Official Report of Cheney's Hunting Accident

Here's the Texas Parks and Wildlife Ranger's official report on the Vice President's hunting accident from the CBS News website. Karen Armstrong is listed as a witness. (ht Guns and Ammo Shooting Forum).

Where Are Iran's Nukes?

You can find some of them on this interesting map of Iran's nuclear facilities from the Intelligence Summit Blog (ht Roger L. Simon).

US Condemns New Images of Abu Gharib Torture

Al Jazeera seems to be reporting the US State Department's response to Australian television broadcasts of new pictures of Abu Gharib torture as a tactical defeat for the United States:

Bryan Whitman, a senior spokesman for the defence department, responded to the broadcast by Australian television network SBS of previously unpublished images of prisoner abuse.

"The department believes that a further release of images could only further inflame and possibly incite unnecessary violence in the world and would endanger our military men and women that are serving around the world," he said.

Whitman said he did not know whether US officials had reviewed the photos and video clips or whether they were among a group of images the department had been withholding from public release since 2004.

If only the US spokesman could have said: "As Justice Brandeis said, 'Sunlight is the best disinfectant.'The public has a right to know, and we took strong measures to end these reported abuses when they were first reported. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld took full responsibility at that time and he will announce his resignation this afternoon."

Here's a link to the Australian TV news report with the photos.

Where on earth is Rudy Giuliani?

UN to US: Shut Down Guantanamo

Al Jazeera has the story...

The Devil's Game

I saw this book by Robert Dreyfuss listed in a podcast on the History News Network while checking out a link about Abu Gharib photos from Michelle Malkin.

It seems intriguing, because Dreyfuss's claims about US policy favoring Islamic fundamentalists appear to explain a lot of things that are going wrong right now around the world from Denmark to Dagestan. Here's the blurb from Amazon.com:

The first complete account of America’s most
dangerous foreign policy miscalculation: sixty years of support for Islamic fundamentalism.

Devil’s Game is the gripping story of America’s misguided efforts, stretching across decades, to dominate the strategically vital Middle East by courting and cultivating Islamic fundamentalism. Among all the books about Islam, this is the first comprehensive inquiry into the touchiest issue: How and why did the United States encourage and finance the spread of radical political Islam?

Backed by extensive archival research and interviews with dozens of policy makers and CIA, Pentagon, and foreign service officials, Robert Dreyfuss argues that this largely hidden relationship is greatly to blame for the global explosion of terrorism. He follows the trail of American collusion from support for the Muslim Brotherhood in 1950s Egypt to links with Khomeini and Afghani jihadists to cooperation with Hamas and Saudi Wahhabism. Dreyfuss also uncovers long-standing ties between radical Islamists and the leading banks of the West. The result is as tragic as it is paradoxical: originally deployed as pawns to foil nationalism and communism, extremist mullahs and ayatollahs now dominate the region, thundering against freedom of thought, science, women’s rights, secularism—and their former patron.

Wide-ranging and deeply informed, Devil’s Game reveals a history of double-dealing, cynical exploitation, and humiliating embarrassment. What emerges is a pattern that, far from furthering democracy or security, ensures a future of blunders and blowback.

About the Author
Based in Washington, D.C., Robert Dreyfuss has written extensively on Iraq, the war on terrorism, and national security for The Nation, The American Prospect, and Rolling Stone, and is a frequent commentator on NPR, MSNBC, and CNBC.

Here's a link to his personal website.

If Dreyfuss is right, we are in trouble with a capital T...

Where's Rudy Giuliani when we need him?

Army Study: Pay Attention to What Al Qaeda Says

Apologies to Homer Simpson and Team America, World Police--The Combatting Terrorism Center says the US should read those captured Al Qaeda documents that lay out the internal workings of Bin Laden's network:

To achieve long-term success in degrading the broader movement driving terrorist violence, however, the CTC believes the United States must begin aggressively digesting the body of work that comprises jihadi macro-strategy. We therefore also seek to apply our model to the ideological dimension of al-Qa’ida revealed in numerous instances in these documents, the goal being to identify ways to facilitate the ideational collapse of this body of thought. The included documents provide insights into the points of strategic dissonance and intersection among senior leaders that must be better understood in order to be exploited.

