There is much more. This could explain why Kahn in recent days has suggested that he was not selling the technology for profit, but for the state. This would puts the government of Pakistan in direct violation of the nuclear proliferation agreements. This might also get the UN involved an might lead to sanctions. At the very least it should make Pakistan more eager to get on the US's good side. That would complicate its activities in cutting deals with the Taliban.Former Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto, on a state visit to North Korea in 1993, smuggled in critical data on uranium enrichment -- a route to making a nuclear weapon -- to help facilitate a missile deal with Pyongyang, according to a new book by a journalist who knew the slain politician well.
The assertion is based on conversations that the author, Shyam Bhatia, had with Bhutto in 2003, in which she said she would tell him a secret "so significant that I had to promise never to reveal it, at least not during her lifetime," Bhatia writes in "Goodbye, Shahzadi," which was published in India last month.
Bhutto was slain in December while campaigning to win back the prime minister's post.
The account, if verified, could advance the timeline for North Korea's interest in uranium enrichment. David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security, a research organization on nuclear weapons programs, said the assertion "makes sense," because there were signs of "funny procurements" in the late 1980s by North Korea that suggested a nascent effort to assemble a uranium enrichment project.
Pakistan -- and, in particular, a nuclear smuggling ring run by Pakistani metallurgist Abdul Qadeer Khan, who was instrumental in developing a Pakistani nuclear bomb -- has long been suspected as a source of expertise for North Korea, but such high-level government involvement always has been denied.
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Saturday, May 31, 2008
Bhutto said to have traded nuke tech for Nork missile tech
Pfleger Pfinally Pfalters
I guess he is trying to build attention for his regular service. One thing that should be clear. Obama's opponents have no reason to threaten Pfleger. In fact most of them would probably like to get some more YouTube material from him.The Rev. Michael Pfleger, who helped reignite Barack Obama's pastor problems by mocking Hillary Clinton, said this evening he's received "thousands of hate threats" since his videotaped pulpit rant.
"They want to kill me," Pfleger told parishioners during a service in a St. Sabina Church chapel on Chicago's South Side this evening. "It's been very ugly."
The firebrand Catholic Priest made his controversial Clinton comments last Sunday at Trinity United Church of Christ, home church of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Obama's former pastor.
Pfleger mocked Clinton for crying on the campaign trail, and suggested it was "white entitlement" leading Clinton to believe the Democratic nomination should go to her -- not Obama.
His speech was videotaped, and quickly made the rounds on the Internet and on television, leading Obama to express his "disappointment" in the activist priest, whom he has known for years.
Pfleger's boss, Cardinal Francis George, on Friday also rebuked Pfleger for his "personal attack" on Clinton, and said he had received assurances from Pfleger that he would no longer campaign for or even mention the names of political candidates.
In his brief comments this evening, Pfleger did not name any candidates, and said he would address the controversy at a Sunday mass at St. Sabina.
"I'm not going to make a statement," Pfleger told the crowded chapel. "My real statement will be tomorrow."
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I think it is more likely that some of Obama's supporters wish he would shut up. But, you would never have guessed that from the reaction he got at Trinity last Sunday. In fact, it was probably that reaction more than Pfleger's sermon that persuaded Obama he could not be associated with his old congregation.
Brits say Taliban on the run
There is the dope business that is still a matter of concern, but it is interesting to see more positive news in our war with the Islamic religious bigots. I suspect that future fights will be with Pakistan based Taliban. Hopefully the Marines will destroy their rat lines into Afghanistan.The Taliban have been tactically routed in southern Afghanistan, with enemy forces 'licking their wounds' after a series of emphatic defeats, say senior British military commanders.
In one of the most bullish assessments yet of the conflict in Helmand province, Brigadier Gordon Messenger said the Taliban's command structure had been 'fractured' and its fighters forced on to the backfoot.
As British forces continue to consolidate positions throughout the Helmand valley, Messenger said latest intelligence indicated that the ferocious fighting that had defined Helmand for the past two summers was unlikely to be repeated. 'It's become apparent that the Taliban are very much on the backfoot. Their leadership both south of the border [Pakistan] and also their local leadership has been severely dislocated and fractured.
'We are not complacent and suggesting that they do not have the capacity to regenerate, but they are very much off the frontfoot and licking their wounds.'
With the British military having sustained 97 casualties since operations began in Afghanistan in 2001, commanders are hopeful that a less costly campaign lies ahead. Estimates suggest that as many as 7,000 Taliban have been killed during the past two years. In addition, Messenger said that evidence of al-Qaeda or affiliated organised groups was scant in areas where British troops were operating.
Latest intelligence updates indicate that Taliban forces have retrenched in Farah, bordering northwest Helmand, the province where about 8,000 British troops are stationed.
Government officials revealed last week that they are monitoring the Iranian frontier - Farah is on the border - for evidence of weapons smuggling. Concern is mounting among Foreign Office officials that Iran might still be smuggling in components for roadside mines known as EFPs, which fire a fist-sized disc of armour-piercing molten copper that explodes inside military vehicles.
To try to disrupt the cross-border traffic, the focus is intensifying on Taliban elements near the Pakistan border, south of Garmsir. Recently a new expeditionary force of 3,500 US marines entered the region to target remote southern districts. The move was interpreted as placing British forces under pressure to adopt the American counter-insurgency tactics. However, Messenger said the tactic was proving fruitful and would help UK troops further north.
'They are disrupting areas where the Taliban have traditionally held sway', said Messenger, who led 40 Commando Royal Marines during the Iraq war and was recently appointed as an aide-de-camp to the Queen. He said that the 'ink spot' stratgey of securing major towns along the Helmand valley and then spreading stability appeared to be paying dividends.
