Fire Hydrant of Freedom

The Suicide Bombers Among Us
Theodore Dalrymple

All terrorists, presumably, know the dangers that they run, accepting them as an occupational hazard; given Man?s psychological makeup?or at least the psychological makeup of certain young men?these dangers may act as an attraction, not a deterrent. But only a few terrorists use their own deaths as an integral means of terrorizing others. They seem to be a breed apart, with whom the rest of humanity can have little or nothing in common.

Certainly they sow panic more effectively than other terrorists. Those who leave bombs in public places and then depart, despicable as they are, presumably still have attachments to their own lives, and therefore may be open to dissuasion or negotiation. By contrast, no threat (at first sight) might deter someone who is prepared to extinguish himself to advance his cause, and who considers such self-annihilation while killing as many strangers as possible a duty, an honor, and a merit that will win ample rewards in the hereafter. And Britain has suddenly been forced to acknowledge that it has an unknown number of such people in its midst, some of them home-grown.

The mere contemplation of a suicide bomber?s state of mind is deeply unsettling, even without considering its practical consequences. I have met a would-be suicide bomber who had not yet had the chance to put his thanatological daydream into practice. What could possibly have produced as embittered a mentality as his?what experience of life, what thoughts, what doctrines? What fathomless depths of self-pity led him to the conclusion that only by killing himself and others could he give a noble and transcendent meaning to his existence?

As is by now well known (for the last few years have made us more attentive to Islamic concepts and ways of thinking, irrespective of their intrinsic worth), the term ?jihad? has two meanings: inner struggle and holy war. While the political meaning connotes violence, though with such supposed justifications as the defense of Islam and the spread of the faith among the heathen, the personal meaning generally suggests something peaceful and inward-looking. The struggle this kind of jihad entails is spiritual; it is the effort to overcome the internal obstacles?above all, forbidden desires?that prevent the good Muslim from achieving complete submission to God?s will. Commentators have tended to see this type of jihad as harmless or even as beneficial?a kind of self-improvement that leads to decency, respectability, good behavior, and material success.

In Britain, however, these two forms of jihad have coalesced in a most murderous fashion. Those who died in the London bombings were sacrificial victims to the need of four young men to resolve a conflict deep within themselves (and within many young Muslims), and they imagined they could do so only by the most extreme possible interpretation of their ancestral religion.

Young Muslim men in Britain?as in France and elsewhere in the West?have a problem of personal, cultural, and national identity. They are deeply secularized, with little religious faith, even if most will admit to a belief in God. Their interest in Islam is slight. They do not pray or keep Ramadan (except if it brings them some practical advantage, such as the postponement of a court appearance). Their tastes are for the most part those of non-Muslim lower-class young men. They dress indistinguishably from their white and black contemporaries, and affect the same hairstyles and mannerisms, including the vulpine lope of the slums. Gold chains, the heavier the better, and gold front teeth, without dental justification, are symbols of their success in the streets, which is to say of illicit enrichment.

Many young Muslims, unlike the sons of Hindus and Sikhs who immigrated into Britain at the same time as their parents, take drugs, including heroin. They drink, indulge in casual sex, and make nightclubs the focus of their lives. Work and careers are at best a painful necessity, a slow and inferior means of obtaining the money for their distractions.

But if in many respects their tastes and behavior are indistinguishable from those of underclass white males, there are nevertheless clear and important differences. Most obviously, whatever the similarity between them and their white counterparts in their taste for sex, drugs, and rock and roll, they nevertheless do not mix with young white men, even in the neighborhoods devoted to the satisfaction of their tastes. They are in parallel with the whites, rather than intersecting with them.

Another obvious difference is the absence of young Muslim women from the resorts of mass distraction. However similar young Muslim men might be in their tastes to young white men, they would be horrified, and indeed turn extremely violent, if their sisters comported themselves as young white women do. They satisfy their sexual needs with prostitutes and those whom they quite openly call ?white sluts.? (Many a young white female patient of mine has described being taunted in this fashion as she walked through a street inhabited by Muslims.) And, of course, they do not have to suffer much sexual frustration in an environment where people decide on sexual liaisons within seconds of acquaintance.

However secular the tastes of the young Muslim men, they strongly wish to maintain the male dominance they have inherited from their parents. A sister who has the temerity to choose a boyfriend for herself, or who even expresses a desire for an independent social life, is likely to suffer a beating, followed by surveillance of Stasi-like thoroughness. The young men instinctively understand that their inherited system of male domination?which provides them, by means of forced marriage, with sexual gratification at home while simultaneously freeing them from domestic chores and allowing them to live completely Westernized lives outside the home, including further sexual adventures into which their wives cannot inquire?is strong but brittle, rather as communism was: it is an all or nothing phenomenon, and every breach must meet swift punishment.

Even if for no other reason, then (and there are in fact other reasons), young Muslim males have a strong motive for maintaining an identity apart. And since people rarely like to admit low motives for their behavior, such as the wish to maintain a self-gratifying dominance, these young Muslims need a more elevated justification for their conduct toward women. They find it, of course, in a residual Islam: not the Islam of onerous duties, rituals, and prohibitions, which interferes so insistently in day-to-day life, but in an Islam of residual feeling, which allows them a sense of moral superiority to everything around them, including women, without in any way cramping their style.

This Islam contains little that is theological, spiritual, or even religious, but it nevertheless exists in the mental economy as what anatomists call a ?potential space.? A potential space occurs where two tissues or organs are separated by smooth membranes that are normally close together, but that can be separated by an accumulation of fluid such as pus if infection or inflammation occurs. And, of course, such inflammation readily occurs in the minds of young men who easily believe themselves to be ill-used, and who have been raised on the thin gruel of popular Western culture without an awareness that any other kind of Western culture exists.

The dissatisfactions of young Muslim men in Britain are manifold. Most will experience at some time slighting or downright insulting remarks about them or their group?the word ?Paki? is a term of disdainful abuse?and these experiences tend to grow in severity and significance with constant rehearsal in the mind as it seeks an external explanation for its woes. Minor tribulations thus swell into major injustices, which in turn explain the evident failure of Muslims to rise in their adopted land. The French-Iranian researcher Farhad Khosrokhavar, who interviewed 15 French Muslim prisoners convicted of planning terrorist acts, relates in his book, Suicide Bombers: Allah?s New Martyrs, how some of his interviewees had been converted to the terrorist outlook by a single insulting remark?for example, when one of their sisters was called a ?dirty Arab? when she explained how she couldn?t leave home on her own as other girls could. Such is the fragility of the modern ego?not of Muslims alone, but of countless people brought up in our modern culture of ineffable self-importance, in which an insult is understood not as an inevitable human annoyance, but as a wound that outweighs all the rest of one?s experience.

The evidence of Muslims? own eyes and of their own lives, as well as that of statistics, is quite clear: Muslim immigrants and their descendants are more likely to be poor, to live in overcrowded conditions, to be unemployed, to have low levels of educational achievement, and above all to be imprisoned, than other South Asian immigrants and their descendants. The refusal to educate females to their full capacity is a terrible handicap in a society in which, perhaps regrettably, prosperity requires two household incomes. The idea that one is already in possession of the final revealed truth, leading to an inherently superior way of life, inhibits adaptation to a technically more advanced society. Even so, some British Muslims do succeed (the father of one of the London bombers owned two shops, two houses, and drove a new Mercedes)?a fact which their compatriots interpret exactly backward: not that Muslims can succeed, but that generally they can?t, because British society is inimical to Muslims.

In coming to this conclusion, young Muslims would only be adopting the logic that has driven Western social policy for so long: that any difference in economic and social outcome between groups is the result of social injustice and adverse discrimination. The premises of multiculturalism don?t even permit asking whether reasons internal to the groups themselves might account for differences in outcomes.

The BBC peddles this sociological view consistently. In 1997, for example, it stated that Muslims ?continue to face discrimination,? as witness the fact that they were three times as likely to be unemployed long-term as West Indians; and this has been its line ever since. If more Muslims than any other group possess no educational qualifications whatsoever, even though the hurdles for winning such qualifications have constantly fallen, it can only be because of discrimination?though a quarter of all medical students in Britain are now of Indian subcontinental descent. It can have nothing whatever to do with the widespread?and illegal?practice of refusing to allow girls to continue at school, which the press scarcely ever mentions, and which the educational authorities rarely if ever investigate. If youth unemployment among Muslims is two and a half times the rate among whites, it can be only because of discrimination?though youth unemployment among Hindus is actually lower than among whites (and this even though many young Hindus complain of being mistaken for Muslims). And so on and so on.

