Right Wing Nut House

This is one of the more curious stories I’ve seen in a while. Did you know that the Italians arrested 3 terrorists with connections to al Qaeda who may have been planning an attack on America that would have dwarfed 9/11?

Three Algerians arrested in an anti-terrorist operation in southern Italy are suspected of being linked to a planned new series of attacks in the United States, Interior Minister Giuseppe Pisanu said Friday.

The attacks would have targeted ships, stadiums or railway stations in a bid to outdo the September 11, 2001 strikes by Al-Qaeda in New York and Washington which killed some 2,700 people, Pisanu said.

The Algerians, suspected of belonging to a cell established by an Al-Qaeda-linked Algerian extremist organisation, the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC), were named as Achour Rabah, Tartaq Sami and Yasmine Bouhrama.

(HT: Red State)

AJ Strata has been on this story since Friday but I was unable to confirm that the terrorists were targeting America. In fact, according to this Google search that AJ made, the farthest that the big wire services would go on that score was that the attacks would have taken place “outside of Italy.”

Why would even the Italian press bury the remarks of their own Interior Minister about the potential target of the attacks?

We have one of two possibilities here. Either Turkish Press has misquoted the Italian Interior Minister or they have extrapolated facts from his statement that aren’t there. In fact, what may be likely is that Turkish Press heard the Minister’s comparison to 9/11 and may have jumped to the conclusion that the target was America. I make this assumption based on the fact that AP, UPI, Reuters, and even RAI do not mention America specifically as a target.

However, the size and scope of this planned attack is so massive that it certainly should have been reported and commented on in America. Why?

The three Algerians detained on Tuesday in the Italian cities of Brescia and Naples were planning a massive terror attack - “on a ship as big as the Titanic, packed with explosives” - that aimed to kill “at least 10,000 people”, as well as an attack on “Italian citizens and interests” in Tunisia, according phone conversations between the three men, which Italian anti-terror police say they intercepted after al-Qaeda’s deadly 7 July attacks on London and on the Egyptian Red Sea resort of Sharm El-Sheikh

A “ship as big as the Titanic” could very well be an oil tanker.

Anyone want to guess how many people would die if a docked oil tanker in Houston or some other coastal American city were to suddenly blow up? The number 10,000 sounds about right.

And it wouldn’t have to be an oil tanker. The accidental explosion in Texas City of a ship carrying ammonium nitrate in 1947 killed 600 people - and that number would have been many times higher except for the fact that the ship had been on fire for nearly 24 hours before the explosion. I daresay that al Qaeda would not vouchsafe us 24 hours warning before detonating a floating bomb like an oil tanker or chemical ship.

It is too much to say that the media is deliberately burying this story. Rather, they have made a collective determination that we do not need to know about this - and other stories of a similar nature. To the gatekeepers, this is just one more terrorism story in a far away place that Americans have no interest in knowing about. Terrorists are arrested all the time. That is not news. Terrorists are targeting America. That is not news. So goes the reasoning of our information minders.

What would be news, of course, is if they succeeded. Then and only then would we hear of arrests in Italy and Britain and other European countries. Then these kinds of stories give context to the attack.

If media coverage in the days and weeks following 9/11 is any guide, this is exactly what transpired on the pages of the Washington Post, the New York Times, and other media outlets. This website - while full of conspiracy theories and other idiocies about 9/11 - has links to literally dozens of stories in the American press following the attacks of arrests and hints from foreign intelligence sources that were in the foreign press weeks, months, and even years before September 11.

Rather than seeing a conspiracy of silence on the part of the press I believe that what we have is a culture of arrogance in our media that sees the American people as a bunch of ignorant children that must be spoon fed news - information that these gatekeepers determine we need to know.

If Jeff Jarvis is right, this culture of arrogance will be the death of the old media. For our own safety and security, let’s hope that day comes sooner rather than later.

I neglected to post the winners from last week’s Watchers Council vote. To remedy that, I’d like to give a great big shout out to Dymphna at Gates of Vienna for one of the better Christmas posts you’ll ever read. I bookmarked it and I hope Dymphna re-posts it every year because it is a timeless reminder of what Christmas should be all about. It was the top vote getter in the Council category.

Entitled “Above Thy Deep and Dreamless Sleep…”, here’s a short excerpt:

Yeah, Christmas at an orphanage sounds bad. But when you’re six years old, what do you know? It was Christmas, just like everybody else.

There are parts that stand out for me. One is the hymns we prepared all through Advent so we’d be ready for Christmas morning (years later, in middle school, the Gregorian choir was my introduction to midnight Mass. Besides getting to stay up till midnight to sing, there was the excitement of singing “Adeste Fideles to a packed house which emitted enough alcohol fumes to share a little cheer with us, way up in the choir loft). There were strong delineations between the hymns we sang and the Christmas carols we prepared for the school party. Somehow they didn’t mix back then.

[...]

The nuns took us shopping the Saturday before Christmas. It’s hard to believe they herded sixty little girls down the street to the dime store near the Florida Theater, but perhaps they took us in groups. Of course, back then, weirdoes weren’t stalking the aisles of stores checking for loose kids, so maybe they did take us all in one fell swoop. We each got a dollar to spend and we deliberated long and carefully over our choices. It really was a dime store. Most years I got my mother my heart’s desire: a box of chocolate covered cherries, which left enough to buy a handkerchief for my brother. One year, though, I splurged and got two sherry glasses for mother and nothing for Mark. I still have one of those glasses, etched with grapes.

Read the whole thing and share it with someone you care about.

Finishing a strong second was this post by Shrinkwrapped who is rapidly becoming one of my favorite sites. The writer has a sharp, penetrating mind and writes in clear, lucid prose to which he applies his considerable experience in the mental health field.

The article is entitled “The Suicidal Pursuit of Perfection:”

It seems to me there are only two possible reasons the leakers, and those who print the leaks, can have for airing such potentially harmful information. The first possibility is that they are true believers in the absolute primacy of civil liberties; these are people who believe, for all sorts of often excellent reasons, that government power to control individuals is the ultimate danger and that any compromise of their position starts us on the “slippery slope” to totalitarianism. This position is, in some ways, quite admirable, though the logic of their uncompromising position leads to great harm to their own cause and to any influence they might wield or seek to wield. The other possibility is that they are political opportunists, using the issue for its value in damaging the Republican opposition for short term political gain. Aside from the noxiousness of this kind of behavior, I would suggest that their approach is similarly self-defeating, and threatens to marginalize their party and destroy whatever influence they might hope to wield.