Well, better late than never, I guess. Hope it is not now too late...Apparently it is intended as a rebuttal to Martin van Crevald's theories in The Transformation of War.(ht Guns and Butter Blog)

Agustin Blazquez Presents COVERING CUBA 4 to Cong. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen

Our friend sent us this news release, hot on the heels of the successful premiere of his newest documentary about Cuba:

Filmmaker Agustin Blazquez with Florida's Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen in her office on Capitol Hill. Rep. Ros-Lehtinen is holding Blazquez's recently released documentary COVERING CUBA 4: The Rats Below. The premiere of this documentary at the Tower Theaters in Miami was a great public and critical success. Both Tower Theaters were filled to capacity and many people were not able to get in. The premiere was sponsored by the Miami Dade College. This documentary reveals the story of secret corporate manipulation of the U.S. government, the media and the American people creating support for their corporate greed, all while staying hidden just under the surface. The corporation featured is Archer Daniels Midland (ADM). It is a fascinating story of intrigue and deceptions that the U.S. media censored because of the economic and political leverage of ADM that sponsors many of the leading political programs on the major TV and Radio networks. Blazquez's documentary kept the audience captive at the Tower Theaters for the 105 minutes duration. This documentary is for all Americans to see and is available in English and with Spanish subtitles. It can be obtained at: http://www.cubacollectibles.com/cuba.mv?p=108-CC4

Ann Althouse on Dick Cheney's Hunting Accident

Ann Althouse:

The suggestion is only that there's a political need to go on TV and emote so that people see you're not a machine. TV demands emotion. Tell us how you feel, reporters demand of people in pain, who often enough snap back "How do you think I feel?" Cheney accidentally shot an old man. How do you think he feels? Why do you need him to go on television and say what you already know? Because it would be so weird and awkward for gruff old Dick to do that?

Happy Valentine's Day!

Here's a link to the history of Valentine's Day, from The History Channel:

One legend contends that Valentine was a priest who served during the third century in Rome. When Emperor Claudius II decided that single men made better soldiers than those with wives and families, he outlawed marriage for young men -- his crop of potential soldiers. Valentine, realizing the injustice of the decree, defied Claudius and continued to perform marriages for young lovers in secret. When Valentine's actions were discovered, Claudius ordered that he be put to death.

Other stories suggest that Valentine may have been killed for attempting to help Christians escape harsh Roman prisons where they were often beaten and tortured.

According to one legend, Valentine actually sent the first 'valentine' greeting himself. While in prison, it is believed that Valentine fell in love with a young girl -- who may have been his jailor's daughter -- who visited him during his confinement. Before his death, it is alleged that he wrote her a letter, which he signed 'From your Valentine,' an expression that is still in use today. Although the truth behind the Valentine legends is murky, the stories certainly emphasize his appeal as a sympathetic, heroic, and, most importantly, romantic figure. It's no surprise that by the Middle Ages, Valentine was one of the most popular saints in England and France.

Why Cheney's Hunting Accident Story Has Legs

(White House photo by David Bohrer)
It's not just liberal media bias, and all the "I'd rather be hunting with Dick Cheney than driving with Ted Kennedy" bumper stickers in the world won't make this accident go away.

The reason is the icongraphic and symbolic resonance of Dick Cheney's accident. Yes, it was an accident, he didn't shoot his hunting buddy on purpose, it could have happened to anyone, and so forth.

Yet:

1. Dick Cheney appears to be careless.

A careful hunter simply wouldn't shoot his buddy. Maybe he got carried away, maybe he wasn't paying attention, maybe he just didn't see, but still--he was aiming at some quail and hit his buddy. That's careless, and it goes to the general impression of the Bush administration's handling of Katrina, Iraq, and the search for Bin Laden, among other things. They are careless. This impression is reinforced by Cheney's hunting accident.

2. Dick Cheney appears to be trigger-happy.

Again, the claim against the US in Iraq is reinforced by the accident. Shoot first, ask questions later, it seems, whether hunting or making foreign policy.

3. Dick Cheney appears to have missed his target.

Like the US going after Bin Laden, Dick Cheney created "collateral damage" but didn't bag his quail.

4. Dick Cheney appears to be secretive.

That the story leaked out through Kate Armstrong's phone call to a friendly reporter, rather than an announcement from the Vice-President's office parallels complaints about news management related to the Iraq war. Again, a simple hunting accident resonates with larger problems for the administration.

5. Dick Cheney appears to be incompetent.

The whole accident story raises the question--doesn't he have better things to do? How come the Vice President has time to go quail hunting while the US is involved in a showdown with Iran, a crisis in Palestine, a botched Saddam trial in Iraq, and the Danish Cartoon crisis.

