli civilians? Who knows?)

Most importantly, he claims that the fatwa, and a massive Islamic education program from "moderates" is the best way to combat terrorist impulses.

Allow me to suggest another.

The Islamic community that neither teaches radical Islam, nor sympathizes or identifies with it, needs to ostracize and isolate those who do within their community. Being an Orthodox Jew, I know a little something about how religious communities enforce their norms without benefit of police powers. Sharia operates in much the same way, aside from burying women up to their necks in sand and stoning them.

So here are concrete steps the Mullahs need to take, need to call for others to take, and need to stick to, in the longer-term interests of their own faith.

They need to ban, or ostracize Muslims who teach these things.

They need to tell businessmen in their congregations, the ones who run the groceries and newsstands, not to sell video games where the heroes are looking to blow themselves up, or where the player gets to blow away Jews and Americans like insects in Galaga.

They need to tell their congregations not to patronize shops who sell video games like that, or the Protocols.

They need to refuse money from these people, no matter where they come from, no matter what holy sites their countries contain.

They need to refuse Halal certification to eateries where this drek is distributed.

In short, they need to make it completely impossible for radicals to function in communities other than those completely dominated by their own kind, thus limiting them to an ever-shrinking circle of operation.

This is how religions function, and enforce their own standards.

Don't hold your breath.

Gush Katif Rally

On Monday, August 15, just as the forced withdrawal from Gaza is scheduled to start, Denver will host a prayer gathering and rally to protest.

My own opinions on the withdrawal have varied, but I think the two major issues are strategic and religious.

From the religious side, I have never felt that Gaza was an integral part of the land of Israel. Certainly the participants in the 1967 war had a much stronger emotional attachment to the West Bank than to Gaza. Even if one does believe that Gaza is part of Israel, there are serious halachic opinions that hold that part can be surrendered to buy peace. In any event, the mere holding of Gaza never struck me as religiously critical.

That said, the forced withdrawal is scheduled to start just after Tisha B'Av (the 9th of Av) on the Jewish calendar, which is the anniversary of the destruction of both Temples, and the Jewish day of commemoration of a whole host of national disasters - start of WWI, expulsion from Spain, that sort of thing. To the extent that Jews believe in Karma (uh, they don't), this just seems like asking for it. It's the kind of thing that, 60 years from now, we add to the list as the beginning of the end of the Third Commonwealth.

Strategically, I think Dan Diker, Hillel Halkin, and Yossi Klein Halevi have laid out the case for leaving as well as anyone. Mark Gerson had an fine, eyes-wide-open piece in the Weekly Standard a couple of weeks back.

The basic idea behind disengagement-as-I-supported it was that, as Gerson put it, "...we are not giving in to the Palestinians; we are giving up on the Palestinians." Draw a line, take the border decision-making away from the Palestinians, and let them sort out their own misery. When they're ready to be responsible, we'll talk. Since we'll have a defensible line of defense, we can decide when to believe them.

Sharon first proposed this in 2003, remember, when the memory of Jenin and the re-occupation of the Weat Bank and Gaza were still fresh. Arafat was living in what was still standing of his Ramallah villa, and the Palestinians were at a low point. To retreat - even strategically - at that point, looked like it could be pulled off. It wouldn't be a retreat under fire, it wouldn't be a repeat of Lebanon. For Israel, it looked as though it made some strategic sense.

The problem is that what's strategic for Israel is only theater-level for the US and the Global Warriors Against Terror. Al-Qaeda sees Israel as a front, not the final ends, and it's already establishing its tentacles in Gaza. If you look at it from their point of view, they're getting a foothold on the Mediterranean, with a lightly-guarded - to say the least - crossing point into Egypt.

The point is that there's simply no reason to believe at this point that Israel can contain the inevitable violence within Gaza. Moreover, Condi Rice and the State Department seem stuck in the same 1990s time warp of bad models. To put it mildly, they're playing Go Fish while the Arabs have already moved onto contract bridge. They have no idea of the structures, motivations, goals, or attitudes of the Palestinians. The State Department seems on the verge of accepting Hamas, if they can only win enough elections. Hamas doesn't want to govern - it wants to wage war.

Given that, this pullout is a grave mistake. It doesn't have to be a catastrophe or a disaster, but you can bet that the EU and whatever part of our diplomatic corps is assigned to the Middle East will be pushing it in that direction.

The Post Persists

I hate to keep doing this, but as long as the Denver Post persists in peddling speculation and outright falsehood as the basis for its editorials, its editorials will continue to read like an 18th-century handbill.

Their current position is that they can dictate to Robert Novak the content of his columns. I should say up front that I've never been a big fan of Novak's. I remember when he used to appear - 30 years ago - on one of those local weekly political journalists' roundtables - Agronsky & Company (who?), Washington Week in Review, McLaughin Group, something like that. He was a paleocon's paleocon, frequently critical of Israel. Not for nothing was he the "Prince of Darkness."

So the Post thinks that Novak should go ahead and write a tell-all column about l'affair Plame:

It's time for Robert Novak to give a public accounting of what led up to his 2003 newspaper column in which he revealed the identity of a heretofore clandestine CIA operative, Valerie Plame.