There is a certain type of person who is intolerant of imperfection in themselves, and in others. They maintain the highest of standards for themselves and their society. In a profoundly important book written 20 years ago, the Psychoanalyst Arnold Rothstein described them as being involved in The Narcissistic Pursuit of Perfection. Their need for perfection leads them to attack all those who, inevitably, disappoint them; no one is ever good enough to make them feel satisfied.

Sound like anyone we know?

In the Non-Council category, the winner was Sigmund, Carl and Alfred’s “The New, Updated, Alice In Wonderland.” Great stuff!

What the real world, high priced analysts won’t tell you is a millennia old truth: The Jews just want to be left alone. They have been slaughtered by those who have hated them and slaughtered by those who have claimed to love them. The world was happy as long as that paradigm was valid. Now that Israelis and Jews defend themselves, they are hated with even more ferocity.

The Arabs could not beat the ragtag Jews, shell shocked from the Holocaust, into submission. The Arabs had never seen Jews defend themselves and they could not imagine a ‘dhimmi’ not acceding to their demands. The Arabs were seen for what they really were- failures. The one thousand year decline of Islam was now visible for all to see- including themselves. The blame game began in earnest. Someone had to be blamed for the failures. That ’someone’ was the Jews.

As for this week’s winners, my post on MSNBC’s Craig Crawford idiocy was nosed out once again by Dymphna at Gatesof Vienna for “Let Me Tell You Something, President Bush” that continues the story about the Indonesian guest worker in Saudi Arabia who was horribly abused at the hands of her master.

I might mention that for the only time in my memory, every single member of the Council received at least 1 vote from a fellow Council member on their submission. Excellent work all around.

Finishing first in the Non Council category was a heartfelt post by Neo-Neocon about the problems she has as a conservative while running in very liberal social circles. It’s called “To Speak or Not To Speak: Coming Out As a Neocon.”

Finally, the Watcher has tallied the 1st place votes from all the weekly contests held during 2005 and I’m proud to say that Right Wing Nut House finished with the most votes among all Council members. Finishing a close second (and closing fast at the end I might add) was Dr. Sanity followed by the irrepressible Dymphna of Gates of Vienna.. Congrats are also in order for Winds of Change who finished with the most 1st place votes in the Non-Council category.

If you’d like to participate in next week’s Watchers Council vote, you can submit a post by following the instructions here.

Here’s hoping that 2006 brings continued excellent work from all my friends on the Council.

It may be too complex a notion for my conservative Neanderthal brain to take in but, correct me if I’m wrong.

When we’re talking about war, isn’t there usually someone who wins and someone who loses?

And if you’re an American, shouldn’t you like, you know, be rooting for our side to win? Or is that too much to ask of a Congressman?

I realize that my first question has many permutations to it. After all, from a military standpoint, there is little doubt that we “won” the Viet Nam war. Every time the North Vietnamese met our guys in stand up, open battles, they got the crap kicked out of them. But in the end, the general consensus became that we “lost” the war because of the failure of our political goals.

I guess it’s one thing to make a strategic assessment about whether or not we lost in Viet Nam. But it is quite another thing to say this:

Representative John Murtha, the Pennsylvania Democrat who has come to national prominence since his call for a quick withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq, said Thursday night that he worries about “a slow withdrawal which makes it look like there’s a victory.”

Appearing at a town meeting in Arlington, Virginia, with fellow Democratic Rep. James Moran, Murtha said, “A year ago, I said we can’t win this militarily, and I got all kinds of criticism.” Now, Murtha told the strongly antiwar audience, “I worry about a slow withdrawal which makes it look like there’s a victory when I think it should be a redeployment as quickly as possible and let the Iraqis handle the whole thing.”

I suppose Murtha could claim that he’s talking about an al Qaeda “victory” as a result of a “slow withdrawal” but that’s not how I read it. It appears the Congressman is complaining that since his policy of “redeployment as quickly as possible” has been ignored that he’s worried that the United States will “appear” to win the war once our stated goal of establishing Iraqi self-government and an improvement in the security situation is achieved.

Since he’s so worried about even the appearance of the US winning the war, might we employ a little logic and ask the blowhard whether he would rather it appear that we are losing?

This would, in fact, reveal what Murtha was really trying to say; that no matter what, we’ve lost the war and any evidence to the contrary is simply administration spin. This would appear to be the Democrat’s war critique going into mid term elections this November. Their point being is that the war is lost, the men died in vain, Bush used the war as an excuse to gather unto himself extraordinary powers, and besides that, he says mean things about Democrats when we agree with al Qaeda.

Here’s al Qaeda’s #2 Ayman Zawahiri who also has a message for President Bush:

“Bush, you must admit that you have been defeated in Iraq and that you are being defeated in Afghanistan and that you will soon be defeated in Palestine,” Zawahiri said, according to a translation of his statement by the Washington-based SITE Institute.

Zawahiri, an Egyptian who is al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden’s top lieutenant, warned Americans that “as long as you do not deal with Muslim nations with understanding and respect, you will still go from one disaster to another. And your calamity will not end, unless you leave our lands and stop stealing our resources and stop supporting the bad rulers in our countries.”

So to sum up, Murtha is worried that by achieving our stated goals and pulling out it will appear to be a victory for the US while Doctor Death from al Qaeda is bragging that an American pullout will be a defeat for the United States.

I hope Representative Murtha found some comfort in the words contained in Doctor Zawahiri’s statement. Between he and al Qaeda (and the press), I have no doubt that somehow, someway, the traitorous wretches will be able to spin their way to making Iraq into a defeat for the United States.

UPDATE

Goldstein at his absolute, lucid best:

Of course, this is a rhetorical ploy—another instance of an attempt to have perception trump reality—as the Democrat leadership (led by their military hero poster child, Jack Murtha) rushed around in advance of the latest elections (and in anticipation of the likely strong voter turnout) demanding a draw down of US troops on the patently false assertion that the war in Iraq was being lost, even while they knew such a draw down was inevitable (and was tied to a position of strength, and to conditions on the ground, rather than some arbitrary time table).

This is postmodern moment—where reality is granted to those who control the dominant narrative and assert its truthfulness. That such can be done purposely and cynically—and with full knowledge that the narrative is manufactured to persuade rather than to inform—is simply part of the game.

Read the whole thing. Now.

Using so many qualifiers that one would think that they owned the franchise on the word “maybe,” the Congressional Research Service (CRS) has determined that the Bush Administration “probably” cannot claim the broad expansion of Presidential powers the President has relied on to justify the NSA intercept program:

President Bush’s rationale for eavesdropping on Americans without warrants rests on questionable legal ground, and Congress does not appear to have given him the authority to order the surveillance, said a Congressional analysis released Friday.