A constant and almost unchallenged emphasis on ?social justice,? the negation of which is, of course, ?discrimination,? can breed only festering embitterment. Where the definition of justice is entitlement by virtue of group existence rather than reward for individual effort, a radical overhaul of society will appear necessary to achieve such justice. Islamism in Britain is thus not the product of Islam alone: it is the product of the meeting of Islam with a now deeply entrenched native mode of thinking about social problems.

And it is here that the ?potential space? of Islamism, with its ready-made diagnosis and prescriptions, opens up and fills with the pus of implacable hatred for many in search of a reason for and a solution to their discontents. According to Islamism, the West can never meet the demands of justice, because it is decadent, materialistic, individualistic, heathen, and democratic rather than theocratic. Only a return to the principles and practices of seventh-century Arabia will resolve all personal and political problems at the same time. This notion is fundamentally no more (and no less) bizarre or stupid than the Marxist notion that captivated so many Western intellectuals throughout the 20th century: that the abolition of private property would lead to final and lasting harmony among men. Both conceptions offer a formula that, rigidly followed, would resolve all human problems.

Of course, the Islamic formula holds no attraction for young women in the West. A recent survey for the French interior ministry found that 83 percent of Muslim converts and reconverts (that is, secularized Muslims who adopted Salafism) in France were men; and from my clinical experience I would bet that the 17 percent of converts who were women converted in the course of a love affair rather than on account of what Edward Gibbon, in another context, called ?the evident truth of the doctrine itself.?

The West is a formidable enemy, however, difficult to defeat, for it exists not only in the cities, the infrastructure, and the institutions of Europe and America but in the hearts and minds even of those who oppose it and wish to destroy it. The London bombers were as much products of the West as of Islam; their tastes and their desires were largely Westernized. The bombers dressed no differently from other young men from the slums; and in every culture, appearance is part, at least, of identity. In British inner cities in particular, what you wear is nine-tenths of what you are.

But the Western identity goes far deeper. One of the bombers was a young man of West Indian descent, whose half-sister (in his milieu, full siblings are almost unknown) reports that he was a ?normal? boy, impassioned by rap music until the age of 15, when he converted to Islam. It need hardly be pointed out that rap music?full of inchoate rage, hatred, and intemperance?does not instill a balanced or subtle understanding of the world in its listeners. It fills and empties the mind at the same time: fills it with debased notions and empties it of critical faculties. The qualities of mind and character that are attracted to it, and that consider it an art form worthy of time and attention, are not so easily overcome or replaced. Jermaine Lindsay was only 19, four years into his conversion from rap to Islam, when he died?an age at which impulsivity is generally at its greatest, requiring the kind of struggle for self-mastery that rap music is dedicated to undermining. Islam would have taught him to hate and despise what he had been, but he must have been aware that he still was what he had been. To a hatred of the world, his conversion added a self-hatred.

The other bombers had passions for soccer, cricket, and pop music. They gave no indication before their dreadful deeds of religious fanaticism, and their journeys to Pakistan, in retrospect indications of a growing indoctrination by fundamentalism, could have seemed at the time merely family visits. In the meantime, they led highly Westernized lives, availing themselves of all the products of Western ingenuity to which Muslims have contributed nothing for centuries. It is, in fact, literally impossible for modern Muslims to expunge the West from their lives: it enters the fabric of their existence at every turn. Usama bin Ladin himself is utterly dependent upon the West for his weaponry, his communications, his travel, and his funds. He speaks of the West?s having stolen Arabian oil, but of what use would oil have been to the Arabs if it had remained under their sands, as it would have done without the intervention of the West? Without the West, what fortune would bin Ladin?s family have made from what construction in Saudi Arabia?

Muslims who reject the West are therefore engaged in a losing and impossible inner jihad, or struggle, to expunge everything that is not Muslim from their breasts. It can?t be done: for their technological and scientific dependence is necessarily also a cultural one. You can?t believe in a return to seventh-century Arabia as being all-sufficient for human requirements, and at the same time drive around in a brand-new red Mercedes, as one of the London bombers did shortly before his murderous suicide. An awareness of the contradiction must gnaw in even the dullest fundamentalist brain.

Furthermore, fundamentalists must be sufficiently self-aware to know that they will never be willing to forgo the appurtenances of Western life: the taste for them is too deeply implanted in their souls, too deeply a part of what they are as human beings, ever to be eradicated. It is possible to reject isolated aspects of modernity but not modernity itself. Whether they like it or not, Muslim fundamentalists are modern men?modern men trying, impossibly, to be something else.

They therefore have at least a nagging intimation that their chosen utopia is not really a utopia at all: that deep within themselves there exists something that makes it unachievable and even undesirable. How to persuade themselves and others that their lack of faith, their vacillation, is really the strongest possible faith? What more convincing evidence of faith could there be than to die for its sake? How can a person be really attached or attracted to rap music and cricket and Mercedes cars if he is prepared to blow himself up as a means of destroying the society that produces them? Death will be the end of the illicit attachment that he cannot entirely eliminate from his heart.

The two forms of jihad, the inner and the outer, the greater and the lesser, thus coalesce in one apocalyptic action. By means of suicide bombing, the bombers overcome moral impurities and religious doubts within themselves and, supposedly, strike an external blow for the propagation of the faith.

Of course, hatred is the underlying emotion. A man in prison who told me that he wanted to be a suicide bomber was more hate-filled than any man I have ever met. The offspring of a broken marriage between a Muslim man and a female convert, he had followed the trajectory of many young men in his area: sex and drugs and rock and roll, untainted by anything resembling higher culture. Violent and aggressive by nature, intolerant of the slightest frustration to his will and frequently suicidal, he had experienced taunting during his childhood because of his mixed parentage. After a vicious rape for which he went to prison, he converted to a Salafist form of Islam and became convinced that any system of justice that could take the word of a mere woman over his own was irredeemably corrupt.

I noticed one day that his mood had greatly improved; he was communicative and almost jovial, which he had never been before. I asked him what had changed in his life for the better. He had made his decision, he said. Everything was resolved. He was not going to kill himself in an isolated way, as he had previously intended. Suicide was a mortal sin, according to the tenets of the Islamic faith. No, when he got out of prison he would not kill himself; he would make himself a martyr, and be rewarded eternally, by making himself into a bomb and taking as many enemies with him as he could.

Enemies, I asked; what enemies? How could he know that the people he killed at random would be enemies? They were enemies, he said, because they lived happily in our rotten and unjust society. Therefore, by definition, they were enemies?enemies in the objective sense, as Stalin might have put it?and hence were legitimate targets.

I asked him whether he thought that, in order to deter him from his course of action, it would be right for the state to threaten to kill his mother and his brothers and sisters?and to carry out this threat if he carried out his, in order to deter others like him.

The idea appalled him, not because it was yet another example of the wickedness of a Western democratic state, but because he could not conceive of such a state acting in this unprincipled way. In other words, he assumed a high degree of moral restraint on the part of the very organism that he wanted to attack and destroy.

Of course, one of the objects of the bombers, instinctive rather than articulated, might be to undermine this very restraint, both of the state and of the population itself, in order to reveal to the majority of Muslims the true evil nature of the society in which they live, and force them into the camp of the extremists. If so, there is some hope of success: physical attacks on Muslims (or on Hindus and Sikhs ignorantly taken to be Muslims) increased in Britain by six times in the immediate aftermath of the bombings, according to the police. It wouldn?t take many more such bombings, perhaps, to provoke real and serious intercommunal violence on the Indian subcontinental model. Britain teems with aggressive, violent subgroups who would be only too delighted to make pogroms a reality.

Even if there is no such dire an eventuality, the outlook is sufficiently grim and without obvious solution. A highly secularized Muslim population whose men nevertheless wish to maintain their dominance over women and need a justification for doing so; the hurtful experience of disdain or rejection from the surrounding society; the bitter disappointment of a frustrated materialism and a seemingly perpetual inferior status in the economic hierarchy; the extreme insufficiency and unattractiveness of modern popular culture that is without value; the readiness to hand of an ideological and religious solution that is flattering to self-esteem and allegedly all- sufficient, and yet in unavoidable conflict with a large element of each individual?s identity; an oscillation between feelings of inferiority and superiority, between humiliation about that which is Western and that which is non-Western in the self; and the grotesque inflation of the importance of personal existential problems that is typical of modern individualism?all ensure fertile ground for the recruitment of further ?martyrs? for years to come.

Surveys suggest that between 6 and 13 percent of British Muslims?that is, between 98,000 and 208,000 people?are sympathetic toward Islamic terrorists and their efforts. Theoretical sympathy expressed in a survey is not the same thing as active support or a wish to emulate the ?martyrs? in person, of course. But it is nevertheless a sufficient proportion and absolute number of sympathizers to make suspicion and hostility toward Muslims by the rest of society not entirely irrational, though such suspicion and hostility could easily increase support for extremism. This is the tightrope that the British state and population will now have to walk for the foreseeable future; and the sweet dream of universal cultural compatibility has been replaced, in a single day, by the nightmare of permanent conflict.