Novak was the columnist who first published Plame's identity, quoting unnamed administration officials in what is now thought to have been retaliation for her husband's opposition to Iraq war policy.

The Post may think this was "retaliation," for something. Anyone who's actually been following the story knows better. To recap: Wilson's wife helped get him the gig - he lied about that. Wilson's half-hearted site visit supported the Administration's position - he lied about that. Plame's life or career have hardly been endangered by the leak, if it was a leak. Wilson himself is the one who first floated himself and his wife as victims.

Some "retaliation."

Speculation regarding Novak ran rampant as Fitzgerald threatened to jail Judy Miller and Matthew Cooper, two journalists who reported on Plame and refused to identify their sources. Miller never even wrote a story with Plame's name in it, yet she sits in jail at this moment.

Miller's not in jail for writing a story. She's also not in jail for murder, larceny, attempted arson, running up thousands of dollars in parking tickets, or any number of other crimes that would earn your average UN diplomat a first-class plane ticket, that she didn't commit. She's in jail for not cooperating with a federal prosecutor. It's entirely possible that her sources came from inside the Agency itself, and while that, too is speculation, it's no worse that the Post bases its, um, recommendation on.

In fact, this investigation is one that the NY Times actively campaigned for, before their own reporter became involved and they decided there was no crime, no crime at all, nothing to see here, please move along. In fact, Fitzgerald has some experience with Miller's irresponsibility. Apparently, she tipped off the terrorist-front Holy Land Foundation that Fitzgerald was on their case, on the eve of a federal raid on their offices. This prompted the Foundation to call over to Arthur Andersen and ask if the shredders were still under warranty, and could they please borrow them for the evening?

Novak finally broke his silence last week, defending his work after a CIA official suggested that Novak had acted improperly....

In writing his Aug. 1 column, Novak ignored his lawyers' advice to maintain his silence. It was a reasonable decision - his end of the Plame story has been bottled up for too long and Novak has wanted to speak his piece. But it's not reasonable for the columnist to discuss the Plame matter when it suits him but continue his silence when it doesn't.

Novak was essentially accused (not "suggested") of if not committing a crime, then tap-dancing on the borders of one - of knowlingly outing an undercover officer - by a CIA spokesman. His attorneys were understandably jittery, but Novak was protecting himself in public from public accusations, and probably letting potential sources know that he wouldn't abuse their trust. The CIA officer in question was likely protecting himself and his organization, and if he needed to throw Novak under the bus to do it, so be it. Novak limited his response to the question of how he responded to the Agency's supposed warnings, because that's the only time he's been accused of impropriety. He doesn't need to either defend or attack Rove or Libby. There's a federal investigation, after all.

Finally, the Post more than implies that Novak's, er, performance in walking off a CNN set was directly related to his silence concerning the Plame affair, and that unburdening himself in a column might be cathartic for him:

It's clear the 74-year-old Novak is tied up in knots. Last week he was put on leave by CNN after uttering a barnyard epithet during an exchange on an unrelated political matter. He stalked off the program just before host Ed Henry was to question him about the Plame leak.

Novak reportedly told Henry beforehand, "My lawyer said I cannot answer any specific questions about this case until it is resolved, which I hope is very soon."

Novak has been avoiding talking about this matter for years. One more on-camera "no comment", or even a refusal to go on air, wouldn't have killed him.

Apparently, the Post's position is that Novak should tell all in order to satisfy their curiosity, while Miller should be able to run free while defying a federal prosecutor. For a crime that didn't happen. Or did. As usual, though, their reasoning is compromised by their speculation and incoherence.

The Grey Men

Mark Steyn's Telegraph column this week focuses less on the terrorists than on their enablers:

It's not black (the bomber) and white (the rest of us); there's a lot of murky shades of grey in between: the terrorist bent on devastation and destruction prowls the streets, while around him are a significant number of people urging him on, and around them a larger group of cocksure young men gleefully celebrating mass murder, and around them a much larger group of people who stand silent at the acts committed in their name, and around them a mesh of religious and community leaders openly inciting mayhem, and around them a savvy network of professional identity-group grievance-mongers adamant that they're the real victims, and around them a vast mass of progressive elites too squeamish about ethno-cultural matters to confront reality, and around them a political establishment desperate to pretend this is just a managerial problem that can be finessed away with a new bureaucracy and a bit of community outreach.

And at the end of this chain of shades of grey is you.

Steyn's point is that it takes a village to raise a bomber, these guys are not the lone wolves that the CAIR-apologists would have you believe. There's a whole world of people looking the other way and making excuses, most prominently our own cult of multiculturalists.

On Meetings and Fatwas

My favorite American Muslims traveled to the Capitol to meet with Tom Tancredo on Wednesday. They didn't manage to get any farther than anyone else with Nuclear Tom, but they did manage to show a remarkable amount of patience in doing so.

Coalition member Ahmad Subhy Mansor, an imam who attended the meeting, said, "If I were in his place, an American congressman concerned about Americans being killed by terrorists, I would say the same thing as the congressman."