The analysis, by the Congressional Research Service, a nonpartisan research arm of Congress, was the first official assessment of a question that has gripped Washington for three weeks: Did Mr. Bush act within the law when he ordered the National Security Agency, the country’s most secretive spy agency, to eavesdrop on some Americans?

The report, requested by several members of Congress, reached no bottom-line conclusions on the legality of the program, in part because it said so many details remained classified. But it raised numerous doubts about the power to bypass Congress in ordering such operations, saying the legal rationale “does not seem to be as well grounded” as the administration’s lawyers have argued.

The murkiness contained in the CRS report is not their fault. There are still so many details of the intercept program that are classified that it is impossible to make any kind of determination as to whether or not the program is Constitutional and/or legal.

Then why write a report in the first place? Well, Congress asked them to, that’s why. Twenty-seven Congressmen sent the non-partisan adjunct to the Library of Congress a letter requesting their opinion on the legality of the program and whether or not the Department of Justice’s explanation held any Constitutional water. Under law, they were obligated to respond.

Their answer to both questions was a qualified “probably not:”

The 44-page report said that Bush probably cannot claim the broad presidential powers he has relied upon as authority to order the secret monitoring of calls made by U.S. citizens since the fall of 2001. Congress expressly intended for the government to seek warrants from a special Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court before engaging in such surveillance when it passed legislation creating the court in 1978, the CRS report said.

The report also concluded that Bush’s assertion that Congress authorized such eavesdropping to detect and fight terrorists does not appear to be supported by the special resolution that Congress approved after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, which focused on authorizing the president to use military force.

While this gives some ammunition to civil libertarian absolutists and partisan Democrats, what particularly struck me was the less qualified and stronger rejection by CRS of the rather sloppy Administration argument that Congressional authorization was contained in the “Authorization to Use Military Force” (AUMF) passed in the wake of the 9/11 attacks:

The report also concluded that Bush’s assertion that Congress authorized such eavesdropping to detect and fight terrorists does not appear to be supported by the special resolution that Congress approved after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, which focused on authorizing the president to use military force.

“It appears unlikely that a court would hold that Congress has expressly or impliedly authorized the NSA electronic surveillance operations here,” the authors of the CRS report wrote. The administration’s legal justification “does not seem to be . . . well-grounded,” they said.

Orrin Kerr has made the same argument and has pointed out that the DOJ letter was sent by the Office of Legislative Affairs. This bunch probably knew less about the technical details of the program than the rest of us know today thanks to the publication of the Risen book. So, in my opinion, the justifications by the Administration for the program will probably receive a much fuller treatment during the almost certain Congressional hearings on the matter.

All this CRS report does is muddy the waters on both the legality and Constitutionality of the NSA intercept program. Given their limited knowledge of the program and the near certainty that no definitive case could be made one way or the other, one has to look at the motives of those asking for the report in the first place. It seems pretty clear that Congress is very concerned (as they damn well should be) about any unwarranted expansion of executive power - even in time of war. As our friends on the left are so fond of saying, “War doesn’t make the President king.” This is very true but neither should it be the business of Congress to tie the hands of the President and emasculate his powers in matters of national security where the life and death of thousands - perhaps millions - of citizens is at stake.

This is the razor’s edge that our democracy is standing on right now. And the fact that Democrats are using the CRS report as a club to score partisan political points is typical but unhelpful. Perhaps it is too much to ask that we wait until more is known about the intercept program before leaping into either the abyss of executive power emasculation or the quicksand of an imperial Presidency. If we really put our minds to it, perhaps we could come down somewhere in the middle.

Given the rank partisanship on the hill, I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for it.

UPDATE

John Hinderaker agrees with me on the ambiguity of the report’s conclusions - which either makes me very smart or the CRS report very obvious.

Hinderaker also skewers the Washington Post for their slanted coverage.

Don’t these guys in the Administration ever learn?

You may recall that prior to the Iraq War, the Bush Administration tried to foist the idea on the American people that Saddam’s Iraq was a training ground for terrorists.

Thanks to our brilliant intelligence services and the untiring efforts of left wing liberals, this dangerous lie was exposed and found to be utterly, completely, totally, and without question a prevarication.

Now there’s word that the Bush Administration is once again trying to promote this lie. Are these guys stupid or something? I mean, in order for anyone to believe them, they would have to have a huge amount of documentary evidence with pictures and testimony from Saddam’s henchmen. The evidence would have to be incontrovertible.

Thank goodness that kind of thing could never happen, right? RIGHT?

THE FORMER IRAQI REGIME OF Saddam Hussein trained thousands of radical Islamic terrorists from the region at camps in Iraq over the four years immediately preceding the U.S. invasion, according to documents and photographs recovered by the U.S. military in postwar Iraq. The existence and character of these documents has been confirmed to THE WEEKLY STANDARD by eleven U.S. government officials.

The secret training took place primarily at three camps–in Samarra, Ramadi, and Salman Pak–and was directed by elite Iraqi military units. Interviews by U.S. government interrogators with Iraqi regime officials and military leaders corroborate the documentary evidence. Many of the fighters were drawn from terrorist groups in northern Africa with close ties to al Qaeda, chief among them Algeria’s GSPC and the Sudanese Islamic Army. Some 2,000 terrorists were trained at these Iraqi camps each year from 1999 to 2002, putting the total number at or above 8,000. Intelligence officials believe that some of these terrorists returned to Iraq and are responsible for attacks against Americans and Iraqis. According to three officials with knowledge of the intelligence on Iraqi training camps, White House and National Security Council officials were briefed on these findings in May 2005; senior Defense Department officials subsequently received the same briefing.

The photographs and documents on Iraqi training camps come from a collection of some 2 million “exploitable items” captured in postwar Iraq and Afghanistan. They include handwritten notes, typed documents, audiotapes, videotapes, compact discs, floppy discs, and computer hard drives. Taken together, this collection could give U.S. intelligence officials and policymakers an inside look at the activities of the former Iraqi regime in the months and years before the Iraq War.

That thud you just heard was the collective sound of liberals hitting their heads on the floor after fainting.

I wrote here of Mr. Hayes’ herculean efforts to examine these non-classified documents. The fact was that at the time, the Pentagon seemed singularly unconcerned about the political ramifications of some of the things that might be found. They had a assigned a pitifully small number of researches to the task and were giving journalists like Mr. Hayes the runaround when they volunteered to go through some of the documents themselves. If what Mr. Hayes says here is true, that attitude may be changing:

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has convened several meetings in recent weeks to discuss the Pentagon’s role in expediting the release of the information. According to several sources familiar with his thinking, Rumsfeld is pushing aggressively for a massive dump of the captured documents. “He has a sense that public vetting of this information is likely to be as good an astringent as any other process we could develop,” says Pentagon spokesman Larry DiRita.

