Why is this only coming out now?

One new piece of information revealed on the tapes, released Saturday by Mr. Tierney at the Intelligence Summit, a private conference held in Arlington, is that Saddam was actively working on a plan to enrich uranium using a technique known as plasma separation. This is particularly worrisome because of the date of the conversation: It took place in 2000, nearly five years after Iraq's nuclear programs were thought to have stopped.

...

Another speaker at the conference was John Shaw, former deputy undersecretary of defense for international technology security, who charged that Saddam's stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction were moved by Russian special forces into Syria and Lebanon. According to Mr. Shaw, former Russian intelligence boss Yevgeny Primakov came to Iraq in December 2002 in order to supervise "cleanup" operations to remove WMD production materials from the country. This operation, carried out by GRU military intelligence and Russian "spetsnaz," or special forces, troops, was designed to make it possible for critics of the war to be able to claim that Iraq had had no WMD. Mr. Shaw claims that officials in the Pentagon and the CIA, who were fearful of alienating Moscow, actively worked to discredit his efforts to bring this story to light, and that some derided it as "Israeli disinformation."

Posted by: Ace at 01:51 PM | Comments (19)
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But wait, what's this? I agree with him:

How, asks Gadiel, whose son James died in the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center, can a company owned by a terror-linked country get control of our nation's ports?

"I'm a lifelong Republican and I think the President's gone insane," said Gadiel, 58, who heads 9/11 Families for a Secure America.

Two of the 19 9/11 hijackers were citizens of Dubai, the Arab emirate whose bid to run ports in New York, New Jersey and four other cities was okayed by the White House even though investigators have found signs that money used to finance terrorism flowed through Dubai banks.

"How the hell could this happen?" fumed Bill Doyle, 58, a retired Staten Island stockbroker whose son Joseph also died when the Trade Center fell.

"We're not securing our country in any way by selling our ports to foreigners," he said.

I'm not sure if I buy that "lifelong Republican" claim -- aren't all the President's critics, who aren't elected officials required to identify with one party or another, "lifelong Republicans"? -- but he seems right.

It is not difficult to imagine terrorist infiltration into the company running the ports and certain packages and shipping containers going uninspected.

We can't even adequately control our ports when they're under American control. Now we're going to give them over to Dubai?

What the hell is Bush thinking?

The Democrats see a political edge here. I hope they exploit it-- and get the Bush Administration to reverse itself.

Posted by: Ace at 12:50 PM | Comments (146)
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Well, not really. Any time a blow hits you hard enough to knock out two teeth you're probably going to feel it.

NEW James Bond Daniel Craig has already failed to make the grade as a tough guy - after a villain knocked out two of his teeth in his FIRST fight scene.

Craig, 37, was in Prague filming the remake of Casino Royale when the stunt went wrong.

As the shaken star staggered backwards clutching his bleeding mouth, cameramen thought it was a brilliant piece of acting.

But they quickly realised the new 007 was really hurt. His injuries were so bad local dentistry experts could not treat him. So Craig's dentist was flown out from London for emergency surgery in the Czech capital Prague.

It was the villain-actor's fault, of course. You, um, are supposed to pull punches when fake-fighting, I'm reliably informed.

Still... Daniel Craig was a nice, educated Yuppie criminal in Layer Cake, but once again the Bond people -- real tightwads; they won't pay anyone points in the profits of a film -- have picked the second (or third) best choice for a role.

Thanks to SWOOD.

Posted by: Ace at 12:14 PM | Comments (25)
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Jeff Jacoby argues the media is afraid to run the cartoons, and Captain's Quarters agrees.

I don't. I don't imagine that many publishers or editors actually fear a molotov cocktail being tossed through their living room window.

I've said this before, but...

It's simply a matter of leftist, "anti-colonialist" bias. American, Western, and above all else Christian institutions should be mocked and undermined, the media's thinking goes, in order to reduce the colonialist hegemony of these structures.