November 04, 2005, 8:40 a.m.
The Real Global Virus
The plague of Islamism keeps on spreading.

Either the jihadists really are crazy or they apparently think that they
have a shot at destabilizing, or at least winning concessions from, the
United States, Europe, India, and Russia all at once.

Apart from the continual attacks on civilians by terrorists in Iraq,
Afghanistan, and the West Bank, there have now been recent horrific assaults in New Dehli (blowing up civilians in a busy shopping season on the eve of a Hindu festival), Russia (attacking police and security facilities), London (suicide murdering of civilians on the subway), and Indonesia (more bombing, and the beheading of Christian schoolgirls). The loci of recent atrocities could be widely expanded (e.g., Malaysia, North Africa, Turkey, Spain) ? and, of course, do not forget the several terrorist plots that have been broken up in Europe and the United States.

The commonalities? There are at least three.

First, despite the various professed grievances (e.g., India should get out
of Kashmir; Russia should get out of Chechnya; England should get out of
Iraq; Christians should get out of Indonesia; or Westerners should get out
of Bali), the perpetrators were all self-proclaimed Islamic radicals.
Westerners who embrace moral equivalence still like to talk of abortion
bombings and Timothy McVeigh, but those are isolated and distant memories.  No, the old generalization since 9/11 remains valid: The majority of Muslims are not global terrorists, but almost all such terrorists, and the majority of their sympathizers, are Muslims.

Second, the jihadists characteristically feel that dialogue or negotiations
are beneath them. So like true fascists, they don?t talk; they kill. Their
opponents ? whether Christians, Hindus, Jews, or Westerners in general ? are, as infidels, de facto guilty for what they are rather than what they supposedly do. Talking to a Dr. Zawahiri is like talking to Hitler: You can?t ? and it?s suicidal to try.

Third, there is an emboldened sense that the jihadists can get away with
their crimes based on three perceptions:

(1) Squabbling and politically correct Westerners are decadent and outnumber the U.S. Marines, and ascendant Islamicism resonates among millions of Muslims who feel sorely how far they have fallen behind in the new globalized world community ? and how terrorism and blackmail, especially if energized by nuclear weapons or biological assets, might leapfrog them into a new caliphate.

(2) Sympathetic Muslim-dominated governments like Malaysia or Indonesia will not really make a comprehensive effort to eradicate radical Islamicist breeding grounds of terror, but will perhaps instead serve as ministries of propaganda for shock troops in the field.

(3) Autocratic states such as Pakistan, Syria, Saudi Arabia, and Iran share outright similar political objectives and will offer either stealthy
sanctuary or financial support to terrorists, confident that either denial,
oil, or nuclear bombs give them security .

Meanwhile, Westerners far too rarely publicly denounce radical Islam for its sick, anti-Semitic, anti-female, anti-American, and anti-modernist rhetoric. Just imagine the liberal response if across the globe Christians had beheaded schoolgirls, taken over schoolhouses to kill students, and shot school teachers as we have witnessed radical Muslims doing these past few months.

Instead, Western parlor elites are still arguing over whether there were al
Qaedists in Iraq before the removal of Saddam Hussein, whether the suspicion of WMDs was the real reason for war against the Baathists, whether Muslim minorities should be pressured to assimilate into European democratic culture, and whether constitutional governments risk becoming intolerant in their new efforts to infiltrate and disrupt radical Muslim groups in Europe and the United States. Some of this acrimony is understandable, but such in-fighting is still secondary to defeating enemies who have pledged to destroy Western liberal society. At some point this Western cannibalism becomes not so much counterproductive as serving the purposes of those who wish America to call off its struggle against radical Islam.

Most Americans think that our present conflict is not comparable with World War II, in either its nature or magnitude. Perhaps ? but they should at least recall the eerie resemblance of our dilemma to the spread of global fascism in the late 1930s.

At first few saw any real connection between the ruthless annexation of
Manchuria by Japanese militarists, or Mussolini?s brutal invasion of
Ethiopia, or the systematic aggrandizement of Eastern-European territory by Hitler. China was a long way from Abyssinia, itself far from Poland. How could a white-supremacist Nazi have anything in common with a
racially-chauvinist Japanese or an Italian fascist proclaiming himself the
new imperial Roman?

In response, the League of Nations dithered and imploded (sound familiar?). Rightist American isolationists (they?re back) assured us that fascism abroad was none of our business or that there were conspiracies afoot by Jews to have us do their dirty work. Leftists were only galvanized when Hitler finally turned on Stalin (perhaps we have to wait for Osama to attack Venezuela or Cuba to get the Left involved). Abroad even members of the British royal family were openly sympathetic to German grievances (cf. Prince Charles?s silence about Iran?s promise to wipe out Israel, but his puerile Edward VIII-like lectures to Americans about a misunderstood Islam). French appeasement was such that even the most humiliating concession was deemed preferable to the horrors of World War I (no comment needed).

We can, of course, learn from this. It?s past time that we quit worrying
whether a killer who blows himself up on the West Bank, or a terrorist who shouts the accustomed jihadist gibberish as he crashes a jumbo jet into the World Trade Center, or a driver who rams his explosives-laden car into an Iraqi polling station, or a Chechnyan rebel who blows the heads off schoolchildren, is in daily e-mail contact with Osama bin Laden. Our present lax attitude toward jihadism is akin to deeming local outbreaks of avian flu as regional maladies without much connection to a new strain of a deadly ? and global ? virus.

Instead, the world?if it is to save its present liberal system of free
trade, safe travel, easy and unfettered communications, and growing
commitment to constitutional government?must begin seeing radical Islamism as a universal pathology rather than reactions to regional grievances, if it is ever to destroy it materially and refute it ideologically.

Yet the antidote for radical Islam, aside from the promotion of
democratization and open economies, is simple. It must be militarily
defeated when it emerges to wage organized violence, as in the cases of the Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan, Zarqawi?s terrorists in Iraq, and the various killer cliques in Palestine.

Second, any who tolerate radical Islam should be ostracized. Muslims living in the West must be condemned when they assert that the Jews caused 9/11, or that suicide bombing is a legitimate response to Israel, or that Islamic immigrants? own unique culture gives them a pass from accustomed assimilation, or that racial and religious affinity should allow tolerance for the hatred that spews forth from madrassas and mosques ? before the patience of Western liberalism is exhausted and ?the rules of the game? in Tony Blair?s words ?change? quite radically and we begin to see mass invitations to leave.

Third, nations that intrigue with jihadists must be identified as the
enemies of civilization. We often forget that there are now left only four
major nation-states in the world that either by intent or indifference allow
radical Islamists to find sanctuary.

If Pakistan were seriously to disavow terrorism and not see it as an asset
in its rivalry with India and as a means to vent anti-Western angst, then
Osama bin Laden, Dr. Zawahiri, and their lieutenants would be hunted down tomorrow.

If the petrolopolis of Saudi Arabia would cease its financial support of
Wahhabi radicals, most terrorists could scarcely travel or organize
operations.

If there were sane governments in Syria and Iran, then there would be little refuge left for al Qaeda, and the money and shelter that now protects the beleaguered and motley collection of ex-Saddamites, Hezbollah, and al Qaedists would cease.

So in large part four nations stand in the way of eradicating much of the
global spread of jihadism ? and it is no accident that either oil or nuclear
weapons have won a global free pass for three of them. And it is no accident that we don?t have a means to wean ourselves off Middle East oil or as yet stop Iran from becoming the second Islamic nuclear nation.

But just as importantly, our leaders must explain far more cogently and in
some detail ? rather than merely assert ? to the Western public the nature of the threat we face, and how our strategy will prevail.

In contrast, when the American public is still bickering over WMDs rather
than relieved that the culprit for the first World Trade Center bombing can
no longer find official welcome in Baghdad; or when our pundits seem more worried about Halliburton than the changes in nuclear attitudes in Libya and Pakistan; or when the media mostly ignores a greater percentage of voters turning out for a free national election in the heart of the ancient caliphate than during most election years in the United States ? something has gone terribly, tragically wrong here at home.

? Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. His
latest book is A War Like No Other. How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War.

SCO: A New Power Center Developing
October 28, 2005 21 47  GMT



Summary

The Shanghai Cooperation Organization's (SCO) summit in Moscow ended Oct. 27. Talk at the summit indicates that the organization is growing; soon, the SCO will deal with more than security-related matters, and its geographic scope will expand. As it grows, the SCO will become a more authoritative figure in Eurasian -- and global -- matters.