The main worry, says DiRita, is that the mainstream press might cherry-pick documents and mischaracterize their meaning. “There is always the concern that people would be chasing a lot of information good or bad, and when the Times or the Post splashes a headline about some sensational-sounding document that would seem to ‘prove’ that sanctions were working, or that Saddam was just a misunderstood patriot, or some other nonsense, we’d spend a lot of time chasing around after it.”

This is a view many officials attributed to Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence Steve Cambone. (Cambone, through a spokesman, declined to be interviewed.) For months, Cambone has argued internally against expediting the release of the documents. “Cambone is the problem,” says one former Bush administration official who wants the documents released. “He has blocked this every step of the way.” In what is perhaps a sign of a changing dynamic within the administration, Cambone is now saying that he, like his boss, favors a broad document release.

What this cache of information about the training of 8,000 terrorists in Iraq shows is that our intelligence agencies aren’t worth spit. What can you say about a culture that would rather be wrong about the facts than change their cherished, long held and flawed analyses?

This represents an extraordinarily troubling dysfunctionality at the top levels of our intelligence apparatus. Even with the most technologically sophisticated satellites and signals intercept equipment known to man, our “analysts” at the CIA were still unable to uncover a training program from which 2,000 hardened jihadists graduated every year. Could they have been blind to this danger because of stupidity? Or was there something more at work here?

Given the war being waged by the CIA over the last 3 years against this Administration, is it too farfetched to believe that the threat Saddam posed as a terrorist trainer and enabler was deliberately downplayed in order to try and convince the Administration not to go for regime change? How could they have missed this? It will take a tall amount of convincing for me to believe that somewhere in our National Reconnaissance Office - the top secret headquarters that analyzes intel from our spy satellites - that there aren’t pictures detailing exactly what is going on at those sites mentioned in Mr. Hayes article. Are we to believe that trained professionals were unable to spot these terrorist sites?

Someone at the CIA has some explaining to do.

There is nothing new about claiming to talk to God. Neither is there anything new in believing that the Lord is working his will through a human vessel. For thousands of years, societies have had mystics, ascetics, holy men, holy rollers, shakers, fakirs, shamans and charlatans. These folks usually served a useful purpose in that they reinforced a belief system that united the culture - especially in times of trial and hardship.

The old Testament is replete with examples of prophets and ordinary people who talked to God or who claimed they were carrying out the will of the Almighty. They are among the most revered figures in the history of both the Jewish and Christian religions. Isaiah, Ezekiel, Jeremiah, and Jonah are touchstones that for Jews, connect the present with the past and for Christians, represent confirmation in the divinity of Christ - “The Word Made Flesh.” Similarly, for Muslims, “al Mahdi” (The Guided One) is both a mystic and a savior. His return has been foretold for almost 1500 years and his arrival will herald the final battle between believers and non-believers. It is significant that the Mahdi’s return will not occur until Muslims all over the world are oppressed and ready to unite to defeat the forces of evil represented by their oppressors.

The modern, secular world no longer has much tolerance for people who claim to talk to God (or, at least have a direct line to what God is saying). They are considered kooks and crazies. If they stand on a street corner in ragged clothes with a sign saying “The End Is Near” we tend to feel pity. But when they go on television dressed in $1,000 suits and claim that illness is divine retribution for being disobedient of God, we are rightly outraged:

As the Israeli prime minister battled for life, Robertson seemed to suggest to viewers on his “700 Club” television show that Sharon was being punished for his policies in Gaza and the West Bank.

“The prophet Joel makes it very clear that God has enmity against those who, quote, ‘divide my land.’ God considers this land to be his.

“You read the Bible, he says, ‘This is my land.’ And for any prime minister of Israel who decides he’s going carve it up and give it away, God says, ‘No. This is mine.’”

Being something of a theatrical prophet, Robertson then invokes language reminiscent of the thundering condemnations given by Old Testament prophets to the sinning Hebrews:

I prayed with him personally. But here he is at the point of death. He was dividing God’s land, and I would say woe unto any prime minister of Israel who takes a similar course to appease the EU, the United Nations or the United States of America.”

Woe, indeed. Robertson isn’t “suggesting” that Sharon’s illness was caused by his disobedience of God’s strictures, he is actually wishing it. “Woe unto” - or “may bad things happen to you” is a helluva lot different than simply saying that God doesn’t like you. In effect, Robertson is acting as the hand of God here on earth - by his lights - in punishing Sharon for his transgressions.

I will not make fun of Robertson’s beliefs by suggesting he is crazy. Indeed, millions believe in what the good Reverend has to say, even his over the air healing sessions where he invokes the name of Jesus Christ to cure everything from cancer to warts. Instead, as Joe Gandleman has pointed out, let’s examine Robertson’s affinity with another anti-modernist; Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad:

“Hopefully, the news that the criminal of Sabra and Chatilla has joined his ancestors is final,” President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was quoted as saying by the semiofficial Iranian Students News Agency.

Ahmadinejad was referring to Sharon, who as defense minister in 1982 directed Israel’s ill-fated invasion of Lebanon. An Israeli commission found him indirectly responsible for a massacre of Palestinians in the Sabra and Chatilla refugee camps by Christian Phalangist soldiers.

While not specifically invoking the name Allah, the reference to “joining his ancestors” is reflective of the belief of devout Muslims that Jews and Christians cannot enter heaven. And note the similarity - both men are wishing Sharon ill.

What are we to make of this? For Robertson’s part, he has been marginalized even in the evangelical movement as other TV preachers have far surpassed him in audience and fundraising. And his political influence is almost non existent. His notoriety comes from his brush with destiny in 1988 when he made a surprisingly strong showing in the Iowa Caucuses, finishing second ahead of candidates like Vice President Bush and Jack Kemp. Since the heyday of TV evangelists in the 1990’s, he has fallen precipitously.

Not so the mystical Ahmadinejad. As President of a country that is about ready to get its hands on the ultimate power here on earth, he claims that he “foretold” his election last June months before when his support was at 1%. He also claims to possess otherwordly powers:

The president also spoke of an aura that wreathed him throughout his controversial UN speech in September.

“O mighty Lord,” Mr. Ahmadinejad intoned to his surprised audience, “I pray to you to hasten the emergence of your last repository, the promised one, that perfect and pure human being, the one that will fill this world with justice and peace.”

