Will Bush Education Department Destroy US Higher Education?

Of all the disasters caused by Bush Administration policies, there is one that I have seen up-close and personal--an attempt to bring "outcomes-based education" to US Higher Education through the mechanism of accreditation bodies. The result, as any adjunct faculty member knows, is a morass of bureaucratic goals, objectives, rubrics, boilerplate padding of syllabi, and "training" that seems designed to dumb down higher education until it becomes as disabled as what goes on in the worst American K-12 public schools. I've actually seen the University of Phoenix and Stanley Kaplan test prep courses held up as models for what university courses should become...

Until now, I thought no one was acting to oppose the imposition of an iron cage of accreditation review, an additional layer of bureaucracy championed by Education Secretary Margaret Spellings. But according to an article in Inside Higher Education, I'm not alone in thinking that the Bush Administration initiatives are bureaucratic madness:

The accreditation panel is by far the most controversial of the rule making committees, because unlike the others, there have been no recent changes in federal law regarding accreditation, and some college officials have questioned whether the department has the legal grounds to consider some of the changes it is considering — most of which were prompted by the work of the Secretary of Education’s Commission on the Future of Higher Education.

Over several months, the negotiators — a mix of college administrators, accrediting agency officials and others — have engaged in pointed and at times tense debates about a range of issues, most of which boil down to: how far the federal government should go in demanding that accreditors set minimum standards for the performance of the colleges they oversee, most notably on how much their students learn.

As the department’s various proposals have evolved over the weeks and months, they have become slightly less intrusive at each turn. Most recently, the department issued draft regulatory language — based, its officials repeated again and again, on a proposal that some of the “non-federal” negotiators had suggested — that would no longer require accrediting agencies to dictate to colleges the levels of performance they must achieve in student learning (for non-vocational programs, at least; for vocational programs, all accreditors would still be required to set such standards, which agencies that accredit for-profit career-related colleges already must).

But because the government would still require accrediting agencies to judge whether the standards that colleges set for themselves and their success in meeting those goals are sufficient — and because the accreditors would be doing so knowing that the Education Department can (through its process for recognizing accrediting agencies) punish any accreditor who doesn’t set the bar high enough to satisfy department officials — some members of the negotiating panel argued Tuesday that even the less-aggressive changes amount to federal control of accreditation, and ultimately of higher education.

“We are taking a system of quality review driven by cooperation and replacing it with a parent-child relationship,” where the parent (the accreditor) is “controlled by the federal government,” argued Judith S. Eaton, president of the Council on Higher Education Accreditation, which coordinates accreditation nationally and recognizes 60 accrediting agencies. “When the accreditor stipulates the level of the performance indicators and the performance expectations, the institution has lost the opportunity to set its own direction, and that’s where the problem is ... We should say yes to accountability and to the goals of accountability, but no to this way.”

I'd go even further and ask that university cooperation with this initiative be ended as soon as possible. In the interests of academic freedom and defending the one element of our educational system that is really a model for the world--higher education--I'd ask Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats to stop the Bush Administration's accreditation reform madness, before it completely destroys the liberal arts in American colleges and universities...

David Halberstam Killed By Journalism Student

According to the San Francsico Chronicle:

At the time of Monday morning's accident, Halberstam was being driven to an interview with Hall of Fame quarterback Y.A. Tittle.

The drivers of the two cars were injured, but not seriously. Halberstam was being driven by a graduate journalism student from the University of California at Berkeley, where he had visited over the weekend. The crash remained under investigation, and the Menlo Park police officer on duty early Tuesday said no further information was available.

Kommersant on the Death of Boris Yeltsin

At the president's residence, it seemed to me that the tragedy had occurred in those very rooms: everyone walked carefully, avoiding each other's eyes, and spoke in whispers, if they spoke at all. People mentioned that Boris Nikolayevich's heart had been bothering him for a week, and then he suddenly improved on Sunday. Just when everyone had breathed a sigh of relief, he suffered cardiac arrest. The doctors did everything they could: they managed to get his heart going again, but it soon stopped, this time forever. His allotted time was simply up. He was so worn out that he just had no chance. No chance, and there was nothing else that could be done.

Vladimir Putin decided to make an announcement about the death of Russia's first president. The text of the statement was his own, and he edited and corrected it several times. He considered the words to be so important for himself personally and for the country as a whole that he waited to write them down until he could gather his thoughts late yesterday evening.

Before then, he met with the president of Turkmenistan, whom he went out to meet in a dark suit and tie. Mr. Berdymukhammedov initially smiled at the Russian president, but as soon as he saw the expression on Mr. Putin's face, the smile slid from his lips. In my opinion, the Turkmen president did not immediately understand what was going on and labored for some time under the impression that Mr. Putin's condition was somehow his fault. The Russian president congratulated Mr. Berdymukhammedov unenthusiastically on his election to the post of president and declared that the relationship between Turkmenistan and Russia is going along "extremely well" and that "we have responded to your recent request to build another branch of the gas pipeline along the Caspian Sea." Then he clammed up.