The story won't go away, not because it isn't trivial in itself, but because this little accident reflects in microcosm the very big problems with the administration--including the wounding and injury of friends like Denmark and Israel by botched American foreign policy; and the wounding and injury of American citizens in New Orleans and the South Coast by botched handling of Hurricane Katrina.

It's the Bush administration in a nutshell.

Don't Piss On Michelle Malkin, Either...

Google Shares Slide 4.7% as Stock Decline Deepens

Mark Steyn: "A Falling Camel Attracts Many Knives"

Thanks to Ann Althouse for pointing out this Mark Steyn column:

And the good news is that that body's already on its way. The European Union's Justice and Security Commissioner, Franco Frattini, said on Thursday that the EU would set up a "media code" to encourage "prudence" in the way they cover, ah, certain sensitive subjects. As Signor Frattini explained it to the Daily Telegraph, "The press will give the Muslim world the message: We are aware of the consequences of exercising the right of free expression. . . . We can and we are ready to self-regulate that right."

"Prudence"? "Self-regulate our free expression"? No, I'm afraid that's just giving the Muslim world the message: You've won, I surrender, please stop kicking me.

But they never do. Because, to use the Arabic proverb with which Robert Ferrigno opens his new novel, Prayers for the Assassin, set in an Islamic Republic of America, "A falling camel attracts many knives." In Denmark and France and the Netherlands and Britain, Islam senses the camel is falling and this is no time to stop knifing him.

The issue is not "freedom of speech" or "the responsibilities of the press" or "sensitivity to certain cultures." The issue, as it has been in all these loony tune controversies going back to the Salman Rushdie fatwa, is the point at which a free society musters the will to stand up to thugs. British Muslims march through the streets waving placards reading "BEHEAD THE ENEMIES OF ISLAM." If they mean that, bring it on. As my columnar confrere John O'Sullivan argued, we might as well fight in the first ditch as the last.

Uzbek Film Director Goes Hollywood

Nathan at Registan has the story of Timur Bekmambetov's Hollywood period. His Russian hit, Night Patrol, was the talk of Moscow when we lived there. Now the ethnic Uzbek, Russian director has a sequel, Day Patrol. And he's been picked by an American studio to do some English-language films. There's a link to the Night Patrol website, here. As they say in Tashkent, "Juda yaxshi!"

Don't Piss On Denmark!

Thanks to LGF, I found this very interesting article by Danish journalist Per Nyholm on Brussels Journal:

I feel that currently my beloved country is being pissed upon rather too much. Denmark has not been neglecting its duties on the international stage. We have supported poor people with acts and advice, we have worked for peace, we have sent soldiers, policemen and experts to all the far flung corners of the world. We have democracy, a rule of law and a welfare state. Not all is perfect, but we harbor no malice towards our fellow men.

And yet Denmark is being pissed upon. The spokesman of the US State Department is pissing on Denmark, the British Secretary of Foreign Affairs is pissing on Denmark, the President of Afghanistan is pissing on Denmark, the Government of Iraq is pissing on Denmark, other Muslim regimes are pissing on Denmark. In Gaza, where Danes for years have provided humanitarian aid, crazed Imams encourage people to cut off the hands and heads of the cartoonists who made the drawings of Mohammed for the Jyllands-Posten newspaper.

Excuse my choice of words, but all this pissing is pissing me off.

What is going on? I am not referring so much to the threats against Danish citizens and Danish commerce. Nor to the burnt down Embassies. I am thinking of a word that keeps popping up whenever the Mohammed cartoons are mentioned.

That word is BUT. A sneaky word. It is used to deny or qualify what one has just said.

How many times lately have we not heard people of power, the Opinion Makers and others say that of course we have freedom of speech, BUT.

They have said it, all of them, from Kofi Annan, the UN Secretary General, to our own Bendt Bendtsen [a Danish Politician]. Once we had to be sensitive to the easily hurt feelings of the Nazis, then came the Communists, now it is the Islamists. The reason I say ‘Islamists’ is that I do not for a moment believe all the world’s Muslims are pissing on us. I think we are dealing with thugs, fools and misled people. Those are the ones we have to deal with, and then the chickenshit politicians.

The cartoons are no longer something Jyllands-Posten can control. They have already been manipulated and misrepresented to the point that few know what is going on and fewer know how to stop it. This affair is artifically being kept buoyant in a sea of lies, suppressions of the truth, misconceptions, lunacy and hypocrisy, for which this newspaper bears no blame. The only thing Jyllands-Posten did was provide a pin-prick which has made a boil of nastiness erupt. This would have happened sooner or later. That it happened more than four months after the publication of the cartoons, raises a question of its own. Are we dealing with random events or with a staged clash of civilizations? One might hope for the former yet be prepared to expect the latter.