Later, at a private meeting with a cleric that was caught on video, Ahmadinejad shared his views of the moment. “I felt that all of a sudden the atmosphere changed, and for 27 to 28 minutes the leaders did not blink,” he said. “They were astonished…. it had opened their eyes and ears for the message of the Islamic Republic.”

“The promised one” being the Mahdi. And here’s where the similarities between Robertson and Ahmadinejad are most pronounced; they both have an apocalyptic vision of the world.

Robertson has said on many occasion that America is suffering because we have fallen away from God. Along with his fellow preacher Jerry Falwell who famously said that 9/11 was the result of throwing God out of the classroom and the public square, this is a worldview that accepts the fact of direct divine retribution for both innocent and guilty alike.

Ahmadinejad goes even farther. He believes he is laying the foundation for the return of the Mahdi, meeting the required conditions laid out in prophecy and tradition. By doing so, he hopes to usher in an era of “justice and peace” - ostensibly once the unbelievers are dealt with. The similarities between Robertson’s constant use of apocalyptic metaphors to describe what’s happening to America and Ahmadinejad invoking the Mahdi is startling. And, in the case of the Iranian President, extraordinarily troubling.

Robertson’s run for the Presidency in 1988 was doomed from the start. He was buried in every subsequent contest and never had a ghost of a chance of winning. What Robertson was really after was a platform for his ideas - something the Republicans were happy to oblige him at the Convention. Robertson was never really serious about being President and I daresay the American people never took him seriously in that regard.

But Ahmadinejad is already the leader of a country that is a regional powerhouse and whose influence (thanks to their support of terrorism) is felt far beyond the Middle East. They also hold vast reserves of oil, have a healthy literacy rate, an emerging middle class, and as I mentioned, are about to embark on the grand adventure of arming itself with nuclear weapons.

The problem is that Robertston would fit right in with those Old Testament prophets and mystics. They would recognize a kindred spirit. The same goes for Ahmadinejad to a certain extent. And here’s the problem.:

What do you think it would be like if instead of horns to blow down the walls of Jerhico, Joshua had a tactical nuke?

It certainly would have saved Joshua some time. After the walls came down, Joshua ordered every living soul in Jericho (with a couple of exceptions) put to the sword, dealing out God’s “justice” - a practice carried out many times by the Israelites in their conquest of the promised land.

This kind of fanaticism in the breast of someone like Robertson is harmless for the most part. No one takes him seriously. But in the case of the Iranian President, it would behoove us to be mindful of every pronouncement this man makes as it relates to his mystical belief in salvation - either by the Mahdi or by the Islamic Republic’s own devices.

We may get a chance to observe his mystical belief in the apocalypse a lot sooner than we would care to believe.

Bill Gertz has a story in today’s Washington Times that actually “broke ” almost two weeks ago; that a former NSA and DIA employee wrote a letter to the Chairmen of the House and Senate Intelligence Committee asking to testify about illegal surveillance activities of the federal government:

A former National Security Agency official wants to tell Congress about electronic intelligence programs that he asserts were carried out illegally by the NSA and the Defense Intelligence Agency.

Russ Tice, a whistleblower who was dismissed from the NSA last year, stated in letters to the House and Senate intelligence committees that he is prepared to testify about highly classified Special Access Programs, or SAPs, that were improperly carried out by both the NSA and the DIA.

“I intend to report to Congress probable unlawful and unconstitutional acts conducted while I was an intelligence officer with the National Security Agency and with the Defense Intelligence Agency,” Mr. Tice stated in the Dec. 16 letters, copies of which were obtained by The Washington Times.

The letters were sent the same day that the New York Times revealed that the NSA was engaged in a clandestine eavesdropping program that bypassed the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court. The FISA court issues orders for targeted electronic and other surveillance by the government.

Tice’s “whistleblowing” was accusing a fellow employee at the DIA of being an agent for China. What happened next is typical of what occurs in our intelligence agencies if you rock the boat; they go after your personal life.

He was ordered to take a psychiatric exam after which he was judged a “paranoid.” His clearance was yanked and he was given menial tasks like washing motor pool cars and working in the NSA warehouse. Eventually, he was fired, coincidentally or not, a week after testifying before Congress about persecution of whistleblowers and how they should be protected under the federal whistleblower statute.

Given the nature of his accusation against the employee and the fact that she continued to work there after the DIA investigated could mean any number of things. What it doesn’t mean is that the DIA is harboring a communist Chinese spy, something Mr. Rice insists is still the case.

Does this make him a paranoid loon? Well…you decide:

In April 2003, Tice sent an e-mail to the DIA agent handling his suspicions about a co-worker being a Chinese spy. He was prompted to do so by a news report about two FBI agents who were arrested for giving classified information to a Chinese double agent.

“At the time, I sent an e-mail to Mr. James (the person at DIA handling his complaint) questioning the competence of counterintelligence at FBI,” Tice wrote in a document submitted to the Inspector General. In the e-mail, he mentioned that he suspected that he was the subject of electronic monitoring.

Shortly after sending the e-mail, an NSA security officer ordered him to report for “a psychological evaluation” even though he had just gone through one nine months earlier. Tice believes James called NSA to ask them “to go after him” on their behalf.

The Defense Department psychologist concluded that Tice suffered from psychotic paranoia, according to Tice. “He did this even though he admitted that I did not show any of the normal indications of someone suffering from paranoia,” Tice wrote in a statement to the inspector general.

The culture in our intelligence agencies brooks no opposition so even though some of the things Mr. Tice himself describes sounds like a classic case of paranoia there is plenty of room for doubt. Then again, Mac’s Mind has some interesting information about why Mr. Tice’s clearance was revoked:

Word is that his security clearance (because he was misusing information and looking with unauthorized peeks into the co-worker’s background), was subsequently revoked - FOR CAUSE - or for those on the left - because he violated the terms of keeping a clearance. (HT: AJ Strata)

Having said that, it is unlikely that Tice would have any bombshells to deliver to the Committees. He says that these SAPS programs were “illegal and unconstitutional.” Now I’m sure Mr. Tice is a very smart fellow but I daresay he is neither a lawyer or a constitutional scholar which makes his charges ring a little hollow.

More importantly, why him and why now? My friend Clarice Feldman who is a frequent contributor at The American Thinker has some interesting information on that score. Apparently Tice is a member of a group called National Security Whistleblowers that sure has some familiar names:

Along with more familiar names like Daniel Ellsburg, you’ll see Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer on the list. You’ll also find Ray McGovern and Larry Johnson. These are members of VIPS, the group that encouraged intelligence agents to leak, shopped Wilson and his story (Johnson was in the agency with Plame and is close to her.) As I noted earlier here, they seem to have been behind much of the Plame/Wilson story. I smell the same public relations/media campaign .The same phony claims of maltreated government employees. If Tice was a source for Risen, and it’s not clear he was, the reporter was certainly casting a broad net. For as Mr. Gertz notes in his article:

“Mr. Tice said yesterday that he was not part of the intercept program.”