Analysis

The prime minister-level Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit -- at which participants met with Russian President Vladimir Putin on the sidelines -- concluded in Moscow on Oct. 27. The organization which Washington at first dismissed as a talk shop is now raising concerns for the Bush administration, especially after SCO member Uzbekistan heeded the organization's call and evicted a U.S. military base in July.

Some media outlets already call the SCO "NATO of the East." In reality, the organization is neither a talk shop nor a NATO equivalent, in the sense that it is not a military bloc. Extensive talks with officials from the SCO's full members (China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan) and observer-members (India, Pakistan, Iran and Mongolia) -- along with observations of the SCO summit -- give insight into where this key Eurasian organization is going.

The summit showed that the SCO is developing in two strategic directions. First, it is growing from a security-only organization into a multi-functional group that includes political and economic collaboration; second, the SCO is expanding from a Central Asia-based organization to include Eurasia. The more the SCO expands in these directions, the more authority it will gain in Eurasian and global affairs. If the SCO continues developing in terms of joint economic projects and security initiatives, it could become a new collective power center.

The SCO was founded by Moscow and Beijing on June 15, 2001, with the ultimate vision of gradually developing a new world power-center that would tend to Eurasian affairs without interference from outside powers. This goal runs contrary to the Bush administration's agenda for Eurasia; Washington considers Eurasia to be of paramount importance in the pursuit of U.S. geopolitical interests, and it is a cornerstone of the U.S. geopolitical strategy that Washington has a decisive role in Eurasian geopolitics. Thus, it is against Washington's interest for major Eurasian states to form alliances, because if those states join together they could successfully challenge the United States, the world's only superpower.

If the SCO matures according to its founders' vision, the organization could become an alliance capable of taking care of Eurasian matters and, thus, capable of challenging Washington's interests there. However, this would take years. SCO leaders fully understand this and strive to keep Washington from seeing the organization as anti-U.S. The SCO is not explicitly anti-U.S., though butting heads with Washington is inevitable as the United States fights to maintain a presence in Eurasia. Rather, its members are focused on getting their neighbors' and their own houses in order while trying to develop them internally. China is about to launch a major internal social and economic redistribution campaign and does not want to be seen as forming any bloc to counter U.S. security interests. Russia is busy trying to revive its economy and find friends abroad who are willing to help it regain some of its former prominence and unwilling to follow U.S. policies. Furthermore, Putin still wants to Westernize the country, which implies at least some cooperation with the United States. India is building itself up as a future global power and wants to benefit from U.S. nuclear technology know-how. The list goes on.

The SCO's growth and strength potential come from a key geopolitical fact: Its members -- current and potential -- have many common problems, and many of these problems can be resolved only if the countries work together. In practice, this involves forming Eurasian transportation corridors, shaping energy routes to benefit the countries' growing and energy-hungry economies, making sure the countries' economies complement each other to remain or become competitive in a global economy, and so on. SCO members' shared and important agenda of making themselves stronger by working together will give the organization an internal strength that is necessary if it is to thrive and become geopolitically significant.

Realizing this, the SCO has worked to complement its security cooperation with major joint economic development plans. At the summit in Moscow, SCO members agreed to fulfill a program of multilateral trade and economic cooperation by 2020. The program includes jointly constructing hydroelectric plants, upgrading highways, laying out fiber-optic communications networks, hydrocarbons exploration and pipeline construction -- a total of 127 joint projects. To finance the first projects, China offered to issue Central Asian nations a low-interest line of credit for $900 million, to be paid off in 20 years. China will also train 1,500 Central Asian engineers and other specialists. Trying to make sure its role in the SCO is not minor compared to Beijing's, Moscow proposed that investments in SCO projects should be joint ventures. This will amount to almost all investment coming from stronger nations, such as Russia and China -- both of which are willing and apparently able to do it.

Another important outcome of the SCO summit is that its leaders, including the observer-members' heads of state, agreed that the organization will deal only with major issues and on a strategic level, leaving it to member nations to sort out details. This could help the SCO move forward with Eurasian security and economic affairs without getting bogged down in the details of local issues and differences. For instance, the SCO joint security drive likely will have a negative impact on Islamist militancy, an issue which all SCO nations have to tackle.

It is telling that current SCO members have had to put a damper on observer-members' enthusiasm to join immediately, in order to keep the SCO from getting overwhelmed by its own rapid growth. Beijing and Moscow first want to make sure the SCO's shop is in order before expanding, ensuring that the first economic projects and security initiatives work for the full member states. They also want to make sure that including countries with diverse agendas will not turn the SCO into a useless group. However, expansion seems to be inevitable, given that both Moscow and Beijing are eager to see more countries join.

The SCO is an organization intended to bear fruit for years to come, though its members will start seeing progress as each year passes. If the current trend -- eagerness to cooperate and a desire to put aside differences -- continues among member nations through the next few years, the SCO could take shape as a new power center in Eurasia -- something for other powers, including Washington, to reckon with.

www.stratfor.com

Not inside baseball at all!  A sound post on a matter of great importance.  In times of war, it is easy to let freedom slip away.

Kissinger:

At some point in Washington the most important decision will have
to be taken. The question is who will get the upper hand: those who believe in regime change or those who favor negotiations? But let me make one important point: I was involved in decision-making processes when there were two superpowers. At that time one could be pretty sure that both sides would exert the same amount of restraint before starting an atomic war. And on top of that just imagine what complicated thought processes both went through trying to work out the opponent's possible behavior. The whole system of international relations is going to have to change. We have to bear this in mind when looking at Iran. The democratic countries have to keep an eye on the consequences of the spread of nuclear weapons and ask themselves what they would have done if the Madrid bombs had been nuclear. Or if the attackers in New York had used nuclear weapons, or if 50,000 people had died in New Orleans in a nuclear attack. The world would look very different than
it does today. So we have to ask ourselves how much energy we want to put into fighting the problem of further proliferation of nuclear weapons.

EDITORIAL

SELECTIVE ENFORCEMENT OF OVERBROAD FORFEITURE LAWS:
A Weapon Prone To Abuse

--Brenda Grantland, Esq., F.E.A.R. Chronicles, Vol. 1 No. 2,
(June, 1992)

For years the Justice Department has been lobbying Congress
for expansion of its forfeiture powers, for broader definitions of
property subject to forfeiture, and for procedures which give the
government greater and greater advantages over claimants. Their
lobbying has produced the current statutes, which put the burden of
proof on the claimant, make claimants pay in advance the
government's costs of forfeiture proceedings, and in all other
ways imaginable put a heavy thumb on the scales of justice in favor
of the government and to the detriment of the claimant.

The feds have used their powers to the fullest, declaring
"ZERO TOLERANCE" to be their policy. Zero Tolerance means no
sympathy for innocent owners of ships -- such as the Monkey
Business (of Gary Hart fame) or Woods Hole Oceanographic
Institute's floating lab that surveyed the ruins of the Titanic --
when a crew member is found by raiding customs agents to be in
possession of personal use quantities of drugs.

Zero tolerance also means parents, grandparents, spouses,
friends, business partners, finance companies, landlords and all
manner of unsuspecting people get caught up in forfeiture
proceedings because of something someone else did which is beyond
their control.

Although the statutes are supposed to protect innocent third
parties -- according to the hype the Justice department is feeding
us -- in reality innocent people are losing property as often as
criminals.

These overbroad powers give law enforcement the unlimited
discretion to destroy the financial lives of innocent citizens, to
take away from them their status achieved over a lifetime of hard
work and "upward mobility."

These overbroad powers are often used to discriminate between
the powerful and the powerless. As a prime example of this,
consider the case of Assistant U.S. Attorney Leslie Ohta of
Hartford, Connecticut -- the Iron Matron of forfeiture. As head of
her office's asset forfeiture unit she was ruthless and extremely
successful, with her unit netting more than $26 million since 1986.
According to the Hartford Courant, "Ohta's aggressive pursuit of
these asset forfeiture cases has won her national recognition in
the ranks of federal prosecutors, and she frequently lectures them
on how to apply the law." (3-22-92).

As head of her unit, Ohta mercilessly pursued Zero Tolerance,
making innocent parents and grandparents pay for the wrongdoings of
their offspring. The Hartford Courant reported that on several
occasions Ms. Ohta argued that "people should know what goes on in
their own homes." (3-22-92).

Presumably Ohta knew what was going on in her own home when
her son Miki began using and selling drugs.

The Hartford Courant reported that the first incident happened
in 1989 when Miki allegedly sold marijuana to an undercover
informant from his parents' home. Miki had another scrape with the
law in December 1991, when he was arrested for allegedly selling 50
"hits" of LSD from his parents' car on September 3, 1991, and for
possession of marijuana when stopped by police, again in his
parents' car, on September 29, 1991. In the September 29 incident,
his companion was allegedly in possession of two "hits" of LSD.