Just about the only thing Tancredo has done right in this whole mess is to stiff CAIR, refusing to meet with the little Hamas-niks. By meeting with Nawash, he may also be trying to boost Americans who act like it.

Still, having seen the way Jewish organizations treat each other, this scenario is dismayingly familiar:

Underlying the controversy is a dispute over who truly represents moderate Muslims.

Nawash, who ran unsuccessfully for the Virginia Senate in 2003 as a Republican and frequently appears on cable news shows, says his was the first U.S. Muslim group to thoroughly denounce terrorism.

He says his group has 9,500 members. But when he put together what was billed as Washington's first Muslim-led rally against terrorism in May, he drew only a few dozen people.

"His constituency, you could put it in a phone booth," said Mahdi Bray of the Muslim American Society Freedom Foundation.

Nawash dismisses such criticism as part of a petty rivalry. "There's no one group that represents all Muslims in America," Nawash said.

I would point out that thus far, it's the only Muslim-led rally against terrorism. The only Muslims other anti-terror rallies managed to attract out here have to be kept on the other side of the Thin Blue Line to keep them from painting the town red, so to speak.

And CAIR rejects criticism that it doesn't represent moderate Muslims or that it hasn't condemned terrorism.

"We rack our brains every day trying to think of new ways to denounce terrorism," Hooper said. "I don't know what more the American Muslim community can say about terrorist attacks by people who claim to represent Islam."

Poor Ibrahim Hooper. Now, I will say this fatwa is better than nothing, but not much, not this late in the game. Go ahead and read it.

Welcome back. First, what's right with it.

No Sacrifice?

The New York Times's Thom Shanker has decided that our soldiers have decided that you're not doing enough:

There is no serious talk of a draft to share the burden of fighting across the broad citizenry, and neither Republicans nor Democrats are pressing for a tax increase to force Americans to cover the $5 billion a month in costs from Iraq, Afghanistan and new counterterrorism missions.

There are not even concerted efforts like the savings-bond drives or gasoline rationing that helped to unite the country behind its fighting forces in wars past.

"Nobody in America is asked to sacrifice, except us," said one officer just back from a yearlong tour in Iraq, voicing a frustration now drawing the attention of academic specialists in military sociology.

Remarkably, I also haven't seen schoolboys, silhouette reference cards in hand, scanning the skies for enemy bombers. Nor have I been silently asked at the light rail "Is This Trip Necessary?" to make way for departing troop trains. I was recently able to replace my tires at very reasonable prices.

Why? Because while the military is on a war footing, we simply neither need nor want the kind of mobilization we had for WWII. There is no need for the government to comandeer the national economy. In fact, we're better off if we don't do that, Bernard Baruch notwithstanding.

Shanker laments the lack of a tax increase to pay for the war. Except that the deficit has been shrinking for a little while now, thanks to the fact that Uncle Sam doesn't have to intercept wheat shipments and send them to the front.

What Shanker doesn't examine is the source of this bitterness, whose extent, I might add, we really have no idea of. Is it possible that a soldier might feel just a little put-upon by Senators who compare their work to gulags, Representatives who call them as bad as Saddam? If the Army is watching CNN on its off-hours, I can see why they might be inclined to ask why these whining civvies aren't being asked to help out.

Except that they have, and they do. I've heard the President speak of the need to support the troops in a tangible way. I've heard him give web addresses. I probably haven't heard it enough. I cetainly haven't heard it from Senator "Turban" Durbin's office.

So, Senators, Congressmen, Governors, start with Soldier's Angels, Operation Uplink,
Books For Soldiers. Every time you give a speech, mention these guys.

Hugh "the Dhimmi" Hewitt

Not. Look, I thought Hugh was a little less than aggressive in his questioning of CAIR's Hussam Ayloush. So did Froggy. So did Aaron. (Aaron, by the way, lays out the case against CAIR like few I've seen.)

But "dhimmi?" C'mon guys. Hugh's able to get the bad guys to come on his show because he gives them a fair hearing, lets them say their piece, and then, when they're done, filets them like Uma Thurman in a bad mood.

Anyway, since they're done, bring out the knives. Since Aaron is cool with a group fisking, I'll take two points made by the main from CAIR. First, Hugh asked him about the utter lack of religious plurality in Saudi Arabia, and Hussam replied that since 99.9% of Saudi Arabia was Muslim, there was no need for churches.

Hugh's rather lame response was that the lack of churches certainly discouraged immigration.

A better response would have been that the 2 million+ Philippino guest workers have no place to go. Admittedly, the mosques there tend to be of the radical sort. ("Welcome to Saudi Arabia. Where the family that prays together slays together.") But the fact is that Islamic law has, for centuries, banned to building of new churches and synagogues, although existing ones can be maintained. After all, they might "spread poison."

The conversation moved on to MEMRI. Hugh had nothing but praise for these guys, but Hussam considered that they were doing a "grave disservice," by letting the world know what was being said in Arabic on Friday morning. After all, anyone can pick out the few crazies from the thousands of mosques.