Now what would our old friends Johnson and McGovern be doing in a group of whistleblowers? Both of those men came to prominence after they left government. In fact, both of them have been out of government for several years.

Something stinks here. And Clarice agrees:

The only significant difference between the original Plame/Wilson scandal and the revival at NSA is that the same folks who moaned about a major intelligence breach that had to be punished when Valerie Wilson’s desk job at the CIA hit print are now openly supporting a leaker and claiming he is entitled to protections – even though he hasn’t gone through the channels established by law.

Could the Johnson-McGovern crew have recruited this hapless ex-NSA employee in another PR effort to try and discredit the Bush Administration? Pure speculation, of course. But a strange and curious case indeed.

I guess if your name is Clinton, violating the law means never having to say you’re sorry…just make sure you’ve got a good enough lawyer:

A fund-raising committee for Senator Clinton’s 2000 campaign has agreed to pay a $35,000 civil penalty and to concede that reports it made to the federal government understated by more than $700,000 donations to a California celebrity gala held to benefit her Senate bid.

The agreement between the committee, New York Senate 2000, and the Federal Election Commission ends the campaign finance regulation agency’s inquiry into a complaint filed in 2001 by an entrepreneur who financed the fund-raising concert, Peter Paul.

“The civil payment assessed to New York Senate 2000 resolves the question of underreported in-kind contributions, and there will be no further action on this matter,” an attorney for the fundraising committee, Marc Elias, said.

If you’re interested, the Hollywood gala took in $721,000 and Hillary’s campaign reported that she realized $57,000. That’s not so bad. Just hope that when she’s President, she doesn’t name her Finance Chairman David Rosen Director of the Office of Management and Budget.

That won’t be likely since Mr. Rosen is under indictment for misleading the FEC on what was taken in on that star studded night. Another organizer of that same fundraiser, Aaron Tonkin, has already pled guilty to fraud in connection to other charity events unrelated to the Clinton fundraiser.

That’s some crew. Given the number of crooks, scofflaws, leches, loons, and galoots who were in her husband’s Administration, I suppose we shouldn’t be so surprised.

What’s surprising is that Hillary herself has escaped with nary a scrape on her sparkling reputation. This is strange, since Hillary apparently knew all about the effort to flim-flam the FEC:

New York Sen. Hillary Clinton personally negotiated some of the fees for a star-studded Aug. 12, 2000 Hollywood fundraiser, the event’s producer, Peter Paul, said in an interview aired on Sunday - as the event comes under increasing scrutiny by a Los Angeles grand jury and the Justice Department.

And in another sign of potential legal trouble for the top Democrat, a spokesman for the law firm championing Paul’s case said his client informed Mrs. Clinton that her finance director, David Rosen, had failed to accurately report costs for the event to the Federal Election Commission.

“Hillary Clinton personally called the producer of the concert part of this event,” Mr. Paul told Fox News Channel’s Eric Shawn. “She asked him to lower the fee that he was charging of $850,000 at my request. So I don’t understand how she could possibly say that she didn’t know.”

Poor Mr. Paul. He evidently isn’t familiar with the Clinton SOP: Deny, deny, deny. And if that doesn’t work, blame the Republicans.

Ed Morrissey believes that there are lessons to be learned from Hillary’s great escape:

In the end, this probably doesn’t hurt anyone too much, but it should remind voters of two important issues. One: the Clinton’s always seem to trod through the outer fringes of election law when it comes to raising money. Two: These Byzantine rules for designating cash in elections only delight attorneys and accountants, and in that order.

Yep. Which means that the next round of campaign finance “reform” that will most surely be pushed as a result of the Abramoff fiasco will have the shysters and pencil necks licking their chops in anticipation.

UPDATE

Michelle Malkin links to Peter Paul’s blog for a more lengthy rundown on Hillary’s complicity in hoodwinking the FEC.

Ever since the NSA intercept story broke nearly 3 weeks ago, it had been my position that before supporting or condemning the top secret program, I wanted to see details of how it actually worked.

From the beginning, I’ve had three concerns:

1. Was the program legal?
2. Was the program Constitutional?
3. Was the program necessary?

One might think that numbers 1 and 2 would be the same thing. But as I’ve learned from Orin Kerr and the Powerline guys, they are not. The program could in fact be Constitutional in that it did not violate either the Fourth Amendment or Article II of the Constitution which deals with the powers of the executive branch, while at the same time it could be illegal if the intercept program was specifically prohibited under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).

As for the necessity of the program, I always suspected that it was a vital tool in preventing another 9/11 but could not make that determination because many of the technical details were hidden from us.

I must confess that I’ve blown hot and cold on the issue, depending on who I happen to be reading at the moment. For example, John Hindraker has done some exhaustive analysis on the legality of the program, essentially saying that it appeared to be justified under FISA. He cited recent court cases that ruled in favor of the government where warrantless searches were concerned. While the analysis was thorough and answered some basic questions, I was troubled by some of the assumptions Mr. Hindraker was forced to make about how the program actually worked due to the fact that technical details were not forthcoming.

Hindraker also brilliantly elucidated the Constitutional arguments in favor of the program and the subsequent expansion of executive powers. This part was much more convincing - until I read Marty Lederman’s treatment of the same subject (with several excellent links outlining the liberal point of view on the issue). What is utterly fascinating is that two intelligent, learned people have come to differing conclusions using pretty much the same information. This leads me to believe that the legal arguments for or against the program will probably have to be adjudicated in a court of law.

As for Constitutionality, this has also been a murky issue thanks to our ignorance of the technical aspects of the program. However, with the publication of James Risen’s book State of War (extended excerpts here) some light has been shed on how the program actually worked that have eased many of the concerns I personally had regarding privacy rights. The jury, however, may still be out on whether or not the program was technically violating FISA.

Orin Kerr has analyzed some of the nuts and bolts involved in the program. Apparently, this New York Times article that followed up on the initial disclosures actually hit pretty close to the mark as to how the intercept program gathered communications:

Several officials said that after President Bush’s order authorizing the NSA program, senior government officials arranged with officials of some of the nation’s largest telecommunications companies to gain access to switches that act as gateways at the borders between the United States’ communications networks and international networks. The identities of the corporations involved could not be determined.

The switches are some of the main arteries for moving voice and some Internet traffic into and out of the United States, and, with the globalization of the telecommunications industry in recent years, many international-to-international calls are also routed through such American switches.