That is why I say: Freedom of Speech is Freedom of Speech is Freedom of Speech. There is no but.

Read the whole thing here

Norman Shumway, Transplant Pioneer, 83

The San Jose Mercury News has a nice obituary of Dr. Norman Shumway, who died aged 83 from lung cancer. He operated on my father a long time ago to replace a bad valve. Shumway was such a good surgeon that his patient has now outlived him. According to this obituary, Republican Majority Leader Bill Frist studied cardiac surgery under Shumway at Stanford.

Torino's Mole Antonelliana

Wikipedia has the story behind the symbol of the 2006 Torino Winter Olympics, Torino's Mole Antonelliana. Don't tell the President of Iran, the King of Saudi Arabia, or any of the Danish Cartoon protesters, for they might turn against the Olympic movement next--construction of the Mole, intended as a synagogue, began in 1863, in celebration of the establishment of religious freedom in Turin. The tower is over 500 feet high, the tallest masonry building in the world at the time of construction. The project grew too expensive, and the Jewish community turned it over to the city of Turin. Today it is the Museum of Cinema. I went to the top almost a quarter of a century ago, when my film was shown at the Turin film festival, and it was the Museum of Italian Independence. Turin had been the center of the movement for Italian unification led by the Count de Cavour--the Kingdom of Italy was proclaimed there in the Cariganano Palace on May 14, 1861.

A History of the Olympics

Ancient Greece was the model for today's games in Torino, Italy--the history of the original Olympics can be found on Perseue.

Time to Sell Google Stock?

I just saw the Google Video segment linked on Michelle Malkin's blog (someone at Google doesn't like me), and was surprised that the VJ personally attacked her in a malicious and unfair way. Hyscience has a response, here.

I think this may be a symptom of something wrong. If Google's business franchise is based on honest, objective information resulting from computer search formulas--what is this guy doing spouting nasty personal opinions based on nothing but ugly prejudice?

That's not objective, scientific, or empirical--it's political.

And if Google's results are seen as political rather than scientific and objective, the search engine's franchise will no doubt suffer. The China censorship issue is bad enough--but IMHO Google Current host Conor Knight's gratuitous insults were beyond offensive--they were evil.

And if Google's motto is "do no evil," then either he is violating company policy, or his shtick is a symptom of something gone very wrong in Google's management. Either one might be a "sell" signal...

If Google becomes known as a "PC" search engine, its value will sink in the same way network news ratings have.

My suggestion to Google: To save your business, stick with objective facts and drop the personal opinions on Google Video.

Victor Davis Hanson on the Danish Cartoon Crisis

From National Review Online:

Like the appeasement of the 1930s, we are in the great age now of ethical retrenchment. So much has been lost even since 1960; then the very idea that a Dutch cartoonist whose work had offended radical Muslims would be in hiding for fear of his life would have been dismissed as fanciful.

Insidiously, the censorship only accelerates. It is dressed up in multicultural gobbledygook about hurtfulness and insensitivity, when the real issue is whether we in the West are going to be blown up or beheaded if we dare come out and support the right of an artist or newspaper to be occasionally crass.

In the post-Osama bin Laden and suicide-belt world of our own, we shudder at these fanatical riots, convincing ourselves that perhaps the Salman Rushdies, Theo Van Goghs, and Danish cartoonists of the world had it coming. All the while, we think to ourselves about the fact that we do not threaten to kill Muslims when they promulgate daily streams of hate and racism in sermons and papers, and much less would we go about promising death to the creator of "Piss Christ" or the Da Vinci Code. How ironic that we now find politically-correct Westerners — those who formerly claimed they would defend to the last the right of an Andres Serrano or Dan Brown to offend Christians — turning on the far milder artists who rile Muslims.

The radical Islamists are our generation's book burners who search for secular Galileos and Newtons. They are the new Nazi censors who sniff out anything favorable to the Jews. These fundamentalists are akin to the Soviet commissars who once decreed all art must serve political struggle — or else.

If we give in to these 8th-century clerics, shortly we will be living in an 8th century ourselves, where we may say, hear, and do nothing that might offend a fundamentalist Muslim — and, to assuage our treachery to freedom and liberalism, we'll always be equipped with the new rationale of multiculturalism and cultural equivalence which so poorly cloaks our abject fear.