"Thank you for your respect… We are grateful for your hospitality…" began the Turkmen president. "Our cooperation has historical, uh, roots… We will build our cooperation on, um, mutually beneficial terms…"

Obviously noticing that something was up, he let his voice trail off. It seemed that he was still uninformed about what had happened. When the journalists were leaving, Vladimir Putin quietly informed his colleague, "we suffered a great tragedy today."

The talks with the president of Turkmenistan were also very short, as was dinner with him.

At the same time, it was being decided what would be done with the president's address to the Federation Council, which was scheduled for April 25. When it became known that Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin's family might schedule the funeral for Thursday, April 26, the Kremlin determined to go forward with the speech on Wednesday as planned, with the additional of a few extra phrases that would have the hall on its feet.

But then it was announced that the funeral would be on Wednesday, and the president's speech was immediately rescheduled.

There was no real doubt where final goodbyes would be said to Russia's first president: the Church of Christ the Savior, in the portion of the church dedicated to events of exceptional importance in the life of the church and of the country. Boris Yeltsin will be laid to rest in Novodevichy Cemetery.

An hour after the Turkmen president left, Vladimir Putin said his first words of farewell to Boris Yeltsin. In a televised speech to the nation, he also designated April 25 a national day of mourning.

"We knew Boris Nikolayevich as a courageous and also warm-hearted, sincere man," said Mr. Putin. "This was a straightforward and brave national leader… Boris Yeltsin took full responsibility on himself for everything that he advocated and strove for. For what he tried to do and did – for the sake of the country, for the sake of millions of Russians. All of Russia's woes and hardships, people's difficulties and woes, he unceasingly channeled through himself… And today I express my sincerest and deepest sympathies to [Yeltsin's widow] Naina Iosifovna and to Boris Nikolayevich's friends and relatives. We grieve together with you. We will do everything in our power to ensure that the memory of Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin, his noble designs, his words 'take care of Russia' always serve as our moral and political compass… The person who brought an entire era into being has gone. A new democratic Russia was born – a free nation open to the world. Thanks to the will and direct initiative of Boris Yeltsin, a new constitution was adopted that acclaimed human rights as the highest value. It gave the people the opportunity to freely express their thoughts, to freely choose the powers-that-be in the country…"

Vladimir Putin's words oblige him to do the same.

The Accomplices: A Review

It seems fitting to review Bernard Weinraub's The Accomplices around the time of Israel's 59th Independence Day. I saw Ian Morgan's impressive New Group production at The Acorn theatre on 42nd Street last Saturday. The actors were uniformly excellent, direction intelligent, sets and costumes true to the 1940s period. Weinraub's play is a serious work about an important subject, and even if were not as well-written as it is, one that merits sober consideration. It is not for everyone, just for sensitive and intelligent audiences who like old-fashioned plays that help them think as well as feel. In a word--highbrow.

It is necessary to note that The Accomplices is a work of metaphorical rather than literal truth. Don't look to the play for an account of what actually happened day-by-day. It is not a documentary--although reminiscent of work by Clifford Odets, Arthur Miller, or the WPA Federal Theatre Project's Living Newspaper. Rather, it reflects a personal re-imagining of history in order to illuminate, explore, and challenge the complacency of an audience. The pacing is slow and deliberate, it takes concentration and attention to understand what is happening on stage--it is a difficult play, intended for intelligent audiences. If you don't get it, then it's not for you. But if you do, you will think about it for a while. It sticks.

The conflicts between characters are symbolic incarnations of forces, such as love, fear, bigotry, assimilation, political expediency, calculation, determination, well-intentioned caution, and regret, that loom bigger than the individuals on stage, bigger than the story itself. For example, Daniel Sauli's Peter Bergson and David Margulies' Rabbi Stephen Wise act not as individuals alone, but as archetypal figures, representing the New Hebrew--the Israeli--in conflict with the Diaspora Jew--in the person of the "Pope" of the American Reform movement.

Bergson, arrived from Palestine, sees America with the eyes of a foreigner, so does not understand Wise. Wise, likewise, does not understand Bergson. What they say to each other on stage, they did not say in real life. But through their actions, they illuminate a Father-Son conflict at the roots of tensions in the relationship between Israel and American Jewry. Zionist leaders like Rabbi Wise helped create the state of Israel. That young Israel pursued a truly independent national course inevitably led to a strained relationship. The conflict between Bergson and Wise is the conflict between the Diaspora and Israel.

This conflict is nested within other sets of dramatic conflicts--between "Our Crowd" members like Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, Jr. and "street Jews" like speechwriter Samuel Rosenman, between Hollywood representatives like Ben Hecht and Establishment pillars, between Eleanor and Franklin, between the Treasury Department and the State Department. between Congress and the President. It's not just a play about Peter Bergson--it's a play about human nature in times of crisis, as acted out in the American system of government.

In brilliantly acted scenes starring John DeVries as FDR and Robert Hogan as a very Princetonian Breckenridge Long, Weinraub illuminates FDR's Machiavellian genius in holding together a Democratic Party coalition that united Southern racists and union leaders alongside liberal Northerners. In the character of Breckenridge Long, the State Deparment functionary responsible for keeping immigrants out of the USA in the wake of the Depression. When Rosenman finally asks Long to let up and permit more refugees to enter the USA, Long tells Samuel Rosenman that they both work for the same man--FDR.