Hugh rightly replied that there really aren't very many crazies in churches and synagogues here in the states. A better reply would have been the following catalog of the minor, insignificant preachers given over to slight hyperbole:

Those Signs Again

A few more thoughts on those signs.

Yes, they probably would do more good if they were posted on the inside of the mosque rather than the outside. What we're asking for isn't so much a PR campaign as introspection and self-analysis.

And there are several excellent questions that the banners invite, not all of them snarky. For instance, how does one explain the concept of dhimmitude in light of Islam's advertised tradition of tolerance?

And yet, most of the questions have to do with problems overseas. People tend to come to America, to cross a wide ocean with expensive airfares, to get away from these problems. If there's any place that can work its assimilationist magic on this problem, it's here.

I think the fact that the banners have pictures of the American flag on them is significant. After 9/11, houses, from those of residence to those of worship to those of ill-repute, put out the Red, White, & Blue. But I searched in vain for Old Glory over a mosque. Admittedly, a picture of a flag isn't the same thing as a flag itself, but again, we're talking baby steps here.

In fact, this particular mosque has a little history in that regard. It was this mosque that some idiot AM shock jocks invaded with horns and noisemakers the morning after a Muslim Nuggets basketball player ostentatiously sat down during the national anthem before a game. No higher power than Allah, so how can he stand up for the flag? The Imams pretty quickly said he had been getting some bad advice, and the whole thing went away.

But really. If you've got a universal religion, even symbols of a temporal power might be a problem. I don't see a lot of Union Jacks or Tri-colors or Bundesbanners at Muslim marches in Europe, either. So putting a picture of the flag up may be the beginnings of an American identity.

One last point. Yes, the banners are directed outward. But remember, if first, people are ashamed to say certain things, they may soon be ashamed to think them.

A Very Good Start

UPDATE: Welcome Hugh Hewitt Listeners. Look around, and while you're here, check out the rest of the Rocky Mountain Alliance.

Today, I happened to drive by the local Islamic Center, not the mosque of Imam Kazerooni, who is Shiite, but a Suuni mosque. They've added some very welcome decoration:

This is good. For one thing, it's the first time I've seen an American flag anywhere near a mosque since September 11. For another thing, they really do say all the right things. The more this becomes the message from Islam, the better. (They could use a better proofreader, but it's no worse than a whole lot of Israeli menus I've seen in LA.)

There's no question that the fact that the London bombers were homegrown has finally gotten through to some American Muslims that this is their problem, that they can't say to themselves and others, "these guys are from someplace else, they don't have anything to do with me."

That said, I think these banners need to face inward every bit as much as they face outward, if not on Parker Rd. then elsewhere.

Way Behind the Curve

Ed Quillen, the Denver Post's resident ex-journalist and current curmudgeon, is generally an excellent read. He's not conservative by any stretch. He writes from Salida, Colorado, and calls Denver the "Front Strange."

His Sunday oped was about the Plame kerfuffle, and was so factually-challenged that one wonders whether the fine Coloado summer had gotten to him a little.

Every time a reporter goes to jail to protect a confidential source, it inspires some anguish here. It happened last week, when Judith Miller, a reporter for The New York Times, went to jail rather than testify before a grand jury about a conversation she had with someone whose privacy she had promised to protect.

It's part of one of those "inside the Beltway" issues that gets people all riled up in Washington, but it's not the stuff of morning coffee chatter in territory where people have to work for a living.

If Quillen is correct, then most people reading his column are hearing about the whole kerfuffle for the first time. What he says will be the story they remember. You would think that, as an old newspaperman, he'd bother to get the facts right.

In February 2002, Joseph C. Wilson IV was sent by the CIA to Niger to investigate rumors that Iraq was trying to buy nuclear material there. A year later, he began criticizing the Bush administration for exaggerating the threat from Saddam Hussein.

Well, when you put it that way, sure. Never mind that the way he "critized the Bush administration" was to lie about the origin, contents, manner, and results of his "investigation." This is a bit like saying that Mussolini was "criticizing" the Italian government in the 20s.

Shortly thereafter, syndicated Washington columnist Robert D. Novak wrote that two administration officials had told him that Wilson's Niger trip had been suggested by Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, an undercover CIA operative.

Well, there are two ways to read this sentence, and both of them are wrong. Novak never wrote that Plame was an undercover CIA officer. And Plame wasn't an undercover CIA officer.

Presumably, the idea was to discredit Wilson.

Actually, the idea was at least to let Newsweek's reporter know that maybe Wilson wasn't all he was pretending to be.

Wilson would do a fine job of discrediting himself in fairly short order.

It is a federal felony to identify an active undercover CIA officer. Thus the officials who talked to Novak might have committed a crime. A special prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, was appointed, and he's trying to find out who leaked Plame's name. He has summoned reporters before a grand jury, with the threat that they'll be held in contempt if they don't testify. Miller wouldn't talk, and she's in jail.

Most states, including Colorado, have a "shield law" that helps protect journalists from being questioned about anonymous sources during a criminal investigation.

There isn't a federal shield law, and there's an argument against one, since the First Amendment belongs to all Americans, not just those with printing presses or broadcast licenses. Why should reporters enjoy any more rights than anyone else?