One outside expert on communications privacy who previously worked at the NSA said that to exploit its technological capabilities, the American government had in the last few years been quietly encouraging the telecommunications industry to increase the amount of international traffic that is routed through American-based switches.

The growth of that transit traffic had become a major issue for the intelligence community, officials say, because it had not been fully addressed by 1970’s-era laws and regulations governing the NSA Now that foreign calls were being routed through switches on American soil, some judges and law enforcement officials regarded eavesdropping on those calls as a possible violation of those decades-old restrictions, including the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which requires court-approved warrants for domestic surveillance.

Compare that with this excerpt from Risen’s book I stole off of Kerr’s post:

In addition to handling telephone calls from, say, Los Angeles to New York, the switches also act as gateways into and out of the United States for international telecommunications. A large volume of purely international telephone calls — calls that do not begin or end in America — also now travel through switches based in the United States. Telephone calls from Asia to Europe, for example, may go through the United States-based switches. This so-called transit traffic has dramatically increased in recent years as the telephone network has become increasingly globalized. Computerized systems determine the most efficient routes for digital “packets” of electronic communications depending on the speed and congestion on the networks, not necessarily on the shortest line between two points. Such random global route selection means that the switches carrying calls from Cleveland to Chicago, for example, may also be carrying calls from Islamabad to Jakarta. In fact, it is now difficult to tell where the domestic telephone system ends and the international network begins.

There have been reports that the spooks had to do a little arm twisting to get the cooperation of at least one of the Telecom companies involved. This leads me to believe that lawyers for the Telecom companies had many of the same concerns as the people in the Department of Justice and in the intelligence community who talked to Risen for his book - that the program was ambiguous enough that there was a possibility that it could be seen as technically violating the law or the Constitution.

Here’s Kerr on that:

Reading over this part of Risen’s book, it seems that most of the new surveillance program was not about domestic surveillance at all; most of it was about the surveillance of entirely international calls and e-mails that just happened to be routed through U.S. networks in the course of delivery. According to Risen, the program typically monitored about 7,000 individuals overseas at any given time, as compared to about about 500 people who were located in the United States. From an operational perspective, then, the big difference between prior NSA practices and the new program was that the NSA was using a back door into domestic provider switches in the U.S. to monitor communications that were mostly foreign to foreign.

With that kind of ambiguity, I can see why it may have been difficult to get FISA Court approved wiretaps. If it was virtually impossible to separate domestic from international traffic while monitoring these switches, what exactly would the spooks have been able to ask of a FISA judge? Even though the FISA Court has a notoriously low threshold for granting warrants, the NSA literally had nothing to take to the Court that would have necessitated wiretaps in the first place.

As for electronic communications like emails, here’s another excerpt from Risen’s book that should ease privacy concerns there as well:

While the Internet uses packets to send and receive information, the packets are really just digital ones and zeroes that computers use to communicate with each other. The ones and zeroes can be reassembled into text to be read by a human, but computers do not need to do this and generally will not. A computer surveillance tool programmed to look for all emails to the Internet account “bob@aol.com” does not actually look for the text “bob@aol.com.” To simplify a bit, the tool instead begins by looking for emails, and when it finds an email, it scans the right place in the email for the digital equivalent of “bob@aol.com,” which is 0110001001101111011000100100000001100001. If this exact sequence of ones and zeros appears in the right place, the surveillance tool knows that it has found an email to bob@aol.com and will copy and record the block of ones and zeros that represent the email so that someone can later come back, convert the ones and zeros into text, and read the email. If the tool has an advanced filter and is configured properly, the billions of ones and zeros that do not relate to emails or to the exact sequence of 0s and 1s that represent the target account will pass through the device and be forgotten.

This answers many of the privacy concerns but not all. For instance, once a target email was converted back into text, was there a branching out of that program to start targeting people who happened to be connected not to the original target, but to someone who had sent the email in the first place? In other words, I sure would like to know if you are directly communicating via email with a terrorist. But does the government have the right to target people who send you emails? And what of people who send that person an email? And on and on. It is not clear whether or not the program allowed for this kind of “branching out” of targets or not. In my mind, that kind of scattershot approach would be troubling if not downright illegal.

On the other hand, as Kerr points out, this was a “real time” intercept program and hence, there was no “capture” of emails or phone calls on a massive scale as some have been alleging. This would seem to make it legal under FISA which requires warrants for communications that are actually in the possession of the government. This is admittedly murky territory and I would defer to those with more knowledge of the subject than I.

As for the Constitutional issues, Kerr is not enamored of the Justice Department’s invoking Article II to justify the intercept program. Specifically, government lawyers are saying the President had Congressional authorization for the program thanks to the “Authority to Use Military Force” (AUMF) resolution passed by Congress authorizing the Iraq invasion:

As I have said before, I find the AUMF and Article II arguments unconvincing, so if that’s the right issue to be focusing on, I’m with Armando. But something seems fishy here. For example, the leakers of the story seem focused on the Fourth Amendment instead of FISA. Further, given the extremely small number of people within the government who know the details of the program, it’s not clear that DOJ’s Office of Legislative Affairs (the office that sent the letter) was briefed on the details of the program. That is, the DOJ memo may have been written by people who knew less about the monitoring program than we now know thanks to Risen’s book. (This may seem odd to you if you have never worked in the federal government; my guess is that it will seem less odd to those who have.) So Armando may be right, but I don’t think we know enough to be sure of that.

Do we know enough now about the workings of the program to make a judgment about its legality and Constitutionality? I think we know enough to say that there is no clear cut case to answer that question in the negative. Which brings us to the $64,000 question upon which such ambiguous questions must be resolved: Was the program necessary?

Vice President Cheney had some thoughts on that yesterday in a speech he gave before the Heritage Society:

Another vital step the President took in the days following 9/11 was to authorize the National Security Agency to intercept a certain category of terrorist-linked international communications. There are no communications more important to the safety of the United States than those related to al-Qaeda that have one end in the United States. If we’d been able to do this before 9/11, we might have been able to pick up on two of the hijackers who flew a jet into the Pentagon. They were in the United States, communicating with al-Qaeda associates overseas. But we didn’t know they were here plotting until it was too late.

If you’ll recall, the report of the 9/11 Commission focused criticism on our inability to uncover links between terrorists at home and terrorists abroad. The authorization the President made after September 11th helped address that problem in a manner that is fully consistent with the Constitutional responsibilities and legal authority of the President and with the civil liberties of the American people. The activities conducted under this authorization have helped to detect and prevent possible terrorist attacks against the American people. As such, this program is critical to the national security of the United States.