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Former Mossad agent could be Israel's next woman PM
My respect for her has just gone up several clicks. I hope she is too smart to be a socialist too.The frontrunner to become Israel’s next prime minister, Tzipi Livni, was a Paris agent for Mossad, Israel’s overseas intelligence agency, in the early 1980s when it ran a series of missions to kill Palestinian terrorists in European capitals, according to former colleagues.
They say Livni, now foreign minister, was on active service when Mamoun Meraish, a senior official in the Palestine Liberation Organisation, was shot dead by a Mossad hit squad in Athens on August 21, 1983. She was not directly involved in the killing, in which two young men on a motorcycle drew alongside Meraish’s car and opened fire, but her role in Mossad remains secret.
Shortly afterwards Livni resigned and returned to Israel to complete her law studies, citing the pressures of the job.
A quarter of a century later, Livni, 49, is poised to become prime minister amid accusations that Ehud Olmert, who has led Israel for the past 2½ years, accepted bribes from an American businessman.
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Livni joined Mossad after leaving the army with the rank of lieutenant and completing a year at law school. From her base in Paris she travelled throughout Europe in pursuit of Arab terrorists.
“Tzipi was not an office girl,” said an acquaintance. “She was a clever woman with an IQ of 150. She blended in well in European capitals, working with male agents, most of them ex-commandos, taking out Arab terrorists.”
Livni has never talked about her years with Mossad, but a glimpse of the nature of the work was given by her closest female partner on European assignments. “The risks were tangible,” said Mira Gal, who became head of her ministerial office. “If I made a mistake the result would be arrest and catastrophic political implications for Israel.”
Livni, a married mother of two, has enjoyed a meteoric rise in Israeli politics since she became an MP in 1999.
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News you can use
Golf 'adds five years to your life'
Too bad I can't hit a ball that is not even moving.
This was not necessary when I was in school
Teachers told to report hungover pupils
I am pretty sure it was not a problem when my kids were in school. Maybe it is a UK thing. The teachers are supposed to "refer repeat offenders to addiction clinics."
Head of al Qaeda European network killed in recent attack
The story goes on to give the opinions of some who think al Qaeda is still a significant threat.An al-Qaeda trainer and explosives specialist involved in a range of European terrorist networks has been killed in Pakistan, the latest senior militant to die in a spate of controversial American missile strikes.
The death two weeks ago of Abu Suleiman al-Jazairi, a highly experienced Algerian militant, has been confirmed only in the last few days, intelligence sources in Pakistan and Western Europe told The Observer. Al-Jazairi, thought to have been 45, died along with at least 15 others when the house in which he was staying in Pakistan's Bajaur tribal district was hit by a missile fired from a Predator, an American pilotless drone.
Details are only now emerging about the strike on Damadola, a village near the Afghan-Pakistan border hit twice in the past. The house targeted and destroyed by the drone is believed to belong to a former Afghan Taliban defence minister, Maulvi Obaidullah, members of whose family, including women and children, are thought to have died. The surrounding area is in the hands of militants linked to the Pakistan Taliban militant group who have been blamed for the killing of Benazir Bhutto last year.
The death of al-Jazairi, thought to have been director of external operations for al-Qaeda and thus responsible for running the terrorist group's European and British networks, was cited by CIA chief Michael Hayden last week as one of the reasons for the 'strategic defeat' of al-Qaeda. Another top militant, Abu Laith al-Libi, was killed in February.
'The ability to kill and capture key members of al-Qaeda continues, and keeps them off balance - even in their best safe haven along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border,' Hayden said. Hayden added that al-Qaeda had been defeated in Saudi Arabia, was losing the battle for hearts and minds in the Islamic world and was now unable to exploit the Iraq war to draw in new recruits.
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While I posted on the Predator Hellfire attacks when they happened, this is the most detail I have seen on the main target of that attack. This guy was likely in charge of most of al Qaeda's recent attacks outside of Iraq and Afghanistan. All the British attacks, for example, had a common thread of training in Pakistan before they launched their bombings. I would say as a trainer, he was not that great.
The back pack bombers of the 7-7 attacks did engage in mass murder for Allah, but most of the other attacks have been thwarted or were spectacular failures. Hopefully he will not be replaced with someone more competent.
Koran lesson abuse kills boy
The parents of a blind seven-year-old who was sent to a religious school in Pakistan have told how he was hung by his feet from a ceiling and beaten to death after failing to memorize the Koran.The parents of Mohammed Atif admitted that they had ignored their son Mohammed's repeated complaints about abuse at the madrassah.
Police in the Punjab province said that Mohammed's religious teacher, Qari Ziauddin, was now in custody charged with torturing and murdering the boy on Thursday.
Police said Ziauddin, whose title "Qari" signifies he is a mullah, had suspended the boy from a ceiling fan for an hour before he beat him. When he realised how badly Mohammed was hurt, he apparently fled instead of taking him to hospital.
The boy's body was not discovered until the next day when fellow pupils, including Mohammed's cousin, realised he had not slept in his bed. They searched the madrassah and found his battered corpse in Ziauddin's room.
An autopsy concluded that Mohammed, who was blind from birth, died of severe head injuries and also found marks of "physical torture" on his body. Police said the fatal blow might have been caused by Ziauddin dropping the boy when he cut him down from the fan.
According to the boy's father, the teacher had previously smashed him over the head with an iron rod, cutting him so badly that he needed stitches.
"We got the boy treated and wanted to pull him out of the madrassah but we decided to readmit him after the teacher said he would show some mercy to the boy," Mohammed's father Fayyaz Ahmed, 35, said. "We really did not expect him to go so far after he reassured us."
Mohammed was sent to the school eight months ago in the hope that he would become a Hafiz-e-Quran - a scholar who wins great respect by memorising the whole of the Koran.