There's a partial answer in that reporters spend a lot of time talking to people, and if there weren't a shield law, lazy prosecuting attorneys would use reporters to do their investigations.

...

Now, I don't know if Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor in the CIA-agent-identity-leak case, is haling reporters before a grand jury because he's lazy or because that's the only way he can get information about a crime, reporters' promises or not.

I've skipped a story here about how Quillen had to deal with a similar situation in the past. Similar, but not identical. Because while Quillen was trying to protect someone who had told him about a crime, Miller is going to jail because the act of telling her something may have been a crime. That's why Fitzgerald is talking to reporters.

I do know that when somebody calls me and says, "I've got some hot information, but you can't tell anybody you heard it from me," I tell them to call someone else if the secret must be kept. I'm a blabbermouth by nature and my business is presenting things to the public, not hiding things from the public.

Except that Cooper called Rove, not the other way around. And Cooper asked Rove about Wilson, not the other way around.

And I'm willing to bet on this: Miller will be the only one to serve any jail time as a result of this Beltway brouhaha. After all, she's part of the Liberal Media Elite, and in these times, many Americans will figure she deserves it, as opposed to some White House source who put an American agent's life at risk.

I used to work for the Agency, indirectly, as a contractor. I knew CIA officers, lots of them. I have a fair sense of how the Agency operates. It's entirely possible that Plame could work at Langley and be undercover. Operatives frequently do rotations at HQ before being sent back out into the field. But if Plame is going around telling her friends and family where she works, she's not undercover. No way, no how. Miller may be the only one to serve jail time because there may not actually be a crime here at all.

I don't want to be too hard on Mr. Quillen. He tends to answer emails, and he's the property of no political party. But there's plenty of original-source material out there for him to check. A piece like this might have been forgiveable two weeks or two months or two years ago. I don't know what the lead time on his columns is, and it's possible he wrote this before the Latest Startling Revelations became public. By Sunday, if the Post hadn't been sleeping off their hangovers, they certainly should have spiked the column for inaccuracy.

Cross-Posted at Oh, That Liberal Media.

Tancredo Goes Nuclear

Hugh Hewitt spent most of his show explaining why Tom Tancredo's threat to nuke Mecca in response to an al Qaeda nuclear attack on America is thoroughly irresponsible. I don't need to rehash that here, except to say that Hugh's right.

That said, wars do this to people. Wars distort and heighten emotion, and lead otherwise responsible people to do and say really, really stupid things.

Therefore, the imperative is not to end this war with a minimum of damage, or to try to finesse its conduct, but to end it as quickly as we possibly can. To end the Syrian regime, and to help the Iranian people annihilate the mullahs as quickly as possible. Life is, sadly, messy, and many wars have been lost by being too clever by half. Unless we do that, we're going to be seeing more of this from other Tancredos and Turban Durbins.

Welcome to the multi-polar world. Latin America doing its NASCAR impersonation with a series of hard left turns. Chinese generals a threatening to incinerate everything west of the Mississippi unless we admit that resistance is futile and that Taiwan will be assimilated.

These Islamicists are a big deal, and yet, at the same time, pretty small fry. Let's finish them off.

London Attacked - Local Cleric Seeks Victim Status

Even as the British authorities try to find the perpetrators of the attack, and even as speculation grows that the terrorists were - surprise! - home-grown rather than imported, the local Denver Imam is making sure to cover himself. After all, the real victims of the attacks aren't the dead and maimed. No, the real victims are the Muslims, who will be made to worry that someone might blame them for failing to help out the police ahead of time, rather than after the fact.

He added that when people stereotype any group, such as linking all Muslims to a terrorist incident, "people react with irrational behavior."

No doubt this also includes asking local religious leaders why exactly they're sharing afternoon tea with their bretheren who say one thing in Arabic on Friday and something rather different in English the rest of the week. One shouldn't, of course, look at a Muslim and assume he harbors any sympathy for murder. But these harder, community and institutional questions are simply called out of bounds, when in fact, they offer the only excuse for not lumping all Muslims together.

The two men - who have been working together on the church's Abrahamic Initiative, a project designed to build relationships among Jews, Christians and Muslims, for nearly a year - condemned the attacks and cautioned anyone against linking those responsible to any particular group.

When they spoke, it was not clear who was behind the London attacks; a previously unknown group called the Secret Organization of al-Qaeda in Europe had made an unverified claim of responsibility.

Funny, though, that no rabbis were interviewed in the writing of this article. I wouldn't expect them to say anything different, but still, it would have been nice. I have an email in to Ms. House asking about that.

In fact, though, it's the linking of the bombing to a general group, not a particular one, that poses the greatest threat to truth. Just as we wouldn't want to assume that any given religious Muslim is hosting light-rail bombing planning sessions in his apartment, it's most important for Muslims to identify - and tip off the police - other Muslims who are spending the weekends testing out blasting caps and poertable timers.

Then again, perhaps the second paragraph insists on a little too much specificity. We may not yet have the names and addresses of the bombers, and the locale of the mosque whose imam gave them his blessing, but I think it's pretty clear who in a philosophical and political sense was behind this.