The left will set up a strawman by arguing that every action the Administration has taken to protect us is justified by 9/11 and that they are using 9/11 as an “excuse” to accrue vast amounts of power and attack the Constitution.

The grown ups among us recognize that argument for what it is; bunkum. It would seem idiotic to have to remind liberals on a daily basis that 9/11 actually happened and that our enemies are working constantly to duplicate the success of that attack and even surpass it in terms of American blood spilled. Concerns over the Constitutionality and legality of the intercept program are well and good. And if they could be argued in a calm, rational manner by both sides I would have some hope that we could come to some kind of understanding on the limits of executive power and some kind of sensible outlook on civil liberties in a time of war.

But you and I both know that is an impossibility. The only thing that concerns the left about this program is that they can use it as a political club to beat the Republicans over the head with come election time. After that, and if they are successful in becoming the majority party in the House, they will give full rein to their hatred of the President as they attempt to use the ambiguity inherent in the program to try and impeach him.

I pity them their madness. The damage they would do the the executive powers of the President with such an inquiry could in fact hamstring future Chief Executives in fighting the war on terror. And that is a circumstance that could spell disaster for all of us.

A gathering of wise men (and woman) has been called by the President ostensibly to discuss the situation in Iraq:

It will be an unusual sight on Thursday in the Roosevelt Room of White House, and deliberately so: President Bush will engage in a consultation of sorts with a bipartisan collection of former secretaries of state and defense.

Among them will be several who have left little doubt that they think Mr. Bush has dangerously mishandled Iraq, ignored other looming crises, and put critical alliances at risk.

The meeting was called by the White House, which sent out invitations just before Christmas to everyone who once held those jobs.

The invitees were told that they were being asked to attend a briefing on Iraq and other issues. It was unclear, one recipient said, “how interested they are in what we are thinking.”

This could be, as some invitees have speculated, window dressing for the President’s continuing efforts to sell the Iraq War to the American people. Or, it could be something much more ominous.

Following on the heels of last weekend’s leak to Der Speigle about our contingency plans to bomb Iranian nuclear sites, this gathering could be one more signal we are sending to the Iranians that we are deathly serious about preventing them from building a nuclear weapon. Since Iran is going to be on the agenda, the President may want to gage what kind of support he can expect from Democratic heavy hitters if he feels it necessary to escalate the crisis, probably within a few weeks.

Key to this strategy will be two individuals respected by the liberal press and Democratic members of Congress; former Secretary’s of State Madeline Albright and Colin Powell.

Powell would probably support toughening our stance in the UN and perhaps even some kind of sanctions regime. Albright is another story. Architect of what she considered a successful nuclear containment policy in North Korea (she blames Bush for the collapse of the inspections in 2002), it is doubtful she would advocate anything outside of that being offered by the European Union’s “Big Three” - Britain, France, and Germany. Those three countries have been negotiating with Iran for almost a year about trying to safeguard their nuclear program and keep the mullahs from processing enough fissionable uranium to build a bomb. The Iranians, of course, have been playing the Europeans for fools as they blow hot and cold on negotiations, all the while continuing to expand their enrichment efforts. The latest offer by the EU - to allow Russia to enrich the uranium - has been rejected by President Ahmadinejad who continues to bait both Israel and the United States, daring us to attack him.

In fact, Ahmadinejad recently made it plain that he feels negotiations with the EU is a waste of time:

In a closed-door meeting with parliament’s Foreign Policy and National Security Committee, Ahmadinejad said that under former presidents Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and Mohammad Khatami Iran had tried to appease Europe.

“On foreign policy, Ahmadinejad said that during the last sixteen years, we adopted a detente policy … but in practice this policy had not achieved anything for Iran,” Kazem Jalali, a member of the committee, told the official IRNA news agency.

By the end of Khatami’s second term in 2004 “we were distanced from the goals of the (1979 Islamic) Revolution and our activity in the Islamic world had been somewhat diminished,” Jalali quoted Ahmadinejad as saying.

(HT: LGF)

Meanwhile, the Iranians appear to be scouring Europe for the hardware to construct a working nuclear device:

The Iranian government has been successfully scouring Europe for the sophisticated equipment needed to develop a nuclear bomb, according to the latest western intelligence assessment of the country’s weapons programmes.
Scientists in Tehran are also shopping for parts for a ballistic missile capable of reaching Europe, with “import requests and acquisitions … registered almost daily”, the report seen by the Guardian concludes.

The warning came as Iran raised the stakes in its dispute with the United States and the European Union yesterday by notifying the International Atomic Energy Authority that it intended to resume nuclear fuel research next week. Tehran has refused to rule out a return to attempts at uranium enrichment, the key to the development of a nuclear weapon.

All of this adds up to a brewing crisis that will require the Administration to make a decision; do we acquiesce and accept an Iranian fait accompli on their building and deploying a nuclear weapon or do we try and use every means necessary to prevent it?

There are things short of bombing that we can do. The UN Security Council would be useful except that both Russian and China - who have both recently signed lucrative commercial deals with Iran - would be expected to veto any sanctions regime or military action contemplated by the SC. And there is the possibility that we could initiate a naval blockade. This would be extraordinarily risky because Iran has been armed by both the Chinese and the French with modern anti-ship missiles. And in the duck pond of the Persian Gulf, our ships would have only minutes notice before one or more of those missiles were upon them. While our anti-missile defense is the best in the world (Aegis Cruisers are designed to protect the battle group in just such a circumstance) they would probably need more time to be effective. I daresay the Navy would be extremely reluctant to undertake any blockade that would put so many ships and men at risk.

It certainly looks like a job for the Air Force. That is, if the President has the courage to buck the left, the MSM, and probably a majority of Democrats not to mention 9/10 of the rest of the world.

And what of all these respected national leaders called to the White House to discuss Iraq and “other matters?” The Democrats in the group (and probably some Republicans) think that Bush has ignored them for 5 years and why should they pull his chestnuts out of the fire now? It’s a fair question and here’s a fair answer; because it is vital to our survival as a nation that on the issue of preventing Iran from getting its hands on nuclear weapons, we speak with one voice. In fact, perhaps the only way to prevent military action against Iran is to convince Ahmadinejad that there is no chance - zero - that they will escape military action by trying to play one faction off of another here in America. We must convince him that he has no choice but to submit to some kind of international inspections regime that will be stringent enough to give us confidence that they can’t circumvent it and build a nuke anyway.

Otherwise, it will be a bombing campaign with risks that I spell out here.

Will factionalism be the death of us all? A significant portion of the answer to that question may be answered tomorrow at a meeting of some of the wisest heads in the foreign policy and defense establishment.