Was Mrs. Ohta's property forfeited? No.

As a result of relentless pursuit of this issue by the
Hartford Courant, and an article by the Connecticut Law Tribune,
the ironies of this situation did not escape public notice. The
U.S. Attorney's Office transferred Leslie Ohta to another unit, at
least temporarily.

In the end, however, the U.S. Attorney's Office decided that
forfeiture of Ohta's property would be "inappropriate".

Most of the forfeiture defense attorneys interviewed by the
Hartford Courant agreed that Ohta's assets should not be forfeited
-- not because she was a well-connected flag-waving forfeiture-
winning Assistant U.S. Attorney, but because, in principle, neither
she nor any of the innocent people she so hypocritically forfeited
property from should be punished for the actions of their children,
grandchildren or acquaintances.

I agree except for the double standard. If the people
prosecuting these forfeiture laws are held to the same standard as
the people they have prosecuted, either Leslie Ohta's house and car
should be forfeited or the government should be forced to give back
the property it took from other innocent parents, grandparents and
third parties. This should include all the innocent victims in the
country since the main Justice Department gave the blessing to
excuse Ohta for her son's crimes.

We want to follow up on this and make sure justice is done.
Please write us if you have any information about Ohta cases or
other Zero Tolerance victims. Send us your opinion (or share it
through the computer bulletin board) on whether Mrs. Ohta's
treatment should also be the standard for forfeiture victims not
employed by the Justice Department. If you want to share your
thoughts with the Connecticut U.S. Attorney's Office, write U.S.
Attorney Albert Dabrowski, Esq., 450 Main Street, Room 328,
Hartford, CT 06103, or you can write Leslie Ohta herself at 2273
Hebron Ave., Glastonbury, CT.

--------------------------

Source articles:

The Hartford Courant and Connecticut Law Tribune news
clippings relied upon for this editorial are available for computer
download through ICSBBS under the filename OHTAW.ZIP OR OHTAA.ZIP.
They are: Rule Lawyer Upholds Might Focus On Her, Lynne Tuohy,
Hartford Courant staff writer, 3-22-92; Feds Reorder House As
Forfeitures Hit Home, Andrew Houlding, Connecticut Law Tribune, 3-
23-92; Let Innocent People Keep Assets; Toss Out Unjust Rules,
Denis Horgan, Hartford Courant Columnist, 3-25-92; Haunted By the
Law She Enforced, editorial Hartford Courant, 4-29-92; Prosecutor
Won't Lose Property in Son's Drug Arrest, Lynne Tuohy, Hartford
Courant staff writer, 4-23-92.

Nalchik: The 9/11 That Wasn't
October 19, 2005 22 59  GMT



By Fred Burton

Russian military forces are continuing mop-up operations in Nalchik, a city in the Caucasus region where Islamist militants last week staged a series of coordinated attacks -- signaling attempts to widen the Chechen conflict to other parts of Russia. The incident, which burst into the international news Oct. 13, is significant on several levels -- not least of which was the much-improved counterterrorism response by Russian forces, without which the raids conceivably might have expanded into something approaching the Sept. 11 attacks in terms of geopolitical impact.

As it happens, the events that took place involved some 100 to 150 armed militants, who attempted to seize control of the airport at Nalchik while also assaulting police stations, government offices and the regional headquarters of the Russian prison system, among other targets. All told, about 100 people were killed -- more than 60 of them militants, and roughly equal numbers of security forces and civilians. That's hardly what anyone would term a "minor incident," but compared to other attacks by Chechen militants -- such as the school hostage crisis in Beslan in 2004 or a similar event at a Moscow theater in 2002 -- the Russian response was swifter and the outcome much better.

This is not due to dumb luck: The response logically stems from drastically improved intelligence-gathering and targeting priorities in Russian counterterrorism strategies, which underwent a sea change following the Beslan incident. In fact, there is reason to believe that the militants who planned the attacks in Nalchik (an operation that has been claimed by Moscow's arch-enemy, Shamil Basayev) actually were forced into carrying out their operation prematurely, after Russian intelligence got wind of a much larger and more chilling plot -- one combining all the most deadly tactics of both Sept. 11 and Beslan.

Russian military contacts and other sources have told us that the events in Nalchik apparently were supposed to be only the first phase of a plan that ultimately was to include flying explosives-laden aircraft into high-profile targets elsewhere in Russia. Though the exact targets have not been confirmed, sources say possible targets included the Kremlin, a military district headquarters and railway hub in Rostov-on-Don, a nuclear plant in the vicinity of Saratov, and a hydroelectric plant or dam on the Volga. Sources also say the militants had a back-up plan that would have involved mining important government buildings and taking hostages -- tactics the Chechens have used in other headline-grabbing attacks.






Intelligence from human sources is rarely golden: Analysts always must play the skeptic and filter out the sources' own motives for providing the information -- and in this case, the Russian military certainly has reason to want to appear to have pre-empted a catastrophe. In this case, the list of possible targets reads like a laundry list of nightmare scenarios that have been widely discussed, in the U.S. context, since Sept. 11 -- so, admittedly, it is not much of a stretch to assume such assets also could be targeted in Russia. That said, the Nalchik incident fits into wider trend that we have been following in the Chechen/Islamist insurgency for more than a year, and the target sets make sense for what is becoming an increasingly Wahhabist-dominated campaign in Russian territory.

The events on the ground also seem to bear out the sourced intelligence: The militants opened their attack with attempts to seize the airport in Nalchik, where -- had they not been beaten back by Russian forces already guarding the target -- they would have been able to commandeer the aircraft needed for follow-on operations. The incidents in other parts of the city, which were closely time-coordinated but appear to have involved poorly trained recruits, are believed to have been intended as distractions -- drawing attention and Russian security forces away from the strategically crucial airport.

The fact that the follow-on attacks were more or less quickly put down, with (relatively) small loss of life, also fits the notion of a busted operation. Reportedly, the grand plot was to have been carried out on Oct. 17, with a force of about 700 militants -- most of whom had not yet moved into Nalchik when the Russians began taking action. The entire plan apparently started to unravel nearly 10 days in advance: Acting on tips from local residents, Russian forces arrested two suspected militants -- who reportedly confessed to planning attacks -- as early as Oct. 8.

Accepting, then, that the intelligence concerning the shape of the plot is credible, we have an operation that, if carried to fruition, would have mirrored Sept. 11 in many respects -- opening up a new front in the global jihadist war and, conceivably, could have reinvigorated the organized Islamist militancy in other parts of the world.

Considering Basayev's claims of responsibility for the Nalchik plot, that clearly seems to have been the intent. Basayev, it must be remembered, is the Chechen commander who has authored many of the most horrific terrorist incidents in Russia. Attacks like those at Beslan and the Moscow theater, and hostage-takings at hospitals and other soft targets typically have resulted in hundreds of deaths at a time -- both before and during the bloody responses by Russian security forces. To say that Basayev has a penchant for grand, showy schemes would be something of an understatement.

Operationally speaking, that trait seems to undermine his effectiveness as a militant leader -- and, in fact, eventually could be his undoing. The fact that that has not yet happened points more toward particular aspects of the political conflict between the Chechen/Islamist insurgents and Moscow than to best practices taught in Terrorism 101.

Under those principles, the most effective forms of attack are those that are simple yet ruthless: They require few resources, and operatives practice airtight "need-to-know" communications. The fewer people who know about a plan -- or have access to more details than they need in order to carry out their own part -- the less likely the plan is to leak out and be pre-empted. Except for the fact that Basayev has, for the most part, operated in territory where locals have supported at least some aspects of the militant campaign against Russian rule, it is nothing short of amazing that he and his cast of thousands have succeeded to the degree that they have.

But the amount of local support Basayev still is able to command has become something of a question mark, as Chechens themselves have grown weary of the death and destruction in their war. It is said that, partly because of this, Basayev increasingly has surrounded himself with Wahhabi militants -- including some Saudi commanders -- and is seeking ways to export the campaign from the Muslim-dominated Caucasus republics into Russia proper.

All of this seems logical: Judging from details of the Nalchik plot and others within the past year, Basayev appears intent on mimicking elements of the Sept. 11 attacks -- indicating that he at least is studying and learning from al Qaeda, even if he is not intimately linked to it. At the very least, his emerging fixation with air assets is reminiscent of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed -- another tactical genius with a penchant for spectacular strikes.

Both the Nalchik operation and the wider plot, had it been carried out, would have mirrored Sept. 11 in other ways as well: Multiple targets, representing a mix of both hard (government installations) and soft (civilian infrastructure) nodes, might have been struck -- maximizing the political, economic and sheer terror value of the strikes. The plot shows high degrees of strategic planning and, as a result, could have been designed to inspire audiences in the Muslim world -- whether that world is defined to include Russia's Muslim-majority provinces or other regions.