While Eaton said he was as "surprised and shocked as anybody," Kazerooni said the war in Iraq may have been a motivation for the attackers. Britain and the United States don't appear to be seeking a resolution, Kazerooni said.

"The longer the occupation continues, the more it becomes a hotbed of terrorism," Kazerooni said.

Ah yes, maybe 9/11 was just a pre-emptive attack in case Iraq was invaded, then. Well, if they're teaching that sort of prophecy down at the mosque, I'd imagine you'd see some pretty hot action down at the sportsbook window at Caesar's.

Left unsaid is that Kazrooni, while a Shiite refugee from Saddam's Peaceable Kingdom himself, opposed the invasion from the beginning, and that London has looked like a pretty jiucy target since well before April 2003. Sure, they may be trying to pry Britain loose from the coalition, but that's tactics, not strategy. My guess is that this has more to do with the 10th anniversary of Srbenica than with any brothers-in-arms in Fallujah who've gone on to Eternal Disappointment.

Both men said reports that British Muslims were encouraged to remain at home were disturbing.

"It focuses this on a group of people who have no relation to this act at all," Eaton said.

What they didn't say was that the people doing the encouraging were something called the "Islamic Human Rights Commission," whose main contribution to Islamic Human Rights was the unconditional support of Palestinian terror, and whose best friends seem to be the Noturei Karta, a group of a couple hundred Orthodox Jews who think Israel was a grand cosmological mistake.

It's no trick as to why they'd be peddling this line. A group whose whole means of support comes from a siege mentality is going to do their best to put their own people under seige, even if they have to bring in the battering rams themselves.

We've said it before, and we'll say it again. Until we demand that the Muslim community begins taking collective responsibility as eagerly as it files for collective greivances, this is going to get a lot worse before it gets better.

Salazar on Durbin

Chirp....Chirp....Chirp...

At least, that's the answer I got when I called the senator's DC office this morning. No official statement yet, and no entry into the Senate record.

Duane, who appears to have taken poll-operating lessons in St. Louis, has a long discourse on the senior Senator from Illinois's Churchill-like rant, pointing out where Durbin says something, quotes himself saying it, and then denies that he said it.

Newsweek's Klaidman on Al-Jazeera

The Indispensible MEMRI has posted a partial transcript of a May 19 Al-Jihadi Al-Jazeera interview with Newsweek Washignton bureau chief Daniel Klaidman.

We can't see the initial question, but Klaidman goes on for two paragraphs describing the technical journalistic question of sources and sourcing, how this item ended up in their magazine. I assume the question was something like, "why did you run this item?" Then, this:

Klaidman: ...we concluded that we did not have the information that we needed to make the assertion that we did in this item – that this had happened.

Host: But there is no proof that it did not happen either...

Klaidman: We are neutral on whether any form of Koran desecration took place. ...we are also saying that this specific act of Koran desecration was not confirmed by the US military investigators, and that is what we reported. As to whether these things happened or not, we are, like the rest of the people out there and news organizations - we don’t know. We have heard the allegations, we continue to report, and the US military and other entities are investigating, and as I said, we are neutral on whether any of this ever happened.

One would be tempted to ask what on God's green earth Klaidman was thinking, if we didn't already know.

The Al-Jazeera reporters deftly changes the subject from Newsweek's lousy reporting to the truth of the underlying charges, asking Klaidman to admit that he can't prove that George Bush isn't receiving intergalactic messages through his fillings.

And Klaidman goes along! Here he is, appearing on what amounts to the propaganda arm of Al Qaeda, the closest thing we have to enemy television. He's staring into the eyes of man who quite obviously hates him as an American and as a Jew. He's got the attention of millions of people for whom CNN isn't anti-American enough. And he acts like he's trying to be the peacemaker at a college debating society.

Even if Newsweek's judgment weren't already compromised, merely by agreeing to appear, Klaidman calls into question his ability to differentiate reporting from propaganda. But this "defense," this complete refusal to defend his country's conduct of the war only compounds the problem.

Look, I don't expect him to go on enemy TV and say something like, "you people need to cool it. Some of your co-religionists have issues with perspective and proportion, and some of you might want to take them aside and teach them how to behave like civilized people." No, that would be asking too much, and Newsweek already has image problems in Arabic.

Something like, "the reason this was news at all was because the US Army has tried so hard to be Religiously Correct that they've issued a supply contract for prayer mats and Korans, and practically has the kitchen staff fom the Mecca Marriott preparing the meals down at Gitmo," would have worked.

Whose side are they on, indeed.

Lapses in Coverage

How can you have a Denver blog titled "Strategic Intelligence" and not mention this?

And how can you throw around the term "chickenhawk" like the wooden nickel it is, and not even mention this?

Dease & Desist

Apparently, Father Dennis Dease, head of the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, MN, thinks more highly of Fidel Castro than of Ann Coulter.

Last year, Dease criticized the Bush Administration's restrictions on travel to Cuba, a position actually taken by many Cuban Americans as well. But, then, according to a May 27, 2004 Star-Tribune report,

St. Thomas has been a pioneer in academic exchanges with Cuba. The school's president, Father Dennis Dease, travels frequently to Cuba, and has encouraged cultural and academic exchanges with the University of Havana.