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This teacher should be charged at a minimum with man slaughter. One of the sicknesses associated with radical Islam is the belief that corporal punishment can always change someones conduct. that is actually the motivation for al Qaeda's attacks on non combatants to persuade people to do as they say. Many Muslims have engaged in violent demonstrations because they thought the Koran had been abused. Will they be silent when a boy is abused and killed over his Koran lessons? Probably so.
Obama leaves his Chicago church
They have embarrassed him repeatedly during this campaign. But their real sin is to expose what a fraud his message of unity has been.
If he can't bring the people he worshiped with for 20 years to reason on issues of race and common sense, how can he bring people who are not his friends together? By leaving he accepts his failure.
Jeff Zeleny at the NY Times Caucus blog says:
...I think he is correct. He will be asked what he did in his 20 year association with the church to heal the racial scabs that many in the church kept picking at. What all the controversy has done is expose some of the ugliness of Black Liberation Theology. In doing that, the controversy has at least been worthwhile.
Mr. Obama, as he prepares for a general election campaign against Senator John McCain, was seeking to put the controversy over his church behind him. It remains an open question whether this move will do that or will simply draw more attention to his decision to be a member of the church for two decades.
I do find the timing of his decision interesting. He waited until after the DNC cut Hillary's Florida and Michigan vote in half. Would there decision have been different if he had made this decision on Monday? Who knows. Many of the members of the DNC were already in the tank for him like much of the media.
Any time any place?
Careful al Qaeda, you have to sleep sometime
Muslim extremist women are challenging al-Qaida's refusal to include — or at least acknowledge — women in its ranks, in an emotional debate that gives rare insight into the gender conflicts lurking beneath one of the strictest strains of Islam.I think they should terrorize the sexist pigs in charge of al Qaeda until they submit.In response to a female questioner, al-Qaida No. 2 leader Ayman Al-Zawahri said in April that the terrorist group does not have women. A woman's role, he said on the Internet audio recording, is limited to caring for the homes and children of al-Qaida fighters.
His remarks have since prompted an outcry from fundamentalist women, who are fighting or pleading for the right to be terrorists. The statements have also created some confusion, because in fact suicide bombings by women seem to be on the rise, at least within the Iraq branch of al-Qaida.
A'eeda Dahsheh is a Palestinian mother of four in Lebanon who said she supports al-Zawahri and has chosen to raise children at home as her form of jihad. However, she said, she also supports any woman who chooses instead to take part in terror attacks.
Another woman signed a more than 2,000-word essay of protest online as Rabeebat al-Silah, Arabic for "Companion of Weapons."
"How many times have I wished I were a man ... When Sheikh Ayman al-Zawahri said there are no women in al-Qaida, he saddened and hurt me," wrote "Companion of Weapons," who said she listened to the speech 10 times. "I felt that my heart was about to explode in my chest...I am powerless."
Such postings have appeared anonymously on discussion forums of Web sites that host videos from top al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden. While the most popular site requires names and passwords, many people use only nicknames, making their identities and locations impossible to verify.
However, groups that monitor such sites say the postings appear credible because of the knowledge and passion they betray. Many appear to represent computer-literate women arguing in the most modern of venues — the Internet — for rights within a feudal version of Islam.
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Irag military getting control in Mosul
The recent successes in quieting violence in Basra and Sadr City appear to be stretching to the long-rebellious Sunni Arab district here in Mosul, raising hopes that the Iraqi Army may soon have tenuous control over all three of Iraq’s major cities.Letting the Iraqis take the lead is a sign of success for the counterinsurgency operation. That they can get the enemy to stop fighting with out having to kill everyone is also a good thing. It has to be somewhat ironic that the NY Times is concerned that the operation that pacified Mosul was not bloody enough. The Iraqis have denied the area to the enemy. Sometimes the war really is about real estate.In this city, never subdued by the increase of American troops in Iraq last year, weekly figures on attacks are down by half since May 10, when the Iraqi military began intensified operations here with the backing of the American military. Iraqi soldiers searching house to house, within American tank cordons, have arrested more than 1,000 people suspected of insurgent activity.
The Iraqi soldiers “are heady from the Basra experience,” Brig. Gen. Raymond A. Thomas III, the commander of American forces in Mosul, said in an interview. “They have learned the right lessons.”
The crucial lesson, in fact, over the past month appears to be that all sides — the Iraqi military as well as various insurgent groups — prefer, at the moment, not to fight. Rather, as in Basra and Sadr City, the huge Shiite enclave in Baghdad, the Iraqi military appears to have allowed many insurgents to slip out of Mosul, after scores of negotiations with militias and their leaders.
This approach could make any gains temporary: The insurgents, here as elsewhere, are alive to fight another day. And little progress has been made on political reconciliation among rival sects and ethnic groups that could help reduce violence in the long term.
But the negotiations have allowed the military to expand both its area of control and the government’s zone of sovereignty, burnishing the once-poor reputations of the Iraqi military and Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki. While the American military was never far away — it offered air support and additional firepower — the operation here was largely led by Iraqis.
And that paid dividends here in Mosul. More than two dozen insurgent leaders who might not have surrendered to the Americans turned themselves in to the Iraqi generals.
Out in the dusty streets, for example, Gen. Nooraldeen Hussein, the commander of the Iraqi Eighth Brigade, hunted one insurgent leader until the day he sat down and had tea with the man. The insurgent, whom General Hussein identified as Muhammad Saffo, living in the Rashadia neighborhood, was suspected of killing five Iraqi soldiers with a roadside bomb.
At a meeting with his American advisers two weeks ago, the general said he arrested 14 members of Mr. Saffo’s tribe and killed three others, before Mr. Saffo came forward to negotiate along with six other tribal members.