Even Bergson's relationship with his wife Betty is symbolic of a conflict between political commitment and personal growth--Betty is portrayed as a dancer more interested in Bergson as a man, than in his cause.

Which is to say that The Accomplices is complex and intricate, operating on a series of different levels that require a certain degree of sophistication. It is a subtle work--not The Lion King nor Angels in America.

I must admit a personal interest, in that the author credited my film with stimulating an interest in the subject, and credited me generously in his program notes. Weinraub has gone well beyond what I attempted, and taken his story in a different and interesting direction. In his dramatizations of character and action, he both intensifed and crystallized the underlying personal and philosophical dramas of the conflict in a way that my documentary could not.

And he does it very well. I attended the play with the man who paid for the production of my film, a professor of political science and editor of a journal of international relations--and he was more enthusiastic than I, saying that the depiction of the FDR-Breckenridge Long-Morgenthau relationship was exactlly how political scientists understand presidential decision-making. Perhaps it might be staged at next year's American Political Science Association convention?

In any case, The Accomplices runs in New York until May 5th. You can buy tickets online, here.

Sarkozy Next French President

That's the gist of today's post-election analysis in today's International Herald Tribune.

Leon Aron Remembers Boris Yeltsin, 76

In a statement released by the American Enterprise Institute:

Today, Boris Yeltsin, the first democratically elected leader in Russia's thousand-year history, died.

As AEI resident scholar Leon Aron explains in his book, Yeltsin: A Revolutionary Life, Yeltsin oversaw the transformation of the Russian political system from stark totalitarianism to free market-based democracy. He institutionalized the vital liberties that Gorbachev had granted only provisionally and often by default, including freedom of speech and free and multicandidate elections. His eight and a half years as president were by far the freest, most tolerant, and open period Russia had ever known.

The Russia that Yeltsin left behind reflected the contradictions of its founding father. It was a hybrid: a polity still semiauthoritarian, corrupt, and mistrusted by the society, but also one that was governable, in which the elites' competition for power was arbitrated by popular vote, and in which most of the tools of authoritarian mobilization and coercion appeared to have been significantly dulled.

Leon Aron, author of Yeltsin: A Revolutionary Life, the definitive biography of Yeltsin, is available for comment. He can be contacted at laron@aei.org or through his assistant, Igor Khrestin, at 202.828.6025 or ikhrestin@aei.org.

For additional media inquiries, please contact Veronique Rodman at 202.862.4870 or vrodman@aei.org.

Blame De-Institutionalization for School Massacres

Dr. Jonathan Kellerman tells it like it is about the Virginia Tech massacre, in today's Wall Street Journal:

The basic premise of Community Psych--that severely mentally ill people could be depended on to show up for treatment voluntarily--never made sense to me. The core of the most common and debilitating psychosis, schizophrenia, is degradation of thought and reason. So the idea that people with fractured minds could and would make rational, often complex decisions about self-care seemed preposterous.

One day, I voiced that opinion in class, questioning if any mechanisms were being set in place to prevent a flood of schizophrenics from ending up on the streets, homeless, helpless, victims of crime and, in some cases, victimizers. The Community Psych professor--one of the liberationists--responded with a patronizing smile and a folksy account of the success of a program in rural Belgium or some such place, where humble working folk created a therapeutic milieu by volunteering to house psychotics in their humble homes and everything ended up peachy.

I didn't challenge what amounted to flimsy anecdotal data, but I did question its relevance to the plight of thousands of severely mentally disabled individuals set loose in vast urban centers. The professor's smile tightened and he changed the subject; and I resolved to get through this joke of a prerequisite and concentrate on becoming the best psychologist possible.

By the time I received my doctorate in 1974, the doors to many of the locked wards had been flung open and the much vaunted community mental health centers were being built--predominately in low-rent neighborhoods. A few years later, government funding for these allegedly humane treatment outposts had been cut, as yet more fiscal belt-tightening was inspired by findings that they didn't work.

Because crazy people rarely showed up for treatment voluntarily, and when they did, the treatment milieu consisted of queuing up interminably at Thorazine Kiosks.

William Easterly on Paul Wolfowitz

In today's Washington Post:

Pity Paul Wolfowitz: Every time he tries regime change, he triggers an insurrection.

The latest revolt was launched by World Bank staffers and Western aid leaders in response to the revelation that Wolfowitz -- who had made a crusade against corruption the hallmark of his bumpy tenure as president of the World Bank -- may have awarded his companion a $60,000 pay increase. A staff that had always hated working for the intellectual architect of the Iraq war was now quite literally shouting for his resignation, and Wolfowitz was left wandering the corridors of the bank looking for a Green Zone in which to hide.

The root cause of his debacle at the bank was pretty much the same as the reason for the fiasco in Iraq: intellectual hubris at the top that disdained the messy realities at the bottom. He imagined it would be as easy to clean up the pathologies of foreign aid as he had thought it would be to create democracy in the Middle East.

Was Virgnia Tech Gunman Taught to Hate?