In my experience, those advocating more openness with Cuba rarely do so hoping to topple Fidel. And indeed, when a Cuban baseball team toured the US In 2000, they made sure to stop in at St. Thomas for a game against the college's team.

Perhaps the team's greatest achievement - returning home almost intact - was also the occasion for Father Dease to embarass himself. The defecting player, Mario Miguel Chaoui, drove away from the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport and surfaced again in Miami.

According to the May 9, 2000 Strib,

Informed that Chaoui had surfaced in Miami, the Rev. Dennis Dease, president of the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, said, "My initial reaction was that I was relieved he is safe; he's OK. I'm happy for that."

Asked his personal opinion, Dease said, "This is his own choice. I respect that. But I've been to the country and I see that people can be happy there. It's a time of great change in Cuba."

Is it any wonder that a guy who lectures a Cuban refugee on the virtues of Castro's Communism would find Ann Coulter "crossing the line?"

Squaring the Sunni Triangle

The Indispensible MEMRI is reporting that 64 Sunni clerics (no, despite the useful number, there's no Mullah Madness basketball tournament scheduled) are advocating that Sunnis join the new Iraqi armed forces, militia, and police.

This is probably good news. I say "probably," because my friend Michael Eisenstadt points out that Sunnis traditionally have dominated those institutions, and more likely to have military training in arms and tactics. Despite the British efforts to integrate Shiites into the Iraqi military during their occupation, Sunnis eventually rose to the top and controlled the command structure. I wouldn't be surprised if some of the mullahs are planning on history repeating itself.

Which, of course, is exactly no guarantee that it will. There's plenty of evidence that, if anything, Iraq is much less sectarian than it has been in the past, and that large numbers of Sunnis are ready to join the rest of Iraq in building a country worth keeping together. The mullahs make a point of stressing non-cooperation with the Americans, which may also be a way of appealing to people not enamored of US troops, suggesting that switching rather than fighting may be the fastest way to get the US to leave.

Popestakes

I know Hugh's looking for an English-speaking Pope, whether he be Australian or Nigerian. While Ratzinger's 78 years came up, Arinze's 72 would also likely make him a short-timer.

While I like the idea that the Italian winning streak has gone the way of the US dominance of the America's Cup, this guy is pretty intriguing, as described in the Wall Street Journal:

Angelo Scola -- An Italian born Nov. 7, 1941, Cardinal Scola has been patriarch of Venice for three years. During his time in the job, the 63-year-old has called for broadening Catholic religious instruction to include issues involving the economic and bioethical challenges facing society. He has also been vocal about the need for the church to find a way to confront the Muslim world and recently launched a publication dedicated to that topic.

If the War on Terror is the great defining issue of our age, a Pope who takes that struggle seriously could be as great an ally in this war as John Paul II was in the last.

He has begun a journal, Oasis, to look at the Church's relations with Islam, and seems to be one of the few people not named Mark Steyn to take Europe's demographic problems seriously.

Con Law

Mark Mulligan, guest-blogging over at Clay's site, raises some interesting questions about the differences among the Amendments in the Bill of Rights, especially where they concern Jose Padilla.

I understand the arguments against gun control. Criminals and terrorists aren’t going to Wal-Mart or Garts. I’m just trying to understand the process by which we decided that the 2nd amendment was sacrosanct and the 5th and 6th weren’t. I don’t remember a national debate. The government decided for us and we went along.

If everything about Jose Padilla is true and can be proved in court I want him locked away in a deep hole for a long time. However, if it isn’t – given who his friends are - I’m not sure I want him owning a gun.

The 4th, 5th, and 6th Amendments are qualitatively different from the 2nd in at least two ways.

First, the government is a direct agent in Amendments 4,5, and 6. Therefore, it can take or not take actions that the courts can rule on. If the government were selling guns, like Virginia used to sell liquor, it could probably try to issue an administrative "Do Not Sell To" list that could also be challenged in court.

Secondly, Amendments 4, 5, and 6 enjoin actions by the government. Amendment 2 protects specific actions by me. The freedom to walk the streets freely may follow from 4-5-6, but it's indirect.

In that sense, the 1st Amendment is much like the 2nd. There are plenty of non-shooting positions in a terrorist operation, and I'm not sure I'd like Padilla wandering around collecting Saudi jihadist literature after Friday prayers, either. But I'm also not sure I could stop him.

For that reason, the context of actions taken under the 1st or 2nd Amendment matters. If my target terrorist organization is meeting at a mosque, the FBI can follow the guy right into prayers and eavesdrop on his conversations. Likewise, the purchase of a gun may be evidence of criminal intent, given the right context.

Again, any of this is subject to modification by the law, but where you're starting from matters.

Freudian Slip

The parking meters in Denver are on holiday today. As a group of high schoolers, on Spring Break, tried to use the high-tech parking meters, a woman came out of the Post Office and helpfully explained that today is "Hugo Chavez Day."