On the other hand, foreign and non-Christian institutions and beliefs are due the greatest amount of respect, because, well, they're non-American, non-Western, and non-Christian. They should be promoted and exhalted, because they represent an alternative and a challenge to the despised Western/Christian traditions.

Newspapermen jump to insult Christianity by running photos of Andre Serrano's "Piss Christ." But when it comes to insulting the Muslim faith, suddenly the watchwords are "respect" and "avoiding giving offense."

Note that in the Piss Christ controversy, the question was whether the state should fund such offensive artwork, and if it should be displayed at state-subsidized museums.

In the Muslim Cartoon wars, the question is whether private entities (US media organizations) should report the "best evidence" regarding the catalyst for an enormous foreign policy story, and one with an ever-growing bodycount.

The media protests that it's not necessary to run these photos to report on the story; that people can imagine what the cartoons look like without actually seeing them displayed in the media. Well, the same could have been said about "Piss Christ" -- it's a crucifix in a glass container of urine, for crying out loud; pretty easily described, no? -- and yet they didn't mind offending millions of Christians by running that schock-schlock "art."

And further-- does the public really understand just how banal and inoffensive most of these "offensive" cartoons really are?

Posted by: Ace at 09:59 AM | Comments (40)
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Reacting to Iran's vow to publish anti-Semitic cartoon in reaction to the Mohammad cartoons (as if the Islamic world weren't churning such out by the buttload anyhow), an Israeli cartoonist has announced a pre-emptive unilateral anti-Semitic cartoon contest.

Just to show them, I guess, that 1, cartoons aren't cause for violence, and 2, we can beat them at anything.

If you've got your own anti-Semitic doodle, send it to amitaiss@yahoo.com.

Via Ken Wheaton.

Correction: I originally wrote this was from Israely Cool. It's not.

Posted by: Ace at 09:49 AM | Comments (21)
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Probably only a moral victory, as criminals don't keep many assets in their names, but a sweet one nevertheless:

soldier wounded in Afghanistan and the widow of his slain comrade were awarded a $102.6 million judgment from the estate of a suspected al-Qaida financier.

U.S. District Judge Paul Cassell said the lawsuit may be the first filed by an American soldier against terrorists under the Patriot Act.

...

Morris cited news reports including interviews with his attacker's immediate family indicating that Omar Khadr, then 15, had wounded him and killed Speer. The ruling, released Friday, cited similar evidence that the boy's father, suspected financier Ahmad Sa'id Khadr, was linked to al-Qaida and trained his son to attack American targets.

I have no problem with Canada opening itself up to this Al Qaeda family.

But I would prefer it if Canada were to open up its jails to these bastards.

Posted by: Ace at 09:01 AM | Comments (10)
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He takes his "very good friend," as he's called her before the show flopped, to the conference room:

Sometimes there is too much of a good thing.

Martha Stewart believes her version of NBC's popular reality show featuring Donald Trump flopped this past fall because of too much "Apprentice."

Her show was supposed to be the sole show, starting out by having her fire Trump on the air, she told Newsweek for its issue on newsstands Monday.

"Having two 'Apprentices' was as unfair to him as it was unfair to me," she said. "But Donald really wanted to stay on."

Trump refuted the domestic diva would have given him a pink slip, citing the fact that he co-owned the show featuring him as a boardroom boss.

"I wish she would be able to take responsibility for her failure," Trump told The Associated Press Sunday night in Dallas. He said her show didn't have the right tone or the right demeanor.

Okay, let me explain to both of these ass-clowns what the problem was.

Yes, Martha's Apprentice was pretty lame. During its run I called it "The Gay Apprentice" because of the decidedly femme nature of almost every task. Sure, it being a Martha show, you'd expect some of that; but really, does every task have to involve salad dressings and doilies?

But the main problem was, as Martha says, the (almost) incomprehensible decision to run both shows during the same season on back-to-back nights. It was simply too much -- I couldn't watch the show twice a week, and I'm a fan -- and it became difficult to tell the largely-interchangeable casts from one another. I was forever mixing up one show with the other.