“I have all his numbers right here,” General Hussein said, tapping his cellphone. He would call, he said, and negotiate the amnesty in the presence of a tribal sheik.
The American advisers glanced at one another, not quite sure what to make of this new twist to the American effort to tamp down the Sunni insurgents in the city.
“If the Iraqis are comfortable, we are comfortable, too,” General Thomas said of the negotiated surrenders of insurgent leaders sometimes described as members of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, the homegrown Sunni insurgent group that American officials say is led by foreigners.
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The recent operation was necessary after northern Iraq, an area about the size of Georgia, with seven provinces and bordering three countries, became what the American military called an “economy of force” region as troops were diverted to Baghdad during the surge. Conditions were dismal. By last fall, only 700 or so American soldiers were stationed in Mosul, the multiethnic fulcrum of the region. American commanders conceded that that was not enough.
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American tanks have formed cordons while Iraqi soldiers have searched house to house. Forts built and operated by Americans in western Mosul also greatly helped to stem the car bombings that had plagued this city. The Iraqis, though, drew up the arrest lists and conducted the parleys. To soothe ethnic tensions, a Sunni Arab general oversaw the operation.
In all, 83 percent of the military actions had a majority of Iraqi troops participating.
American military statistics show that significant acts of violence, including roadside bombings, sniper shootings, and mortar and rocket grenade attacks, fell from 195 in the week before the operation to 93 in the week after it, according to Lt. Col. Eric R. Price, the chief American adviser to General Hussein.
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How low has al Qaeda sunk?
...These guys sound like they have been stealing their material from late night comedy writers. The mortar attack caused no damage to the refinery. The internet claim does some damage to al Qaeda's reputation as terrorist and being PR savvy.
"Al Qaeda Organisation in the Arabian Peninsula -- Yemen Soldiers Brigades -- carried out the blessed operation with three mortar shells ... on the refinery used by Yemen's despot to supply fuel to the Crusaders (Western states) in their war against Islam," the group said on an Islamist website.
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Shia rebels in Yemen are fighting within 12 miles of capital
Yemeni government forces have beaten back an advance by northern rebels who brought their fight to within 12 miles of the capital, officials and witnesses said Saturday.There is more. This is a war that has not gotten much attention because it is mainly Muslim on Muslim fighting so you don't get the typical victim offensive you would get from Muslims when they are fighting Israelis or the US.Eyewitness Hamoud Mohammed said many houses were demolished in the village of Bani Heshiash near San'a after three days of airstrikes and shelling by government forces battling the rebels. Artillery shells could be heard exploding in the area over the weekend.
“The bodies of the dead were seen in the streets, left unburied because of the intensity of the strikes,” Mohammed said. “Water and medicine is scarce and the injured have to drive dangerous roads to the capital for proper treatment.”
Tribal officials and medics said scores have been killed on both sides in fighting over the past few weeks. They spoke on condition of anonymity because of security concerns and the government did not provide any casualty figures.
The rebels from the al-Zaydi sect of Shiite Islam have been fighting intermittently since 2004, claiming the government is corrupt and too closely allied with the West. Thousands have been killed in the rebellion.
Until recently, the rebellion had been concentrated in Saada province, close to the Saudi border and more than 100 miles from the capital.
But in the last three days, government forces pounded advancing rebels in the mountainous around Bani Heshiash, 12 miles north of San'a, tribal and local officials said speaking on condition of anonymity because of security concerns.
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Yemen is not a well run country. At one time it was split in half with communist running part and a thugocracy running the other. With the fall of the Soviet Union there was not much reason to be communist anymore so they united.
Al Qaeda has active cells in Yemen and the government has been indifferent at best to seeing justice done in the Cole bombing.
Egypt finds big arms cache in cave near Gaza
The story does not indicate the origin of the cache. I would be very curious to know whether the weapons were from Iran. Hopefully the Egyptians will have a similar curiosity.An Egyptian police official says boxes of ammunitions, RPGs and anti-aircraft missiles have been uncovered inside a mountain in the northern Sinai peninsula.
The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to the media, said the weapons were to be smuggled into the neighboring Gaza Strip.
The mountain is about 80 kilometers (48 miles) south of Rafah on the Gaza border. It has been used before as a shelter for local Islamic groups that carried out three major bomb attacks starting October 2004 in Sinai. They killed 125 people in total.
The official said some 2,200 bullets, 30 anti-aircraft missiles, several sacks packed with hand grenades and automatic rifles, and RPG launchers were stored inside the mountain.
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Gen. Mattis to testify in Chessani's Haditha case
Military prosecutors will call on Marine Gen. James Mattis to testify Monday about whether a lower-ranking officer improperly influenced his decision to file criminal charges against a Marine tied to the killings of 24 Iraqi civilians in Haditha, a civilian defense attorney said Friday.This case like many of the other Haditha cases is in trouble. I would also be interested in what conversations Gen. Mattis had with people above him such as the former Commandant as well as any conversations he may have had with congressman Murtha or whether he was aware of Murtha's comments on the Haditha events.
Mattis is in charge of U.S. Joint Forces Command, and also is the supreme allied commander in charge of military modernization for NATO.
It is rare for a four-star general to testify in a court-martial or pretrial proceedings.
Lt. Col. Sean Gibson, a Marine Corps spokesman for the Haditha trials, would not confirm whether Mattis would testify. He said the Marine Corps does not provide witness lists for court matters in advance of the hearing, nor do they discuss the travel plans of generals. Mattis is based in Norfolk, Va.
Defense attorney Brian Rooney, who represents Lt. Col. Jeffrey Chessani, said Friday that government prosecutors are calling Mattis to rebut a military judge's finding that there was undue influence in Mattis' decision to bring charges against Chessani.