James Lewis says Virginia Tech's curriculum is full of crazy ideas that may have set the stage for Cho Seung-Hui's violent rampage:

Yes, I know. Tens of thousands of ordinary college students are lonely, full of rage, lost and frustrated. A few percent are psychotically disturbed, and some of them can kill. Our big factory colleges are alienating. Take millions of adolescents, and at any time there are bound to be quite a few confused and seething souls walking loose. Just visit downtown in any American or European city, and you can see all the lost and disturbed living in their private hells. And no, that doesn't excuse executing thirty-two innocents.

Still, I wonder --- was Cho taught to hate? Whatever he learned in his classes --- did it enable him to rage at his host country, to hate the students he envied so murderously? Was he subtly encouraged to aggrandize himself by destroying others? Was his pathology enabled by the PC university? Or to ask the question differently --- was Cho ever taught to respect others, to admire the good things about his host country, and to discipline himself to build a positive life?

And that answer is readily available on the websites of Cho's English Department at Virginia Tech. This is a wonder world of PC weirdness. English studies at VT are a post-modern Disney World in which nihilism, moral and sexual boundary breaking, and fantasies of Marxist revolutionary violence are celebrated. They show up in a lot of faculty writing. Not by all the faculty, but probably by more than half...

...The question I have is: Are university faculty doing their jobs? At one time college teachers were understood to have a parental role. Take a look at the hiring and promotion criteria for English at VT, and you see what their current values are. Acting in loco parentis, with the care, protectiveness, and alertness for trouble among young people is the last thing on their minds. They are there to do "research," to act like fake revolutionaries, and to stir up young people to go out and revolt against society. Well, somebody just did.

I'm sorry but VT English doesn't look like a place that gives lost and angry adolescents the essential boundaries for civilized behavior. In fact, in this perversely disorienting PoMo world, the very words "civilized behavior" are ridiculed --- at least until somebody starts to shoot students, and then it's too late. A young culture-shocked adolescent can expect no firm guidance here. But we know that already.

John Loftus on the Muslim Brotherhood's Nazi Roots

Melanie Phillips' article on Saddam's WMD led me to Google "John Loftus", which led to this item he published on the history of the Muslim Brotherhood:

Let me give you an example. This year a friend of mine from the CIA, named Bob Baer wrote a very good book about Saudi Arabia and terrorism, it's called “Sleeping with the Devil.” I read the book and I got about a third of the way through and I stopped. Bob was writing how when he worked for the CIA how bad the files were.

He said, for example, the files for the Muslim Brotherhood were almost nothing. There were just a few newspaper clippings. I called Bob up and said, “Bob, that's wrong. The CIA has enormous files on the Muslim Brotherhood, volumes of them. I know because I read them a quarter of a century ago.” He said, “What do you mean?”

Here's how you can find all of the missing secrets about the Muslim Brotherhood -- and you can do this too. I said, “Bob, go to your computer and type in two words into the search part. Type the word “banna,” b-a-n-n-a. He said, “Yeah.” Type in “Nazi.” Bob typed the two words in, and out came (now tens of) thousands of articles from around the world. He read them and called me back and said, “Oh my God, what have we done?”

What I'm doing today is doing what I'm doing now: I'm educating a new generation in the CIA that the Muslim Brotherhood was a fascist organization that was hired by Western Intelligence that evolved over time into what we today know as al Qaeda.

Here's how the story began. In the 1920's there was a young Egyptian named al Banna. And al Banna formed this nationalist group called the Muslim Brotherhood. Al Bana was a devout admirer of Adolph Hitler and wrote to him frequently. So persistent was he in his admiration of the new Nazi Party that in the 1930's, al Bana and the Muslim Brotherhood became a secret arm of Nazi Intelligence.

The Arab Nazis had much in common with the new Nazi doctrines. They hated Jews; they hated democracy; and they hated the Western culture. It became the official policy of the Third Reich to secretly develop the Muslim Brotherhood as the fifth Parliament, an army inside Egypt.

When war broke out, the Muslim Brotherhood promised in writing that they would rise up and help General Rommell and make sure that no English or American soldier was left alive in Cairo or Alexandria.

The Muslim Brotherhood began to expand in scope and influence during World War II. They even had a Palestinian section headed by the grand Mufti of Jerusalem, one of the great bigots of all time. Here, too, was a man - - The grand Mufti of Jerusalem was the Muslim Brotherhood representative for Palestine. These were undoubtedly Arab Nazis. The Grand Mufti, for example, went to Germany during the war and helped recruit an international SS division of Arab Nazis. They based it in Croatia and called it the “Handjar” Muslim Division, but it was to become the core of Hitler's new army of Arab fascists that would conquer the Arab peninsula from then on to Africa -- grand dreams.

At the end of World War II, the Muslim Brotherhood was wanted for war crimes. Their German intelligence handlers were captured in Cairo. The whole net was rolled up by the British Secret Service. Then a horrible thing happened.

Instead of prosecuting the Nazis - - the Muslim Brotherhood - - the British government hired them. They brought all the fugitive Nazi war criminals of Arab and Muslim descent into Egypt, and for three years they were trained on a special mission. The British Secret Service wanted to use the fascists of the Muslim Brotherhood to strike down the infant state of Israel in 1948. Only a few people in the Mossad know this, but many of the members of the Arab Armies and terrorist groups that tried to strangle the infant State of Israel were the Arab Nazis of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Britain was not alone. The French Intelligence service cooperated by releasing the Grand Mufti and smuggling him to Egypt, so all of the Arab Nazis came together. So, from 1945 to 1948, the British Secret Service protected every Arab Nazi they could, but they failed to quash the State of Israel.