The decision was merely "almost" incomprehensible, though. NBC did this because they had virtually no other programming to run in the fall, and they were hoping to plug up their weak schedule with two hours of hit shows per week. But they just about killed one of their few golden gooses. It was far smarter to let the Trump show air, and then, as audience built to the big finale and people became more and more interested, then run the Martha show, when people were most desperate for a new Apprentice fix.

This was all obvious before the season, too, as I've written before.

Anyway:

Yes, Martha's show was lame and much, much too girly. Donald's Apprentice had girly elements and tasts -- it had a good mix of appeal to both men and women -- but Martha seemed to go only for the female demographic.

But-- two Apprentices per week was too much of a good adequate, somewhat diverting thing.

Posted by: Ace at 08:52 AM | Comments (17)
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We have an agreement in principle, it seems:

“I have sworn to only live free. Even if I find bitter the taste of death, I don’t want to die humiliated or deceived,” bin Laden said.

Kind of ironic that a confirmed fascist has vowed to "live free or die," as the license plates of libery-loving New Hampshire announce. Seems another case of a Do As I Say, Not As I Do "progressive."

(Hey, he builds "day care centers" according Patty Murray, right?)

Posted by: Ace at 08:40 AM | Comments (16)
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More of this is needed if we're to get to the bottom of this:

As one of the reports in the press commented last year regarding this story, there are "bad guys" who were not held accountable for their failures. There were those who were fearful of what we were doing who played politics and shortchanged the nation in both their duty and loyalty to the country, and in the end they put their career ahead of doing the right thing.

Mr. William Huntington, who was just promoted to serve as the Deputy Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, who after becoming the Deputy Director of HUMINT in the early 2001 timeframe passed the buck. When I attempted to brief him on the DORHAWK GALLEY project, to include information on the ABLE DANGER project that was to use specific portions of the ABLE DANGER methodology to sort through and separate U.S. Person information from Foreign Intelligence information, to hear the briefing, announcing that "I can't be here, I can't see this" as he left his office and refused to return to hear the information. By doing this, he could later fain ignorance of the project should it have been compromised to the public. It is my believe that he is an example of the cultural problem — senior bureaucrats who are more focused on their own career and having "plausible deniability" to never allow anything "controversial or risky" to "touch them".

No wonder the DIA and intelligence services are determined to keep this story secret.

Posted by: Ace at 08:28 AM | Comments (7)
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Daniel Henninger seems to nail it:

"Have you ever noticed how, on a scale of one to 10, every untoward event in the life of the Bush presidency goes straight to a 10?

The Abu Ghraib photos? A 10 forever. Dick Cheney catching a hunting buddy with some birdshot? An instant 10. The Bush national guard story? Total 10. How can it be that each downside event in this presidency greets the public at this one, screeching level of outrage and denunciation by the out-of-power party and a perpetually outraged media?

There was a time when what has been called news judgment would deem some stories a five or six and run them on page 14 or deeper in the newscast ... Not with this presidency. Every downside event - large, small and in-between - plays on the front page above the fold now. And when Dick Cheney accidentally pops Harry Whittington, old Harry Reid jumps up from his Senate leader's desk faster than a Nevada jack rabbit to announce, one more time, that this 'is part of the secretive nature of this administration'.

Here are some of the political and media bonfires that have been lit on the White House lawn, stoked and reignited over the past five years: the 'stolen' 2000 election, Halliburton, 'Fahrenheit 9/11', Cheney lives in an 'undisclosed location', Abu Ghraib, torture at Guantánamo Bay, Bush lied about WMD, secret CIA prison sites, Valerie Plame, the neocons ... Cheney's 'secret' energy task force, Cindy Sheehan, Bush is destroying social security, Hurricane Katrina, Jack Abramoff, illegal wiretaps, Bill Frist's stock sales, what else?

From Glenn Reynolds' essay on our perpetually-persnicketty media. Cross-posted at Say Anything, where I'll be doing a little guest blogging while Rob is busy.

Posted by: Ace at 08:01 AM | Comments (14)
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