Chessani faces charges of dereliction of duty for failing to conduct a full-scale investigation into the Nov. 19, 2005, civilian deaths, which followed a roadside bombing that killed a Marine.
Chessani's attorneys have argued that Mattis' legal adviser, a colonel, improperly influenced the case. Mattis was a three-star general when he decided to bring the charges.
With the judge's pretrial finding, the burden falls on prosecutors to prove that no undue influence occurred.
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The ignorance of Barack Obama
HE GENERATES even more gaffes than Dan Quayle. "We have not exhausted our nonmilitary options in confronting the Iranian threat; in many ways, we have yet to try them," Sen. Barack Obama says on his Web site. "If Iran abandons its nuclear program and support for terrorism, we will offer incentives like membership in the World Trade Organization."If the media was doing its job rather than enjoying the tingle running up their legs, it would not take conservative columnist and bloggers to notice these gaffes. Some in the media are starting to notice such as ABC's Jack Tapper. It is too bad many of his colleagues are not paying attention.
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"Perhaps Mr. Obama is unaware that one of [Iranian President Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad's first acts was to freeze Tehran's efforts for securing WTO membership because he regards the outfit as 'a nest of conspiracies by Zionists and Americans,'•" wrote Amir Taheri in the Wall Street Journal this week.
In 2006, Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice offered Iran a package of incentives including "improving Iran's access to the international economy, markets, and capital, through practical support for full integration into international structures, including the WTO."
.... shouldn't a candidate for president know these things?
Last week, I twitted Mr. Obama for saying he'd campaigned in 57 states, for not knowing that his home state of Illinois borders on Kentucky, and for claiming the Cuban Missile Crisis (October, 1962) was defused by President Kennedy's summit meeting with Nikita Khruschchev (June, 1961). Earlier, Mr. Obama said 10,000 people were killed when a tornado struck Greensburg, Kansas last year (the death toll was 12), and assumed Afghans speak Arabic (they don't).
After Mr. Obama took opposite sides on successive days last week on whether Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez should be engaged or isolated, ABC's Jake Tapper described him as "a one-man gaffe machine." And that was before his Memorial Day twofer.
Speaking in New Mexico, Mr. Obama seemed not to understand Memorial Day honors those who died in war, and claimed his uncle was one of the soldiers who liberated the Auschwitz concentration camp. Since Auschwitz was liberated by the Red Army, and Mr. Obama's mom was an only child, this is unlikely.
When this misstatement was spotted by bloggers, the Obama campaign said the senator had in mind his great uncle, Charles W. Payne, who, the campaign said, had served in the 89th Infantry Division, which liberated Ohrdruf, a slave labor camp that was a satellite of Buchenwald. This explanation has satisfied most journalists. But Charles W. Payne is not listed on the roster of the 89th Infantry Division, perhaps because the Kansas State Historical Society says Charles W. Payne entered the Navy on Nov. 10, 1942.
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Obama combines arrogance with ignorance in the Iranian World Trade Organization gaffe. Like many Democrat he assumes the Bush administration has not succeeded in negotiations with Iran because of its own failures and not the intransigence of the Iranian religious bigots. This is despite Iran's clearly stated intentions to never give up its nuclear ambitions no matter what they are offered.
Communist economy doesn't work in Cuba, neither do many Cubans
Loraicys is 27 years old, has never worked, and refuses to take just any job. She is not alone.Note that the little sliver of capitalism that is permitted in Cuba is in the tourist business and that is the only place that people have much interest in working. A smart leader would figure that out and offer capitalism a chance, but Cuba has not had a smart leader in decades. When the Castros are gone and people can be rewarded for their efforts, the country will take off.As Raúl Castro embarks on an ambitious plan to kick-start the communist nation's economy, he faces daunting challenges: Many Cubans simply do not work.
Decades of measly salaries and vast government subsidies have kept many young people off the labor rolls because it's more lucrative to hustle on the street. Others live comfortably enough off remittances from Miami and elsewhere.
Loraicys passes on neighborhood janitor positions in hopes of higher-paying work at nearby resort hotels, where she also would have a chance of earning tips in dollars.
''I am not going to tell you something different: there are jobs here in Cárdenas where I live. Doing what? Cleaning hospitals for 150 pesos ($7) a month,'' said Loraicys, a single mom. ``For 150 pesos, I would rather stay home with my kid. I am willing to work really hard, but not for nothing in return.''
While Cuba struggles to increase productivity, it must also find a way to entice hundreds of thousands of people to get a job. The dilemma is one of the profound systemic difficulties Castro faces as he tries to create a so-called modern socialist economy.
The government says there are plenty of jobs -- just low-paying ones Cubans won't take. Even educated professionals would rather work in the tourist industry as waiters or taxi drivers, which earn far more money than state jobs that usually offer about $10 a month.
Loraicys said she has blanketed all the state agencies that run tourist resorts near her home with résumés, but she lacks the high school diploma required for even menial work. So she spends most days hanging out in front of her house, watching horse-and-buggies go by in this Colonial city east of Havana known as Ciudad Bandera, because it is where the national flag was first raised on May 19, 1850.
''If Raúl Castro wants to crack down on people who do not work, then he should offer real jobs,'' said Loraicys. ``Don't you think people would prefer to have independence, to have something they can be proud of?''
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"I came here to learn"
When you see so many students throwing away the opportunities they have in school, it is nice to see someone who appreciates them and shows others how to.When my 9-year-old daughter first told us about her school's Student Council elections, it sounded like one of those harsh early lessons we all have to learn about politics.
“It's all about who's popular,” she said at dinner the other night.
But as the story unfolded, her mom and I found it more compelling than she expected — and not in the way she expected.
The “popular” student elected Student Council president was Abakar Baraka, a 10-year-old “resettlement student” who enrolled at Colonies North Elementary School on Feb. 12.