What the British did then, they sold the Arab Nazis to the predecessor of what became the CIA. It may sound stupid; it may sound evil, but it did happen. The idea was that we were going to use the Arab Nazis in the Middle East as a counterweight to the Arab communists. Just as the Soviet Union was funding Arab communists, we would fund the Arab Nazis to fight against. And lots of secret classes took place. We kept the Muslim Brotherhood on our payroll.

But the Egyptians became nervous. Nasser ordered all of the Muslim Brotherhood out of Egypt or be imprisoned, and we would execute them all. During the 1950's, the CIA evacuated the Nazis of the Muslim Brotherhood to Saudi Arabia. Now when they arrived in Saudi Arabia, some of the leading lights of the Muslim Brotherhood like Azzam, became the teachers in the Madrasas, the religious schools. And there they combined the doctrines of Nazism with this weird Islamic cult, Wahhabiism.

Everyone thinks that Islam is this fanatical religion, but it is not. They think that Islam -- the Saudi version of Islam - -is typical, but it's not. The Wahhabi cult was condemned as a heresy more than 60 times by the Muslim nations. But when the Saudis got wealthy, they bought a lot of silence. This is a very harsh cult. The Wahhabiism was only practiced by two nations, the Taliban and Saudi Arabia. That's how extreme it is. It really has nothing to do with Islam. Islam is a very peaceful and tolerant religion. It has always had good relationships with the Jews for the first thousand years of its existence.

For the Saudis, there was a ruler in charge of Saudi Arabia, and they were the new home of the Muslim Brotherhood, and fascism and extremism were mingled in these schools. And there was a young student who paid attention - - and Azzam's student was named Osama Bin Ladin. Osama Bin Ladin was taught by the Nazis of the Muslim Brotherhood who had emigrated to Saudi Arabia.

In 1979 the CIA decided to take the Arab Nazis out of cold storage. The Russians had invaded Afghanistan, so we told the Saudis that we would fund them if they would bring all of the Arab Nazis together and ship them off to Afghanistan to fight the Russians. We had to rename them. We couldn't call them the Muslim Brotherhood because that was too sensitive a name. Its Nazi cast was too known. So we called them the Maktab al Khidimat il Mujahideen, the MAK.

And the CIA lied to Congress and said they didn't know who was on the payroll in Afghanistan, except the Saudis. But it was not true. A small section CIA knew perfectly well that we had once again hired the Arab Nazis and that we were using them to fight our secret wars.

Azzam and his assistant, Osama Bin Ladin, rose to some prominence from 1979 to '89, and they won the war. They drove the Russians out of Afghanistan. Our CIA said, “We won, let's go home!” and we left this army of Arab fascists in the field of Afghanistan.

Saudis didn't want to come back. Saudis started paying bribes to Osama Bin Ladin and his followers to stay out of Saudi Arabia. Now the MAK split in half. Azzam was mysteriously assassinated apparently by Osama Bin Ladin himself. The radical group -- the most radical of the merge of the Arab fascists and religious extremists -- Osama called that al Qaeda. But to this day there are branches of the Muslim Brotherhood all through al Qaeda.

Osama Bin Ladin's second in command, Ayman al-Zawahiri, came from the Egyptian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, the results of a Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

There are many flavors and branches, but they are all Muslim Brotherhoods. There is one in Israel. The organization you know as “Hamas” is actually a secret chapter of the Muslim Brotherhood. When Israel assassinated Sheik Yassin, the Muslim Brotherhood published his obituary in a Cairo newspaper in Arabic and revealed that he was actually the secret leader of the Muslim Brotherhood in Gaza.

So the Muslim Brotherhood became this poison that spread throughout the Middle East and on 9/11, it began to spread around the world.

Where is Saddam's WMD?

Melanie Phillips claims that Saddam' Hussein's WMD was moved to Syria after discovery by Iraq Survey Group inspector Dave Gaubatz, due to American incompetence during the Iraq war--and that the CIA is involved in a CYA operation that requires denying that fact, while destroying relevant evidence:

‘The problem was that the ISG were concentrating their efforts in looking for WMD in northern Iraq and this was in the south’, says Mr Gaubatz. ‘They were just swept up by reports of WMD in so many different locations. But we told them if they didn’t excavate these sites, others would’.

That, he says, is precisely what happened. He subsequently learned from Iraqi, CIA and British intelligence that the WMD buried in the four sites were excavated by Iraqis and Syrians, with help from the Russians, and moved to Syria. The location in Syria of this material, he says, is also known to these intelligence agencies. The worst-case scenario has now come about. Saddam’s nuclear, biological and chemical material is in the hands of a rogue terrorist state — and one with close links to Iran.

When Mr Gaubatz returned to the US, he tried to bring all this to light. Two congressmen, Peter Hoekstra, Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, and Curt Weldon, were keen to follow up his account. To his horror, however, when they tried to access his classified intelligence reports they were told that all 60 of them —which, in the routine way, he had sent in 2003 to the computer clearing-house at a US air base in Saudi Arabia —had mysteriously gone missing. These written reports had never even been seen by the ISG.