It is important to note here that, though Sept. 11 has become the gold standard for "effective" terrorist attacks, we and others believe that even al Qaeda likely was stunned by its success. The plot was redundant in most aspects: two economic facilities (the World Trade Center towers) and two government facilities (the Pentagon and, it is believed, the Capitol) were targeted, building in a margin of error for planners who likely never expected three of the four aircraft to strike their targets. Similarly, Basayev appears to be hatching redundant plots, so that operations can still be politically and economically effective even if some aspects of the mission fail.

But at Nalchik, almost the entire operation failed before it could get off the ground. The points of failure appear to rest in two areas.

First, there is evidence that Basayev used some and ill-prepared operatives in Nalchik -- rather than highly trained and ruthlessly efficient cells, like those that carried out the 9/11 attacks. The assailants acted in groups of five men. Typical al Qaeda operations use four-man cells, in which each member plays a specific and crucial role. Larger cells appear to be the norm in Chechen operations -- partly because this allows commanders to play a greater role on the ground, but also perhaps because strikes often include local militants who have been poorly trained. This can be a mixed blessing. For instance, we saw in Beslan would-be suicide bombers who ran away; in Nalchik, some of the fighters -- many of whom were well-equipped -- fired their weapons while running toward their targets (a tactic very likely to draw return fire and get them killed). The use of larger cells allows for this kind of attrition without endangering the mission, but it also brings into the mix local operatives who have supreme area knowledge -- and thus are able to identify launching points and escape routes with lower operational overhead.

Second, and crucially, there was poor operational security in Nalchik. In short, someone snitched, and the op was blown. The snitch could have been someone motivated by the bounties Moscow now is offering for intelligence targeting Chechen commanders, or a mole who has infiltrated the militants' ranks, or perhaps a local parent who overhead a conversation between teenagers -- or all of the above. Given the hundreds of people who, according to sources, ultimately would have taken part in the plot, anything is possible. The point is, a lot of people were in the know, and COMSEC -- communications security -- was next to impossible.

At this point, the Russians have to be feeling both relieved and shaken, asking the inevitable "What if?" Basayev certainly has the means and ability to hatch grandiose plots that, if effectively executed, would have serious geopolitical implications -- and, of course, he is alive and free to fight another day. On the other hand, his soaring ambition -- combined with the obviously improved intelligence capabilities and response strategies of the Russian forces -- could be his undoing.

October 17, 2005



Exploit Rifts in The Insurgency
The next two weeks are crucial. Washington and the Iraqi government should put forward a bold program of "national reconciliation"
By Fareed Zakaria

Amid all the problems in Iraq, I see one encouraging sign. Sunnis are organizing to defeat the referendum on Iraq's draft constitution. This is good news because it places the Sunnis in direct opposition to the jihadi insurgents in Iraq. The latter, headed by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, have been threatening to kill anyone who votes. The vast majority of Sunni organizations in Iraq?including several insurgent groups-have called on Sunnis to mobilize and vote to defeat the constitution, which they view as anti-Sunni. This is the most important positive development in Iraq?a growing split between the radical jihadists and the other insurgents, who are mostly Baathists. It provides the United States with an opportunity, even at this late date, for some success. Drive this split wider and isolate the jihadis. Or as the British motto goes, divide and conquer.

Rifts are emerging on other issues. Recently Zarqawi urged a "total war" against the Shiites in Iraq. But five Sunni insurgent groups rejected the argument and emphasized that they do not target civilians, whether Sunni or Shia. The Association of Muslim Scholars, a Sunni group that supports the insurgency, issued a more elaborate denunciation. Days later, Zarqawi issued a correction, explaining that "not all Shiites are targets," and exempting those who opposed the occupation, such as the followers of the rebel cleric Muqtada al Sadr. This led Sadr's group to issue a statement rejecting Zarqawi's embrace and making clear that "for our movement Zarqawi is nothing but an enemy and if he falls into the hands of our militia he will be torn apart."

Most recently comes news that Ayman al-Zawahiri sent a letter to Zarqawi telling him his goals and means were causing a loss of support for Al Qaeda. For months now there have been signs that the Baathist insurgency wants to end its uprising. Last week, there was one more such signal. Saleh al Mutlak, a prominent Sunni politician whom many believe has ties to the insurgency, publicly proposed a ceasefire. "The fighting should stop," Mutlak told Reuters. "We have fought for two and a half years and the problem is, it doesn't work."

Within the next week, several Sunni groups will gather to put together a formal set of proposals for the United States to consider. "We must find a political solution," he said. A ceasefire during Ramadan, which began last week, "should be a start for direct negotiations between the two sides."

Until recently, the United States has been opposed to negotiating with the insurgents, but that line is weakening. The new U.S. ambassador in Baghdad, Zalmay Khalilzad, has begun meeting with people who are close to the insurgents. But, according to a senior diplomat who spoke on background so as not to interfere with the negotiations, Khalil-zad has not yet met the people with power, who are actually running the insurgency.

From the start, the United States has misunderstood how to handle Iraq's Sunnis, sending the signal that it viewed them all as Baathists. In fact, Saddam's regime was run by a small group of tribal Sunnis, mostly from Tikrit and adjoining areas. He displaced the secular, urban Sunnis, who were Iraq's traditional elite. Some of the latter were left in government bureaucracies and educational establishments, but with little power. Then came de-Baathification and the disbanding of the Army. All of a sudden, tens of thousands of people, nominally members of the Baath Party, lost jobs as engineers, schoolteachers and officials. The result was chaos and an embittered Sunni population.

For the last year, Washington has been trying to reverse these errors. But the Shiite-dominated government has been unwilling to make many compromises. This is understandable. The Shiites suffered greatly under Saddam and the Baath Party. But that perspective might blind them to what is in Iraq's long-term interest. Only a balance of power between the Shia, the Sunni and the Kurds will keep Iraq stable.

The next two weeks are crucial. In all likelihood, the Sunnis will not be able to defeat the constitution, which means they will be further embittered. Washington and the Iraqi government should then put forward a bold program of "national reconciliation" that includes talks with some of the insurgent groups to draw the Sunnis into the political mainstream. Otherwise the dangers grow for Iraq, and for others as well. Iraq's Interior minister, Bayan Jabr, said last week that while Zarqawi had been weakened in recent months, other smaller jihadi groups were getting stronger. And, he added, they were beginning to move men and arms outside of Iraq. "You will see insurgencies in other countries," he warned. There's a dark cloud forming in the Middle East, and it may burst if we don't act soon.

Forwarded to me by a friend:
---------------------------------------------------------

I know that Rockwell is way too strident for many of you, but I am posting this piece for one reason -- it is an incredible compilation of control-freak behaviors during this disaster. The problem with FEMA is not so much their incompetence as their possessive bureaucratic tendencies that often prevented anyone from helping people in need. If they were merely incompetent, this disaster would have been handled far better.
 
If this is the way bureaucrats behave, do we really want them "solving" our retirement problem, our health care problem, ... or even "protecting" us from terrorists? This story is enough to give anyone pause ... I would think. But maybe I am wrong about that.
 
Tom
 
Katrina and Socialist Central Planning
by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.
[Posted on Monday, October 10, 2005]

Watching the Capitol Hill hearings on what went wrong after Hurricane Katrina provided a glimpse of what it must have been like in the Politburo in the 1950s. The Soviet bureaucrats would gather with the party officials and factory managers to figure out why grain production was down or why shop shelves were empty or why the bread lines were ever longer and the quality ever worse.

They gathered under the conviction that they had a workable system that was being rendered unworkable because of the incompetence of certain key players in the chain of command. No one was permitted to say that the command system itself was the problem; this would too contrary to the prevailing political ethos. Instead, they had to place blame on someone, as if all problems could be reduced to issues of obedience. It was always a scramble. Whoever was finally said to be at fault faced certain ruin.

To be sure, there was plenty of blame to go around. With rats in a maze, there is a sense in which they are all responsible for not having found the exit. If those rats could also organize into a hierarchy of control and hold trials, it would surely produce quite a show with many victims. But at the end of the day, the rats would be no closer to getting out of the maze. And so it was in the US Congress: the hearings produced a great show with no results that will make a difference for our future.

The Soviet system had to fully unravel before it became permissible to state what it used to be a crime even to think: you can't manage an economy. You can make every demand, issue a million commands, exhaust every financial resource in the state's account, elevate some people and demote others, dress up in a military costume and make grand pronouncements from a glorified pedestal, cut off fingers, toes, and heads, but in the end, you can't make the economy perform in a way that serves the people unless you let market forces work.