A refugee from the Darfur region of Sudan, Abakar is one of several hundred students from all over the world who've been welcomed into the Northside Independent School District this year through the Catholic Charities Refugee Resettlement Program.
Our daughter wasn't in Abakar's class and didn't know him well, but she theorized he won because his supporters included dozens of refugee students at Colonies North — but also, she said again: “Because he's popular.”
I resisted the temptation to say aloud that the foreign students gave Abakar a strong “base” — not unlike that of Sen. Barack Obama, whose bid for the White House has been boosted by his dominance among African American and young voters in Democratic primaries this year.
A few days after our dinner-table conversation, I met Abakar Baraka in the school cafeteria, where he was sitting at a table with friends.
He spoke so softly that I had difficulty hearing him amid the lunchtime din. So after he finished nibbling at fruit and sipping from a carton of milk, we moved to the library while his friends went to recess.
With big, dark eyes and flawless skin, Abakar speaks English well — slightly accented, but crystal clear. Small for a fourth-grader, he wore jeans, sneakers and a striped purple T-shirt. His gaze was remarkably steady for his age.
He ran for Student Council, he said, “because I want Colonies North to be a great and respected school.”
When asked if he had an interest in politics, he frowned.
“What is politics?”
After I explained, he shook his head and said he wanted to be a doctor.
The biggest difference between his country and ours is that in Sudan, he said, “There's not a lot of food.”
His family had to leave because “it was not safe for us.”
“The Janjaweed is the bad people,” he explained. “They come in the morning and kill people, including my uncle — so we crossed the border to Chad.”
From there he traveled to Ghana with his father, mother, two brothers and two sisters. After three days they were on a plane to the United States, where Catholic Charities helped place them in San Antonio.
Three of his four siblings, those old enough to attend school, are enrolled at Colonies North, too.
“These children have seen things that we cannot imagine,” said Sonya Kirkham, the principal at Colonies North, speaking of all of the refugee students attending the school this year.
Taking them on, she said, has made this a challenging but wonderful year. Kirkham has been encouraged by the warmth with which other students have welcomed the newcomers.
On his first day of school, Abakar said, “I was nervous.”
The first person who spoke to him was a boy named Sebastian. Abakar remembers when they met.
“He said, ‘Hi, I am a friend.'”
Sandra Figueroa, Abakar's teacher, has her own vivid memory of that day. As a teaching exercise, she showed the class a map of Sudan and asked Abakar what brought him here.
“I'll never forget,” she said. “His words were, ‘I came here to learn.' ”
She paused for composure. Her eyes glistened with tears.
“And then I looked at all of the other students in the class and wondered if they know how fortunate they are to be in this country and to have the opportunities that they have.”
Figueroa said Abakar has a passion for learning like none she has ever seen.
“He does not take his eyes off of the teacher, ever.”
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The students were given three days to campaign during recess. Then they had to deliver two-minute speeches to the student body.
“He was the only candidate who walked up there and, before he got there, everybody cheered,” said Figueroa.
“Abakar won because of his good nature. He's got such a loving heart.”
In his speech, Figueroa said, Abakar called for students to treat teachers more respectfully, to get along better with one another, and to comport themselves well in the hallways.
“He wants us to be more civilized,” she said. “He says, ‘We are a family, and families should be there for each other and get along.'”
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Aid for the enemy
A U.S.-backed paramilitary force in Pakistan's lawless border area may be aiding Taliban fighters, according to American officials who say the support may cause Congress to freeze some security funds for Islamabad.Pakistan's new government is acting more like an ally of the enemy than the US. We should consider suspending payments to them if we are not getting our moneys' worth. The problem that presents is that in other areas Pakistan is providing valuable assistance. Many of the Predator strikes against al Wade and Taliban leadership targets are flown from Pakistani bases. Most supplies are landed at Pakistani ports and are trucked into Afghanistan. Others are flown in over Pakistani air space. Iran is certainly not an alternative route, and the Russians and their former republics are not that reliable, much less convenient. These leaves us with finding a way to make Pakistan's assistance to the enemy more painful for them and us. That is the challenge.Signs that Pakistan's Frontier Corps is helping Taliban and al Qaeda-linked groups cross into Afghanistan only exacerbates U.S. frustration over Pakistan's plans to secure peace deals with fighters in that region, where Osama bin Laden is thought to hide.
"We cannot rely on Pakistan to stop the traffic of terrorists crossing that border despite the strong statements of its leaders," said Sen. Carl Levin, the Michigan Democrat who chairs the U.S. Senate's committee on armed forces.
Levin and some U.S. defense officials said Taliban fighters may also be getting assistance from Pakistan's army.
"If that's our intelligence assessment, then there's a real question as to whether or not we should be putting money into strengthening the Frontier Corps on the Pakistan side because if anything there's some evidence that the Pakistan army is providing support to the Taliban," Levin told reporters after visiting Afghanistan and Pakistan this week.
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The Mugabe campaign
Troops 'must back Mugabe or quit'
I guess orders are orders. The shameful government of Zimbabwe has given up the pretense of a fair election long ago but this order seems to make it official. What kind of legitimacy does the Mugabe government think it can get from this type of election? It might be more humane to just quit pretending and tell everyone Mugabe intends to be a dictator.
Economic slander
...Democrats are very good at demagoguery when it comes to the economy and the media follows their script. If a Democrat is in office everything is swell and if a Republican is in office, it is either bad or about to be bad. When the economy was in a period of strong growth a few years ago, the NY Times would still throw in references to hard times in stories designed to suggest people were worse off because Bush was in office. Likewise as we were going into a downturn at the end of the Clinton years, they were loathed to suggest it until Bush was sworn in.By any historic standard, our economic numbers are good, though possibly headed in a negative direction. April's unemployment was 5 percent -- a figure that once upon a time was considered full employment. The Consumer Price Index was up 3.9 percent, largely due to price rises in energy and food. "Core inflation" was 2.3 percent. Productivity was up 2.2 percent.