Let's hope it never comes to that. Cesar Chavez Day is bad enough.

Personally, I plan to eat my traditional bunch of grapes in commemoration.

Nuts and Bolton

That's the title of the latest from Mark Steyn in the Spectator. Steyn usually cuts down the Spectator column for American syndication, and if you've got less time this morning, you can get the gist of it here.

Okay, I get the hang of this game. Sending John Bolton to be UN ambassador is like ...putting Sudan and Zimbabwe on the Human Rights Commission. Or letting Saddam’s Iraq chair the UN conference on disarmament. Or sending a bunch of child-sex fiends to man UN operations in the Congo. And the Central African Republic. And Sierra Leone, and Burundi, Liberia, Haiti, Kosovo, and pretty much everywhere else. All of which happened without the UN fetishists running around shrieking hysterically. Why should America be the only country not to enjoy an uproarious joke at the UN’s expense?

Steyn goes on to argue that America is simply honoring its traditions by refusing to play by the stale rules of an archaic game designed by others. Unlike some others who would like to do the same thing, America can make it stick.

Bolton simply isn't interested in being liked. He's interested in promoting a policy, which is actually what diplomacy is about.

My guess is that that’s what Bill Clinton and Eason Jordan were up to when they respectively hailed the progressivism of Iranian politics and defamed the entire US military. You’re with a bunch of foreigners and you want them to like you and it’s easy to get carried away.

That’s what was so stunning about Bolton. In a roomful of Euro-grandees, he was perfectly relaxed, a genial fellow with a rather Mitteleuropean moustache, but he thwacked every ball they served back down their gullets with amazing precision. He was the absolute antithesis of Schmoozer Bill and Pandering Eason: he seemed to relish their hostility. At one event, a startled British cabinet minister said to me afterwards, ‘He doesn’t mean all that, does he?’

Light Blogging, and a Note of Concern

Today's Blogging: Light, with much to do.

Ah, that Note of Concern. Well, you know, now that the MSM has decided to start checking out that "Bush May Have Been Right" train that left the station while they were inside refreshing their cocktails, it might be worth it to remember that these guys do have a pack mentality. They usually do all right with the fact - it's the story they have a hard time getting right.

In this case, with Democracy Busin' Out All Over, the story we want to avoid is 1848. That was the year that the citizens took over Europe. In January, they started making trouble all around; by June, the people had seized control of the governments of Germany, France, and Austria. By December, the Empires had struck back, and were back in control. In the one exception, France, the man who would become the dictator Napoleon III was in charge.

Revolutions, even genuinely popular ones, can fail. Our job is to make sure that doesn't happen in the Middle East. My guess is that the President understands this better than most of the critics-turned-grudging-admirers.

Institutional Lunacy

The good folks over at the RMPN are practicing the old Guilt by Association.

My outrage is for me alone to dispose of, but I am thoroughly disgusted by this.

I was disgusted when I saw this same group of about 8 people several months ago on a Sunday morning as I was walking my dog. No words passed between us, but it was clear they returned my contempt. Sadly, my dog declined my invitation to lighten his load on them.

Still, I am not outraged. I will be outraged when they are invited to sit in the Presidential Box at the Republican National Convention.

Media Bias Down Under

For those of us who think that media bias is even primarily an American phenomenon, I'd recommend to you Australian Gerard Henderson's Media Watch postings. Henderson is executive Director of the Sydney Institute, where he writes a weekly column. He also seems to appear in The Age with some regularity.

Not Paying Attention

The brilliant Mark Steyn's latest devastating column centers on Arthur Miller's inflated reputation, and the uses to which it has been put:

Miller was the most useful of the useful idiots. It was a marvelous inspiration to recast the communist "hysteria" of the 1950s as the Salem witch trials of the 1690s. Many people have pointed out the obvious flaw with "The Crucible" — that there were no witches, whereas there were certainly communists. For one thing, they were gobbling up a lot of real estate: they seized Poland in 1945, Bulgaria in '46, Hungary and Romania in '47, Czechoslovakia in '48, China in '49; they very nearly grabbed Greece and Italy; they were the main influence on the nationalist movements of Africa and Asia. Imagine the Massachusetts witch trials if the witches were running Virginia, New York and New Hampshire, and you might have a working allegory.

As it is, Miller's play is an early example of the distinguishing characteristic of the modern Western left: its hermetically sealed parochialism. His genius was to give his fellow lefties what has become their most cherished article of faith — that any kind of urgent national defense is, by definition, paranoid and hysterical. It was untrue in the '50s, and it's untrue today. Indeed, the hysteria about hysteria — the "criminalization" of "dissent" — is far more hysterical than the hysteria about Reds.

"The Crucible" will survive because it is the modular furniture of left-wing agitprop: whatever the cause du jour, you can attach it to and it functions no better or worse than to anything else, mainly because it is perfectly pitched to the narcissism of the left.

Steyn is the theater critic for the New Criterion, and reason enough to subscribe.

The Iraq-Vietnam Parallels Continue to Mount

I did notice this somewhat rueful quote from GM's President concerning the Fiat debacle:

"To be honest, when you d