Not just the Soviets had to learn this. Authoritarian regimes from the beginning of time have attempted to defy the laws of economics, step on the interests of the merchant class, control and redirect the wishes of consumers and entrepreneurs, bend and kick prices and wages this way and that, and inhibit trade in every way. But they cannot finally overpower the driving desire on the part of people to control their own fate and not be subject to the slavery that is collectivism of all colors, whether red, green, or brown.

Someday, the US managers of crises will have to realize this same point. But for now, they are like Soviet bureaucrats scrambling to make an unworkable system function, and creating a scene that is as farcical as it is tragic.

Consider first how the much-glorified Department of Homeland Security responded to the Katrina crisis. There is a mysterious missing day between the time the hurricane hit and the levees broke and flooded New Orleans. During this strange Monday, August 29 ? a day in which there was a window of opportunity to prevent the meltdown of civilization ? why didn't federal officials respond or even pretend to respond?

The head of the Department of Homeland Security, Michael Chertoff, said that he read in the Tuesday morning newspaper that, according to the headline, "New Orleans Dodged the Bullet." So, to his mind, there was nothing to do. This was his testimony. This is not exactly an awe-inspiring admission, but it speaks to a truth that few are willing to admit: government officials live normal lives. They do not partake of the mind of God. They get their news just like you and me. And they have far less information than the body of knowledge generated by the signaling process of the market economy and the private sector.

We might even say that they are in effect sub-normal in intelligence, because government officials stand outside of society, cut off from normal channels of information that the rest of us take for granted. They are isolated from markets and the regular pressures of life. They are not owners of what they control, and have no real stake in the value of their product. They are surrounded by some of the most peculiar people in the world, namely lifetime bureaucrats, power-mad politicians, and lobbyists on the make. This is their world and this is what they know.

Now, they enjoy the illusion of being better informed than the rest of us, so it would never occur to a high official to surf Google News to find out what is really going on. Thus was it apparently beyond the capacity of FEMA to find out that the National Weather Service had issued a flood warning soon after the hurricane hit. The National Weather Service in turn was only reporting what many private local media outlets were saying.

Certainly the municipal government of New Orleans got the message. It issued a warning to residents, and then all the officials packed up their stuff and headed to Baton Rouge. I suppose that this was the plan that the bureaucrats came up with after having received a $500,000 federal grant in 1997 to design a comprehensive plan for evacuation. Half a million dollars later, they agreed what the plan should be. Two words: let's go!

Now, we can learn from observing this. It is always the case that the government's first interest in a crisis is the protection of itself. The public interest is way down the list. Government employees have no ancient code that requires them to go down with the ship. The seafaring captain might feel disgrace if he lost his crew and passengers but returned safely to shore, but the government bureaucrat would see this as nothing but rational self-interest at work. From their point of view, public service is not a suicide pact.

If this is so, are we wise to expect government service at times of crisis? Well, here is where it gets complicated. They always promise that they will take care of us. On the day the Hurricane hit, for example, President Bush made the following announcement: "For those of you who are concerned about whether or not we're prepared to help, don't be. We are. We're in place. We've got equipment in place, supplies in place. And once the ? once we're able to assess the damage, we'll be able to move in and help those good folks in the affected areas."

Well, given the calamity that followed, this statement by Bush might as well have been a Soviet propaganda poster about the glorious future of socialism.

If the only response by government were to turn and run, they could be accused of hypocrisy, but it would be better than the alternative of bad government that stayed to ruin the work that markets and private individuals do.

As the Hurricane approached, for example, Mr. Bush, along with nearly every office holder in the entire region, immediately announced that there would be no tolerance of so-called price gouging. What is and what is not gouging remain undefined by law, but there are still criminal penalties attached to doing it. If you raise your prices to the point where you attract a complaint, there is a good chance that you will be thrashed as a gouger.

And yet, we have to ask ourselves what the purpose of a price is. It is a signaling device that allows market players, including both producers and consumers, to adjust their economic behavior in light of supply and demand. If supply remains the same and demand rises, the price too will have to rise so the market can clear properly. Otherwise there will be shortages and surpluses that will prove to be a benefit to no one. William Anderson has called gouging rules a form of back-door price control, and he is right. They create victims, encourage economic dislocations, and foster black markets.

One might think that a Republican administration would understand this, but reflect on the fact that Iraq still has very strict price controls on gasoline, controls that were instituted by the US after Saddam was overthrown. Don't think for a minute that it is beyond the capacity of the Bush administration to do what the Nixon administration did, which was to believe that the laws of markets can be overridden by regulatory force.

Anti-gouging laws, to the extent they are obeyed, will create shortages. But in telling the sad tale of Katrina, I would like to begin not with a case of shortage, but with a strange case of surplus.

One week after the hurricane, FEMA ordered the Army Corps of Engineers to buy 211 million pounds of ice from IAP Worldwide Services of Florida. Trucking companies were notified of a grand opportunity since the government was paying the bills for delivery, and the dispatchers sent out the word. There is no space to explore the workings of IAP Worldwide, but I will observe that the company, which exists solely to get paid by your tax dollars as a federal contractor, has a new CEO who most recently held the position of vice president of national security programs for the notorious Kellogg Brown and Root. His name is David Swindle.

But back to the story of the ensuing chaos. One trucker picked up ice in Greenville, Pennsylvania, and was told to drive it to Carthage, Missouri. When he arrived in Carthage, he was told by a FEMA official to go to Montgomery, Alabama. After a day and a half sitting in Montgomery, he was told to go to Camp Shelby, Mississippi, after which he was sent to Selma, Alabama, after which he was sent to Emporia, Virginia, where he stayed for a week burning fuel, until he was sent to North Carolina, and finally to Fremont, Nebraska, where he dropped the ice in a government storage unit. That's 4,000 miles over two weeks.

This was hardly the only case.

The news media chronicled the stories of these truckers. A truck full of ice was sent from Dubuque, Iowa, to Meridian, Mississippi, then to Barksdale Base in Louisiana, then to Columbia, South Carolina, and finally to Cumberland, Maryland, where he waited for six days before being sent to Bettendorf, Iowa, where the ice was unloaded. Another truck was sent from Wisconsin to Missouri to Selma to Memphis, before finally dropping off the ice in a storage unit.

Do you know how many drivers were enlisted in this incredible charade? 4,000. No one knows for sure how much ice ever got through or how much good it did, if any.

In one of the first incidents reported of what was to be two weeks of catastrophe, a group of volunteer fire fighters from Houston came to New Orleans wanting to help. They were told to wait. They waited 48 hours and were ordered to go back. A group of doctors from Maryland tried to get in but FEMA sent them on to the Red Cross, which said it could do nothing without the approval of federal health officials.

After the New Orleans mayor made a call for firefighters to come help, hundreds of volunteers were sent to Atlanta, where they were put in a conference room at the Sheraton hotel and subjected to seminars on sexual harassment and other bureaucratic matters. They were then told that their job would be to distribute flyers with a message on it: call 1-800-621-FEMA. Many or even most of these well-trained people caught on to the racket and left town. Those who stuck it out and headed for Louisiana were aghast that their first assignment was not to fight fires, which had been raging for a week, but to escort President Bush on his TV-laden tour of the area.

You can see all the photos on WhiteHouse.gov.

In fact, FEMA refused offers of help of all sorts, mainly because of issues of control. FEMA declined helped from Amtrak in evacuating people from New Orleans. The Chicago municipal government was trying to send volunteers from the fire department, police department, and hospitals. FEMA said no. The same happened to New Mexico, whose governor volunteered equipment and personnel.

FEMA prevented Wal-Mart from delivering three tank trucks of water, and the Coast Guard from delivering 1,000 gallons of diesel fuel. It even cut the communications lines for Jefferson Parish. The local sheriff ending up posting armed guards to protect the restored lines from FEMA ? an interesting model that many communities around the country would do well to imitate in the future.

A chief medical officer for a large ambulance company says he was unable to find helicopters to pick up dying patients at the Superdome. He walked outside and discovered that two helicopters, donated by an oil services company, had been ordered to wait in the parking lot. Morticians attempted to donate their help. But FEMA said absolutely not, on grounds that they were not officially certified by FEMA to perform such services, so the bodies of the dead piled higher.

As for the National Guard, for days it would not allow reporters into the superdome where tens of thousands were trapped. People were hungry and thirsty, but the National Guard would not allow the Red Cross to deliver any food.

Here is the astounding statement from the spokesperson of the Red Cross: "The Homeland Security Department has requested and continues to request that the American Red Cross not come back into New Orleans? Right now access is controlled by the National Guard and local authorities?. We cannot get into New Orleans against their orders."

The Salvation Army attempted to rescue two of its own officers trapped in a building and on dialysis. They rented three boats for a rescue. But they were not allowed through, though to be fair the Salvation Army did not specifically name the government as at fault, but it did point out that all private efforts were running into similar kinds of obstacles, so the message was clear.