Those are numbers that would have been taken as a sign of very good times when I was growing up. Then, we had recessions every four or five years and bad bouts of inflation in the 1940s, 1950s and 1970s, and unemployment sometimes surged to 10 percent nationally and to 15 percent in industrial states like Michigan. In contrast, we've had only two mild recessions since 1983, with a third now possible but not yet in view.
In those 25 years, we have had low-inflation economic growth more than 90 percent of the time -- something never before achieved in American history. Alan Greenspan titled his memoir "The Age of Turbulence, but the story he tells is one of the amazing resilience of the American economy. Hit by one shock after another -- a stock market crash in 1987, currency meltdowns in Mexico in 1994 and in Asia in 1997, the collapse of Long-Term Capital Management in 1998, and the Sept. 11 attacks and the Enron collapse in 2001 -- our economy has adapted and kept growing.
In the America I grew up in, the political effects of economic issues were clear. Voters, most of whom had vivid memories of the Depression of the 1930s, tended to vote for Democrats when the economy sagged. Political scientists produced formulas for predicting elections that were based largely on macroeconomic indicators: If the economy was growing, the incumbent party's presidential candidate would win; if it was in recession, he'd lose. But those formulas don't work anymore. If they did, Al Gore would have been elected by a comfortable margin in 2000.
Today, few voters remember the 1930s; the median-age voter has lived all his adult life in a period when low inflation economic growth has become the norm. Voters take a good economy for granted and are enraged by any irritation. But who is to blame? The subprime mortgage crisis was brought about by policies encouraging home ownership supported by George W. Bush and members of Congress of both parties. Monetary policy is made by Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, who has bipartisan support.
Polls suggest votes are not moving in response to local economic conditions. Recent polls in Michigan, the No. 1 state in unemployment, show John McCain running even with Barack Obama, even though George W. Bush lost the state by 3 percent in 2004. And Obama is running much stronger than John Kerry did in Great Plains and Rocky Mountain states with very low unemployment.
But then Obama is advocating fiscal and trade policies -- higher taxes on high earners, more protectionism -- which are the opposite of John F. Kennedy's and the same as Herbert Hoover's. Yes, the economy matters in politics, but not in the way it used to.
There is just a built in bias in the media on economic reporting that was dramatically demonstrated in a recent Investor's Business Daily cartoon where the pilot of a plane warns the passengers to buckle their seat belts because they will encounter a little turbulence and one frantic passenger screams "We're doomed." Another tells a fellow passenger, "He is a financial reporter."
Will McCain get Hillary's voters?
I think you need to look at women in different groups to determine which ones he will get. for example, I don't think he will get many black female voters, since Hillary did not either. If you look at a breakdown of bush's numbers, he won a majority of married female votes. Many of the women who voted against him were single, who were single issue pro abortion voters. So far, that has not been a big issue in this race and many of them may stay home rather than vote for a guy who they see as dissing their girl. Many of these voters have already suggested they will vote for McCain over Obama.There is a lot of bitterness out there. And it’s not coming from rural voters in Appalachia. There are legions of Hillary Clinton supporters—from Emily List activists to NARAL members to middle-aged female fans—who do not like the impending outcome of the Democratic primary.
They are downright angry about some of the language employed by the media to describe Clinton, and at what they see as the media’s undue haste in shoving her out of the race. And they don’t like some of the phrases tossed around by Barack Obama (“Sweetie”; “You’re likable enough, Hillary”) either.
The major newspapers now regale us with stories about the many women, especially but not limited to the Geraldine Ferraro generation, who threaten to withhold their votes from Obama. Such angry and disillusioned female Democrats seem, for the moment, to be everywhere.
But even if we accept that this phenomenon is real (even if encouraged by Clinton herself), the question going forward is this: Will these voters will really turn tail on the Democratic nominee and vote for John McCain?
Recent history suggests that the idea of a mass female defection to the Republican side is more than a little unlikely: In 2000 Al Gore carried women voters 54-43 percent, and John Kerry carried them 51-48.
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War against women extends to the womb
It is not that new in Indian society. I can remember my father's anger over Indians throwing girl babies into the fire back in the 1950s. Not only are these people doing demographic damage to their culture, they are robbing themselves of the gifts that women bring to their culture."Someone wins, someone doesn't win, that's life," Nancy Kopp, Maryland's treasurer, told The Washington Post. "But women don't want to be totally dissed." She was talking about her political candidate, Hillary Rodham Clinton.
Democratic women are feeling metaphorically battered by the Obama campaign. "Healing The Wounds Of Democrats' Sexism," as the Boston Globe headline put it, will not be easy. Geraldine Ferraro is among many prominent Democrat ladies putting up their own money for a study from the Shorenstein Center at Harvard to determine whether Sen. Clinton's presidential hopes fell victim to party and media sexism.
How else to explain why their gal got clobbered by a pretty boy with a resume you could print on the back of his driver's license, a Rolodex apparently limited to neosegregationist race-baiters, campus Marxist terrorists and indicted fraudsters, and a rhetorical surefootedness that makes Dan Quayle look like Socrates.
"On this Memorial Day," said Barack Obama last Monday, "as our nation honors its unbroken line of fallen heroes – and I see many of them in the audience here today."
Hey, why not? In Obama's Cook County, Ill., many fallen heroes from the Spanish-American War still show up in the voting booths come November. It's not unreasonable for some of them to turn up at an Obama campaign rally, too.