One theory is that they were inadvertently destroyed when the computer’s data base was accidentally erased in the subsequent US evacuation of the air base. Mr Gaubatz, however, suspects dirty work at the crossroads. It is unlikely, he says, that no copies were made of his intelligence. And he says that all attempts by Messrs Hoekstra and Weldon to extract information from the Defence Department and CIA have been relentlessly stonewalled.

In 2005, the CIA held a belated inquiry into the disappearance of this intelligence. Only then did its agents visit the sites — to report that they had indeed been looted.

Mr Gaubatz’s claims remain largely unpublicised. Last year, the New York Times dismissed him as one of a group of WMD diehard obsessives. The New York Sun produced a more balanced report, but after that the coverage died. According to Mr Gaubatz, the reason is a concerted effort by the US intelligence and political world to stifle such an explosive revelation of their own lethal incompetence.

After he and an Iraqi colleague spoke at last month’s Florida meeting of the Intelligence Summit, an annual conference of the intelligence world, they were interviewed for two hours by a US TV show — only for the interview to be junked after the FBI repeatedly rang Mr Gaubatz and his colleague to say they would stop the interview from being broadcast.

The problem the US authorities have is that they can’t dismiss Mr Gaubatz as a rogue agent — because they have repeatedly decorated him for his work in the field. In 2003, he received awards for his ‘courage and resolve in saving lives and being critical for information flow’. In 2001, he was decorated for being the ‘lead agent in a classified investigation, arguably the most sensitive counter-intelligence investigation currently in the entire Department of Defence’ and because his ‘reports were such high quality, many were published in the Air Force’s daily threat product for senior USAF leaders or re-transmitted at the national level to all security agencies in US government’.

The organiser of the Intelligence Summit, John Loftus — himself a formidably well-informed former attorney to the intelligence world —has now sent a memorandum to Congress asking it to investigate Mr Gaubatz’s claims. He has also hit a brick wall. The reason is not hard to grasp.

The Republicans won’t touch this because it would reveal the incompetence of the Bush administration in failing to neutralise the danger of Iraqi WMD . The Democrats won’t touch it because it would show President Bush was right to invade Iraq in the first place. It is an axis of embarrassment.

Mr Loftus goes further. Saddam’s nuclear research, scientists and equipment, he says, have all been relocated to Syria, where US satellite intelligence confirms that uranium centrifuges are now operating — in a country which is not supposed to have any nuclear programme. There is now a nuclear axis, he says, between Iran, Syria and North Korea — with Russia and China helping build an Islamic bomb against the west. And of course, with assistance from American negligence.

‘Apparently Saddam had the last laugh and donated his secret stockpile to benefit Iran’s nuclear weapons programme. With a little technical advice from Beijing, Syria is now enriching the uranium, Iran is making the missiles, North Korea is testing the warheads, and the White House is hiding its head in the sand.’

.

France Awaits Election Returns

CNN coverage here.
Too close to call in advance, says Sky News:

A new opinion poll shows centre-right candidate Nicolas Sarkozy still leading with 29%, ahead of the Socialist Segolene Royal on 25%.

The BVA poll has the centrist candidate Francois Bayrou slipping to 15%.

But at least one-third of voters are still undecided ahead of Sunday's first round.

Writing in Slate, Christopher Hitchens predicts they will vote for Jean Le Pen:

Le Pen may still be proven wrong next weekend in his overconfident assertion that people will vote for the real thing rather than a surrogate. Sarkozy, and others, may draw his fangs by stealing his voters. But some of us can remember a time when—as someone once put it—if you heard people discussing La Revolution in a French cafe, you realized that they were talking not about the last one, but the next one. I don't think it is sufficiently appreciated that France has now become the most conservative major country in Europe, where different defenses of the status quo are at war only with different forms of nostalgia and even outright reaction.

LGF: PBS's "Insane Bias"

In an episode of its multipart series on Islamism:

Here’s a very good look at the insane bias of the PBS series “America At a Crossroads,” as they go to the most notorious extremist front group in America for quotes about “moderation,” and brush aside CAIR’s many, well-documented connections to terrorist groups. With an extended section about “soaring hate crimes” against Muslims, this is nothing but a public relations presentation for CAIR. Saudi money sure can buy some PBS love...

...And just for the record, in the 2001 FBI hate crime report, they list 481 anti-Islamic incidents: in 2002, 155; in 2003, 149; and in 2004, there were 156. That’s how much they have “soared.”

Ken Burns's and PBS's New "Separate But Equal" Hispanic Veteran Deal...

That's the strong implication of Paul Farhi's Washington Post story from April 18th:

A PBS official said yesterday that filmmaker Ken Burns will not re-cut his documentary on World War II -- a statement that disappointed and angered minority-group activists who on Tuesday said they believed Burns and PBS had committed to reediting the film to address their concerns about its content.

Programming chief John Wilson, seeking to clarify PBS's earlier statements, said yesterday that Burns's 14 1/2 -hour documentary, "The War," is complete. That statement, however, leaves unresolved the complaints from some Latino and American Indian organizations, which have been pressing Burns and PBS for months to incorporate into the film material about Latino and American Indian service members.