Mark Steyn v. Hugh Hewitt on Danish Cartoon Crisis

Hugh Hewitt had Mark Steyn on his radio show to talk about the Danish Cartoon crisis:

HH: ...Mark Steyn, now let's turn to the Danish cartoons. Hundreds of thousands of Shiite Muslims turned out in Beirut today to protest the cartoons. The head of Hezbollah told George Bush to shut up over Syria and Iran fueling protests. And in Gaza, a quaint little story of entrepreneur Ahmed Abu Daya, who has laid in a hundred hard to find Danish and Norwegian flags for sale to flag burners.

MS: Yeah.

HH: What's going on?

MS: Well in a sense, that sums up the economic energy in the Muslim world, that they're actually great for...if you want to start a flag business for people to burn flags, that's a viable business in the Muslim world. Not a lot of other things are. That's one of the problems. You know, I disagree with the line you've taken on this, Hugh, and I do accept that in the simple politics of it, there's something actually quite useful in the United States detaching itself from Europe's position. But from Europe's point of view, the problem is that the basic narrative here in all these stories, the French riots, the murder of the Dutch filmmaker, the banning of Pooh and Piglet mugs in English municipal government offices, all these little nothing stories all basically derive their energy from the same point, that the fact that the Europeans are weak and elderly and fading, and their Muslims populations are young and surging. And in all these clashes, they're basically putting down markers for the way things are going to be the day after tomorrow, in the way that if you're a new owner, you may buy a house and have the kitchen remodeled before moving in. I mean, a lot of the things they're putting in place now, the Muslims are demanding, the Muslim lobby groups are demanding. They're basically putting in place the remodeled kitchen before they move in and take over.

HH: So I've not persuaded you with my analogy to Churchill's treatment of Franco during the War, that we've got to worry about Pakistan's stability, we don't really want Danish newspaper editors making these calls for the Pentagon. We would...I want our government to engage this world and these fanatics on their terms and their timing, not the timing of Danish out of touch cultural editors, which is what this all began with.

MS: Well, I wouldn't actually call those guys out of touch, because in some ways, they're living with far...in a far worse situation than people are in parts of the Muslim world. And again, I would slightly disagree with you there, because I think Muslims in the Muslim world are actually far more culturally reformable than Muslims in Europe are, because they're living in relatively homogenous societies that can be shifted culturally in significant ways. The problem in Europe is that Muslims feel alienated, because they regard Western culture as an abomination, it's all around them. They regard them as soft, decadent, narcissist fornicators and sodomites, and they loathe the society they're living in. And I think in a sense, that's a much more problematic thing. You know, whether there...I think there are moderate Muslims in Jordan. Whether there are moderate Muslims in the Netherlands is a much more problematic question.

HH: You know, I asked Dennis Prager this week. I don't know if you had a chance to read that interview with Prager, Medved and Joe Carter.

MS: Yeah, that was a great show, actually.

HH: Well, I thought so, too, but I was a little stunned when Dennis said he thought 20% of the Muslim world was radicalized, and that it would go to more than 50%. Do you agree with those numbers?

MS: Well, I think the thing is you have to distinguish between...the proportion of Muslims who are prepared to fly planes into skyscrapers is incredibly small. But when you take polls...they took a poll in Britain this week of British Muslims, and basically found that 2/5ths of British Muslims regard Jewish civilians as legitimate targets. Now that provides a huge comfort zone for Muslim terrorists to operate in.

HH: Yes.

MS: It means that they can go and set up in Manchester or Birmingham or Rotterdam or Copenhagen or Buffalo or Seattle, knowing that within those communities, there's a very huge comfort zone for them to be able to operate in. And in that sense, I think Dennis may be, in fact, underestimating the number a little.

HH: Now what do you make, though, of hundreds of thousands of Hezbollah followers in Lebanon? Is this conflict unavoidable with Hezbollah?

MS: Well, I think that is part of something that's slightly more calculated. Spontaneous demonstrations don't erupt in that part of the world.

HH: That's right.

MS: They're basically as stage managed as the opening ceremony at the Moscow Olympics. And what is happening is that Iran is putting pressure, because there's this parallel situation going on with Iran's nuclear program being referred to the U.N. Security Council, and Iran is basically calling some of its client groups out into the streets to remind some of the weaker members of that Security Council that in fact, if they want a clash of civilizations, bring it on, baby. That's the message these groups are making.