But what of the fallen heroine? If it's any consolation to Sen. Clinton, she's not the only female to find that social progress is strangely accommodating of old-time sexism. There was a front-page story in London last week about a British Indian couple in Birmingham – she's 59, he's 72 – who'd had twins through in vitro fertilization and then abandoned the babies at the hospital when they turned out to be daughters, announcing their plans to fly back to India for another round of IVF in hopes of getting a boy.
In the wake of the media uproar, the parents now claim something got "lost in translation" and have been back to the hospital to visit the wee bairns. But think of Mom and Dad as the Democratic Party and the abandoned daughters as Hillary, and it all makes sense.
There's a lot of that about. Sex-selective abortion is a fact of life in India, where the gender ratio has declined to 1,000 boys to 900 girls nationally, and as low as 1,000 boys to 300 girls in some Punjabi cities. In China, the state-enforced "one child" policy has brought about the most gender-distorted demographic cohort in global history, the so-called guang gun– "bare branches." If you can only have one kid, parents choose to abort girls and wait for a boy, to the point where in the first generation to grow to adulthood under this policy there are 119 boys for every 100 girls. In practice, a "woman's right to choose" turns out to mean the right to choose not to have any women.
And what of the Western world?
From 2000-05, Indian women in England and Wales gave birth to 114 boys for every 100 girls.
A similar pattern seems to be emerging among Chinese, Korean and Indian communities in America. "The sex of a firstborn child in these families conformed to the natural pattern of 1.05 boys to every girl, a pattern that continued for other children when the firstborn was a boy," wrote Colleen Carroll Campbell, of the Ethics and Public Policy Center and former Bush speechwriter, in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch the other day. "But if the firstborn child was a girl, the likelihood of a boy coming next was considerably higher than normal at 1.17-to-1. After two girls, the probability of a boy's birth rose to a decidedly unnatural 1.51-to-1."
By midcentury, when today's millions of surplus boys will be entering middle age, India and China are expected to account for a combined 50 percent of global GDP. On present trends, they will be the most male-heavy societies that have ever existed.
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They are missing the delight of having grand daughters to light up their day. I cannot remember a time when I was not delighted to have women in my life. (Even if there are a few, like some former male friends, I don't miss.)
When George Patton's wife was concerned that there first children were all girls she asked if he was upset. He responded that he was delighted. "I was looking for a girl when I fell in love with you," he told her.
Why is al Qaeda on the run?
The genius of counterinsurgency warfare is to take advantage of local grievances to turn locals to our side in the fight with the enemy. We have done that in Iraq and opponents of the war just do not understand that it would not have happened if our troops had not been able to go in and protect the people. When you protect the people you get intelligence on the enemy that produces a cascading effect in his destruction.A year ago in July, a National Intelligence Estimate warned that al Qaeda had "protected or regenerated key elements of its Homeland attack capability," meaning it could be poised to strike America again. The political reaction was instantaneous and damning. "This clearly says al Qaeda is not beaten," said Michael Scheuer, the former CIA spook turned antiterror scold.
What a difference 10 months – and a surge – make.
CIA Director Michael Hayden painted a far more optimistic picture in an interview yesterday in the Washington Post. "On balance, we are doing pretty well," he said. "Near strategic defeat of al Qaeda in Iraq. Near strategic defeat for al Qaeda in Saudi Arabia. Significant setbacks for al Qaeda globally – and here I'm going to use the word 'ideologically' – as a lot of the Islamic world pushes back on their form of Islam."
What happened? To certain sophisticates, this is all al Qaeda's doing: By launching suicide attacks on Shiite and even Sunni targets, and ruling barbarically wherever they took control, the group has worn out its welcome in the Muslim world.
There's some truth in this. The Sunni Awakening in Iraq was in part a reaction by local clan leaders against al Qaeda's efforts to subjugate and brutalize them. The Arab world took note when Abu Musab al-Zarqawi ordered the November 2005 bombing of three hotels in Amman, Jordan, in which nearly all of the victims were Sunni Arabs. Extremist Islamic parties took an electoral drubbing in Pakistan's elections earlier this year following a wave of suicide bombings, one of which murdered Benazir Bhutto.
It's also true that al Qaeda finds itself on the ideological backfoot, even in radical circles. As our Bret Stephens reported in March, Sayyed Imam, a founder of Egyptian Islamic Jihad and once a mentor to Ayman al Zawahiri, has written an influential manifesto sternly denouncing his former comrades for their methods and theology. This was enough to prompt a 215-page rebuttal from Zawahiri, who seems to have time on his hands. Lawrence Wright in the New Yorker and Peter Bergen and Paul Cruickshank in the New Republic have recently written about similar jihadist defections.
But the U.S. offensives in Afghanistan and especially Iraq deserve most of the credit. The destruction of the Taliban denied al Qaeda one sanctuary, and the U.S. seems to have picked up the pace of Predator strikes in Pakistan – or at least their success rate. This has damaged al Qaeda's freedom of movement and command-and-control.
As for Iraq, Zawahiri himself last month repeated his claim that the country "is now the most important arena in which our Muslim nation is waging the battle against the forces of the Crusader-Zionist campaign." So it's all the more significant that on this crucial battleground, al Qaeda has been decimated by the surge of U.S. forces into Baghdad. The surge, in turn, gave confidence to the Sunni tribes that this was a fight they could win. For Zawahiri, losing the battles you say you need to win is not a way to collect new recruits.
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In Mexico one of the problems the government has in its fight with the drug insurgents is that people are too afraid to cooperate. In many of the reports on the drug terrorism, it is clear that people know who the bad guys are, but have no confidence in the ability of the government to protect them, since it can't even protect the police. It is that protection that turned things around in Iraq.
We should add to that the surge in Iraqi forces which helped us create the force to space ratio needed to protect the people.