Burns has resisted any suggestion that he is changing "The War," despite his agreement to film additional material to try to address advocates' concerns. A spokesman for Burns insisted yesterday that the filmmaker isn't "reediting" his work, as The Washington Post reported yesterday....

...Some of the disagreement over Burns's -- and PBS's -- intentions turns on small but critical semantic distinctions, particularly whether the unproduced new material will be a "part" of "The War," or instead air as a supplement.

Latino advocates are wary that the additional content that Burns has promised will appear during breaks in the film, or otherwise outside the main story arc. They insist that the new material should be part of the story itself, which focuses on the wartime experiences of four towns or cities in different regions of the country.

But that will not be the case, according to Burns's representative and Wilson.

"It does not satisfy our concerns to be an amendment or some kind of addendum" to the documentary, said Raul Tapia, a spokesman for the American G.I. Forum, a Latino veterans organization. Latinos "who contributed so much to winning the war deserve better. They are not an addendum. They stood up for their country, and we are standing up for them."

Joshua Foust on Irshad Manji

Joshua Foust writes about Irshad Manji, on his blog The Conjecturer, about an episode of the PBS series America at a Crossroads:

The first hour was the debut documentary of Irshad Manji, the self-styled Muslim Refusenik. It basically follows her as she visits Yemen, Amsterdam, and her mother in Canada, discussing her objections to modern, extremist Islam. As always, it is mesmerizing to watch a devout lesbian feminist battle the regressive, fundamentalist men destroying her faith. I can relate, though obviously not to the same degree...

In Memoriam, Liviu Librescu

A link to Liviu Librescu's Virginia Tech website.

Wall Street Journal: Wolfowitz Scandal Payback for Anti-Corruption Drive at World Bank

Robert B. Holland, III, the US representative to the World Bank, writes that there's more to the Wolfowitz scandal than an appearance of nepotism, self-dealing, and cover-up by a former defense department official--it's about entrenched corruption among World Bank permanent staff:

Those interested in the success of the World Bank should be under no illusion as to what is really motivating the staff revolt now playing out and what the consequences are likely to be. Many are opposed to Mr. Wolfowitz's anti-corruption emphasis, some on the good faith basis that he is placing disproportionate emphasis on the issue at the expense of other development priorities. Others, however, are opposed on the selfish basis that elevating anticorruption and governance considerations will result in lower lending levels and more difficult negotiations with borrowing governments. Still others may fear exposure of corruption among staff itself and possible adverse donor reaction if widespread corruption appears to plague Bank operations.

Regardless of the fates of Mr. Wolfowitz and the anticorruption initiative, the Bank faces an existential financial problem because of the combined effect of its declining relevance and attractiveness as a funding source for many middle-income countries like China, India, Mexico and Russia, and an annual administrative budget exceeding $1 billion. It's a positive development that many countries no longer are dependent on Bank lending, but the income consequences to the Bank need to be addressed because the administrative budget is a serious burden on the world's poor and donor taxpayers.

The most important cost drivers are staff salaries and headcount, and it is here where some of the most pernicious effects of the staff association's union characteristics are felt. Over the years, the Bank's legal department has constructed a complex set of rules and procedures governing employment practices, particularly terminations, designed to avoid a court of law somewhere imposing something more onerous in the name of "due process."

The unfortunate result is a system of such Dickensian complexity that virtually all bank managers have concluded that no one can be fired. This, and the tendency of many Board members to intervene in individual cases to protect or promote their nationals, has resulted in far too many employees, many of whom are widely viewed as incompetent, and costly salaries and severance packages (compared to which Ms. Riza's package is a pittance).

Other unfortunate results are an unreasonably low mandatory retirement age of 60 and the retention of an army of consultants nearly as large as the Bank's regular workforce. Many consultants are former Bank staff. The permanent nature of Bank employment also complicates needed reform of its whistleblower policies, which are frequently abused as another tool of entrenchment.

All of these and other factors have added up to a bloated budget in which an unusually honest and candid senior budget official , who met with Mr. Wolfowitz in my home pending board approval of his nomination to avoid detection by more senior Bank staff, identified specific examples of wasteful spending adding up to about $300 million annually. Mr. Wolfowitz's first steps to rein in the Bank's unsustainable cost structure are another important reason many staff and their board allies want him gone. Unless he and his successors and the board address the cost structure, the Bank will be in danger of collapse.

After reading this, it seems that the US Congress might need to conduct an in-depth investigation of what's really going on at the World Bank. Obviously Wolfowitz didn't have the management skills needed for his job. And, after all, those huge tax-free salaries at the World Bank are paid by US taxpayer dollars...

Perhaps it may be time for Congress to shut down the World Bank gravy train altogether?

Nancy Pelosi's Father Helped Peter Bergson Rescue Jews During WWII

My father sent me this link, to Rafael Medoff's Jerusalem Post article about Nancy Pelosi's father--who supported Peter Bergson (Hillel Kook)--protagonist of Bernard Weinraub's new play, "The Accomplices," as well as my documentary (just out on DVD from Kino), "Who Shall LIve and Who Shall Die?"--in Congress:

Speaker Pelosi's father, the late US congressman Thomas D'Alesandro, Jr., of Maryland, was known as a Roosevelt Democrat. What is not widely known is that D'Alesandro broke ranks with president Franklin D. Roosevelt on the issues of rescuing Jews from Hitler and creating a Jewish State.

