SADDAM’S TERROR TRAINING CAMPS

This Stephen Hayes piece shows how dangerous the Saddam regime was – even without WMDs. Of course, the number of terrorists training in Iraq under Saddam was a fraction of the number operating freely – and devastatingly – there today. But that says something about the execution of the war, not the very good reasons for deplosing Saddam in the first place.

QUOTE FOR THE DAY

“We are Iraqis, and Al Qaeda came from outside our borders. They defame the name of the noble resistance inside Iraq,” – “Abu Omar“, the nom de guerre of a member of the Islamic Army in Abu Ghraib. The enemy is not just evil; it’s also dumb. In that lies the slim, but still present hope for the future in Iraq.

A FULLER LIST: The recipients of Abramoff’s bounty, with party affiliation highlighted.

UH-OH: After he copped a plea deal, Randy Cunningham wore a wire for a while to record his conversations.

THE NEXT GENERATION: The latest Hamilton College/Zogby poll of high school seniors shows a generation morally troubled by abortion and highly supportive of gay rights. 53.6 back marriage rights, an additional 20.1 percent back civil unions, and 63 percent are fine with gay adoptions. Catholics, as ever, are the most pro-gay of Christian denominations. Here are the results from 2001. The marriage question, alas, has changed. In 2001, 66 percent favored marriage rights, but were not given a civil union option. Today, a combined 74 percent favor one or the other. The proportion of students who were staunchly antigay in 2001 was 30 percent. In 2005, it was 20 percent. The bulk of them came from evangelical and fundamentalist backgrounds. As the broader society becomes much more accepting of gays, the religious right has hardened its hostility. Oh, and the idea of amending the federal constitution to bar marriage and civil unions for gays? It has 26 percent support among the next generation. Hence the urgency among the older fundamentalists to get it passed – soon.

LOSING IT AT THE MOVIES

When you see this trailer, you’ll either start choking up, or think that Hollywood’s exploitation of tragedy has finally gone too far. I choked up.

Also, if you didn’t much care for Jarhead (I didn’t) it’s because you can’t see the bright line running backward from Sam Mendes’ work to Sartre, Beckett, and Bunuel. Just so you know.

– posted by Ross

“BUSH DERANGEMENT SYNDROME” DERANGEMENT SYNDROME?

Andy McCarthy penned a truly strange column over at National Review yesterday. The gist is that we shouldn’t be suckered in by Bush critics’ fixation on little technicalities like “whether electronic searches were authorized by warrant” because the rabid, Bush-deranged liberal mainstream media would have pitched a hissy fit even if the very same program had been carried out with judicial oversight. In other words, the fifth columnists at The New York Times would’ve created a scandal-story no matter what… so best not to get too worked up about this “warrant” business. You wouldn’t want ot be a dupe of The New York Times, would you?

The problem is, put warrants back in the picture and (leaving aside the nebulous data mining thing, which isn’t what McCarthy’s talking about) there is no “program”… there’s just law enforcement officers seeking FISA warrants, as we’ve known they do for years. The Times could, of course, find some top-secret insider to leak the information that FISA warrant applications and approvals have recently reached record highs. Fortunately, they wouldn’t have to look very hard, because the Justice Department releases those figures to Congress each year.

In other words, we don’t need McCarthy’s fertile imagination to know what the NSA tapping story might look like if judicial oversight were added to the mix… because it’s the story we’d been getting for years already.

THE COVERT OPTION

Matt Yglesias flags an excerpt from James Risen’s new book, in which it’s revealed that the CIA may have given the Iranians defective blueprints for a nuclear bomb, in the hopes that this would send their nuclear program down a primrose path to failure. The excerpt casts the whole incident as a fiasco that may have actually helped the Iranians, though as Matt points out, it’s hard to tell from the details whether the plan backfired or succeeded. And the story seems a little fishy in any case. But either way, it’s not terribly shocking that we’d attempt something like that. As my Atlantic colleague, Terrence Henry, pointed out in last month’s issue, this kind of skullduggery is an obvious way to sabotage a nuclear program that can’t be stopped by diplomacy or direct action. It’s quite likely that we’ve tried to sell Iran defective parts, ensured that certain ships bound for the Persian Gulf have found their way to the bottom of the ocean, and plotted acts of sabotage against Iran’s uranium-enrichment facilities.

What’s less likely, however, is that we’ve taken up the Israeli approach to covert anti-nuclear action:

Iraq bought the cores for the Osirak reactor from France. Originally they were to be shipped to Iraq in April of 1979, but shortly before their departure an explosion ripped through the warehouse that held them. An organization calling itself the French Ecological Group, which had never been heard of before (and hasn’t been heard from since), claimed responsibility. Shipment was delayed for six months while the cores were repaired.

The next year Yahya al-Meshad, an important scientist in Iraq’s nuclear program, arrived in France to test fuel for the reactor. The morning he was to return home a maid entered his Paris hotel room and found that he had been stabbed and bludgeoned to death. (The only person known to have seen the scientist the previous night, a prostitute who called herself Marie Express, was killed a few weeks later in a hit-and-run accident. The culprit was never found.) Soon afterward workers at firms supplying parts for the reactor began to receive threatening letters from a mysterious group called the Committee to Safeguard the Islamic Revolution. Bombs went off at the offices of one of the firms, in Italy, and at the home of the company’s director-general. Over the next several months two more Iraqi nuclear scientists died in separate poisoning incidents.

Not that Israel ever claimed responsibility for any of this, mind you. And it’s worth noting that even after all this effort, it still required an air strike to permanently take down the Iraqi nuclear program.

– posted by Ross

BUSH’S EXTRA-LEGAL PRESIDENCY

More thoughts here from Marty Lederman. There’s no doubt in my mind that this administration has sought to establish an extra-legal executive as far as it possibly can. No wonder civil libertarians are worried. Two points worth noting: the president has defined the theater of war as including the territory of the United States and including citizens of the United States; he has also defined the war as without end. So his war powers, although moderate in effect compared to what, say, Lincoln and FDR got away with, are exponentially more far-reaching. Because this war is forever, as Jon Rauch explains in his latest National Journal column (not online yet). And countless future presidents will be given the right to ignore, flout or finesse domestic law if they so wish. I wonder how many Republicans will object when president Hillary is wiretapping their private conversations. They’d better speak up now, hadn’t they?

– posted by Andrew.