D'Alesandro was one of the congressional supporters of the Bergson Group, a maverick Jewish political action committee that challenged the Roosevelt administration's policies on the Jewish refugee issue during the Holocaust, and later lobbied against British control of Palestine.

The Bergson activists used unconventional tactics to draw attention to the plight of Europe's Jews, including staging theatrical pageants, organizing a march by 400 rabbis to the White House, and placing more than 200 full-page advertisements in newspapers around the country. Some of those ads featured lists of celebrities, prominent intellectuals, and members of Congress who supported the group - including D'Alesandro.

D'Alesandro's involvement with the Bergson Group was remarkable because he was a Democrat who was choosing to support a group that was publicly challenging a Democratic president. And D'Alesandro was not one of the conservative Southern "Dixiecrat" Democrats who sometimes tangled with FDR over various issues; he was a staunch supporter of Roosevelt and the New Deal. He even named his first son Franklin Roosevelt D'Alesandro.

UNTIL LATE in the Holocaust, the Roosevelt administration's position was that nothing could be done to rescue Jews from the Nazis except to win the war. The Bergson Group was convinced that there were many steps the US could take to rescue refugees, without impeding the war effort.

Bergson's strategy for changing US policy was anchored in the hope that humanitarian-minded Democrats like D'Alesandro would break ranks with the White House over the plight of the Jews. Rallying Congress was a way to put pressure on the president.

The Bergson Group's Holocaust campaign culminated in the introduction of a Congressional resolution, in late 1943, urging creation of a government agency to rescue refugees. Senator Tom Connally of Texas, a loyal FDR supporter and chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, blocked the committee's consideration of the resolution. But when Connally was out sick one day, his replacement, Senator Elbert Thomas (D-Utah) quickly ushered the resolution through. In the House of Representatives, too, there was growing support for the rescue resolution.

This Congressional pressure helped influence President Roosevelt to do what the resolution urged - in early 1944, he established the War Refugee Board. Despite its small staff and meager funding, the Board played a key role in the rescue of more than 200,000 Jews from the Holocaust. Its many accomplishments included sponsoring the heroic life-saving activities of the Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg in Nazi-occupied Budapest.

AFTER THE war, D'Alesandro continued supporting the Bergson Group as it campaigned for the establishment of a Jewish State in Mandatory Palestine. That sometimes meant clashing with the Truman administration, which wavered back and forth on the issue of Jewish statehood...

Virginia Tech Killer Had History of Mental Illness

From The Telegraph (UK):

The South Korean student who shot 32 people at Virginia Tech university was held in a mental health unit after two women students complained about his behaviour in autumn 2005, according to the university police chief.

Virginia Tech university officials were also warned repeatedly about Cho Seung-hui more than a year ago, a university teacher said.

Cho Seung-hui railed against ‘rich kids’and ‘debauchery’

Lucinda Roy, a former chairwoman of Virginia Tech’s English Department, told CNN she warned officials about Cho Seung-hui, 23, in 2005 after seeing how disturbing his creative writing essays were.

But she said the warnings were not taken seriously enough. The university has not yet responded to her comments.

Ms Roy said that she was so disturbed by what she found that she decided to take him out of the classroom for one-to-one tutoring.

“I was so uncomfortable that I didn’t feel that I could leave him in the classroom,” she said.

Queens College Conference on World Jewry

It's called: Is It 1938 Again?. Speakers include: Professor Irving Louis Horowitz,Hannah Arendt University Professor Emeritus of Sociology and Political Science, Rutgers University;Professor Michael Walzer,Center for Advanced Study, Princeton, Editor, Dissent;Professor Alan Dershowitz
Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law, Harvard Law School; and Norman Podhoretz, Editor-at-Large, Commentary Magazine . From the program:

In 1938, German Nazi totalitarianism, under the charismatic and mad leadership of Adolf Hitler, began its march toward world conquest and the destruction of the Jews. In an act of willful blindness, Western democratic leaders chose to negotiate and appease Nazism. Many Jewish leaders also downplayed the danger by convincing themselves that Nazi ideology was merely for domestic political consumption. Seven years later, over 50 million people, including six million European Jews, were dead: victims of World War II.

In 2007, extreme Islamist forces have spawned global Jihad, a state-sponsored terrorist war against the West as well as moderate Islamic states and their leaders, a war in which they openly proclaim their intention to destroy the Jewish State of Israel and its seven million inhabitants. This time, the chief peril emanates from radical Islamist Iran, whose President Ahmadinejad openly pursues nuclear weapons capability while brazenly declaring, “The accomplishment of a world without America and Israel is both possible and feasible.”

“IS IT 1938 AGAIN? A Major Conference on the State of World Jewry” presents an international array of scholars, writers, intellectuals and activists who will assess, debate and discuss today’s threat against the West and the Jewish people and identify options for meeting dangers to Jewish survival. Ample time will be allocated for Q&A.