Meanwhile, the USS Bataan, a floating hospital for 600 patients, that had ridden out the storm, was still sitting empty by the third day, not permitted to do its job.

An astounding case of ineptness comes to us from the case of three Duke University students who drove to New Orleans to help but were turned away by the National Guard. They had seen the news and knew that they could help, and wondered why they should be pushed around by bureaucrats. Being college sophomores, they took a risk. They forged press credentials, with fake IDs and shirts and the works. They went back and adopted a haughty tone. The National Guard waved them through.

Then the students drove to the Convention Center. There they found thousands of sick, hungry, thirsty, and dying people in desperate need. They found a man who had welts all over his body. He was in a tree covered with fire ants as the waters rose, and there he stayed there being bitten repeatedly for up to 24 hours.

The boys picked him up along with three others and drove them to a Baton Rouge hospital. They made another trip there and back with more people before they began to become frightened of what the government might do to them. On one return trip, they observed 150 empty buses driving the other way ? and they have a video to prove it.

One can only express astonishment at how the government treated the tens of thousands of people that it had herded like cattle into large public spaces. For reasons that are still unclear, the government couldn't get its act together on transporting them out even as the people themselves were forbidden to leave. Once the central planners decided to move all these people from the Superdome to the Astrodome, no means of transport arrived, even as aerial photos showed miles and miles of public buses available.

Indeed, the first bus to reach Houston was not driven or approved by the government. It was commandeered by 20-year-old named Jabbar Gibson, who drove it from the floods and picked up as many people as he could and drove all the way to Houston, a 13-hours drive! He beat the government's system by a day. Meanwhile, the tens of thousands of people who had been shoved into the Superdome on Sunday, before the floods came, were still suffering in that massive calamity by Friday and Saturday.

Perhaps the most astounding case of incompetence has received the least attention. It relates to a 500-boat flotilla stretching over 5 miles that left for New Orleans from Acadiana Mall in Lafayette. It involved 1,000 people who had hoped to rescue hospital patients and take them to safety. It consisted of private boaters, fishermen, hunters, and others who had spent their entire lives navigating the waterways of Louisiana.

Once this caravan arrived, they were turned away by the Department of Wildlife and Fisheries, now being run by FEMA. All five hundred boats were ordered out.

After pleading, some people were told that they could take the boats to a rescue operation launch site. They reported that at this site, there were 200 agents of the government standing around doing absolutely nothing even as people were dying in hospitals and thousands were desperate to get out. After three hours, even these few boats were told to go away.

Now, President Bush has been criticized for being out to lunch on all of this. Indeed, some staff members put together a DVD of the evening news coverage for him to watch on Air Force One, which was the only way they could get him to understand the depth of the crisis. The purpose of the action was not so much to help people, of course, but rather to stop the meltdown of the president's reputation.

Now, President Bush has been criticized for being out to lunch on all of this. Indeed, some staff members put together a DVD of the evening news coverage for him to watch on Air Force One, which was the only way they could get him to understand the depth of the crisis. The purpose of the action was not so much to help people, of course, but rather to stop the meltdown of the president?s reputation.

In fact, by the time he actually arrived in Louisiana, food and medicine deliveries, such as they were, had to be halted on order of the White House, to make room for the presidential caravan.

Then there was the matter of the government's proposed cash gifts to the victims of Katrina. Most FEMA employees knew nothing about it when their phones and offices were mauled by people demanding their cash. FEMA's website registration for victims required Internet Explorer 6.0 and could not work with any other browser. Of course this is somewhat academic, since most of the victims had no computer access at all. But those who called the number were often told to go online to register. Most of the time, people couldn't get through on the phone or online.

In one particularly interesting detail, Katrina triggered the first use of the Department of Homeland Security's great accomplishment since it was created after 9-11: the National Response Plan, a 426-page central plan for dealing with a crisis on the level of the post-Katrina floods. Here is how the government describes it:

"The National Response Plan establishes a comprehensive all-hazards approach to enhance the ability of the United States to manage domestic incidents. The plan incorporates best practices and procedures from incident management disciplines ? homeland security, emergency management, law enforcement, firefighting, public works, public health, responder and recovery worker health and safety, emergency medical services, and the private sector ? and integrates them into a unified structure. It forms the bases of how the federal government coordinates with state, local, and tribal governments and the private sector during incidents."

What happened to the National Response Plan after the floods? It remained what it always was: a colorful PDF download, a thick book on the management shelves, an item in the Government Printing Office catalog, bird-cage liner, and many other things. One thing it was not was a national response plan that did all those glorious things listed above. As with all these plans from time immemorial, it was a dead letter.

As for the National Guard, it did what the military does best: it started harassing the residents. Working with the police, it began to enforce an order for everyone to evacuate. As the New York Times summarized the order: "no civilians in New Orleans will be allowed to carry pistols, shotguns, or other firearms of any kind."

The National Guard allowed themselves to be videotaped going from house to house, and mansion to mansion, knocking down doors, searching for weapons, handcuffing owners and humiliating them. They called them the "holdouts," a phrase out of Baghdad.

One storm trooper ? that's a pretty good name for them ? was asked whether he would shoot residents if they resisted. Yes, he said. He added, "It's surreal. You never expect to do this in your own country."

The police also broke into the offices of a heroic little company in New Orleans that did not flee. Its name is DirectNIC, an Internet Service Provider, and it was staffed by friends of the Mises Institute. Through careful preparations, good generators, lots of fuel, and vast amounts of courage, this company kept providing internet service throughout. For several days after the flooding, it was the only source of information coming out of New Orleans. They had a camera on the streets below, and ventured out to take pictures of the scenes. They were first to report the looting, the explosions, the fires, and to chronicle the craziness. They became so good at acquiring fuel that they military actually came to them for diesel.

Millions were logging into their feed, and for four of the most critical days the Mises Institute actually provided the group with an external server in order to make their broadcasts possible. They were showing what the mainstream media would not show and could not show. But late one night, there was a pounding at the door. The National Guard had seen lights in the window and demanded to know what was going on in this room. Though these young people had already been interviewed on MSNBC, Fox, and were the talk of the blogosphere, the troops knew nothing about them. Astounded and confused at what they saw, the troops allowed their pictures to be taken and went on their way.

I've provided a look at some of the terrible failures by the government ? not only failing to do what it claims it will do, but actively working to prevent others from helping out. The cost to human life and prosperity is incalculable. But, one might say, at least the government is generous now in preparing to spend perhaps $250 billion to clean up and reconstruct what was destroyed.

But who will get this money and where will it go? Cynics could not be more correct: the first companies to receive the money were our old friend Kellogg Brown and Root, a current client of President Bush's former campaign manager and former head of FEMA. KBR is a subsidiary of Halliburton, the company formerly headed by Dick Cheney. Another winner is Bechtel, whose former head is now in charge of Bush's Overseas Private Investment Corporation. The top rebuilding priority: repairing government military bases in Louisiana and Mississippi.

If you work for one of these companies, you will do very well by this aid. As for the victims, everyone knows that what rebuilding they do will come from their own savings. You can expect no assistance from this monstrosity that taxes and controls you relentlessly on the pretext that it will protect you and care for you when no one else will.

Fortunately for people who lived in flooded areas, they did not face the crisis alone. The private commercial sector, along with thousands of religious charities, was there to help. Indeed, John Tierney of the New York Times was one of the few mainstream journalists to note that Wal-Mart improved its image after Katrina. Its stores in the disaster-stricken areas still carried generators in areas. Wal-Mart trucks rode into to areas immediately following the hurricane and gave away chain saws, boots, sheets, and clothes for shelters, plus water and ice. It alone had prepared for emergency with its own emergency operations center.

Chris Westley further noted that Wal-Mart gave $20 million in cash donations, 1,500 truckloads of free merchandise, food for 100,000 meals, and the promise of a job for every one of its displaced workers. After comparing FEMA's failures with Wal-Mart's successes, he concluded that the government emergency management ought to be abolished.

Tierney, meanwhile, drew the wrong conclusion. He says that the Wal-Mart CEO "is the kind of leader we need to oversee the tens or hundreds of billions that Washington will be spending on the Gulf Coast. Scott could insist on low everyday prices while still leaving the area as well prepared for the next disaster as Wal-Mart was for Katrina."

In fact, if Lee Scott were given a government job, it would only be a matter of time before he became just another Michael Brown, the disgraced former FEMA head. This isn't a matter of character. It is a matter of the maze in which you find yourself ? the one made by the market so that it has large exit signs, or the one that is government's, that is, the one with no exits at all.

As Walter Block, Mark Thornton, and many others have shown, it was not the storm as such that did the damage, but the failure of the government levees. Combined with the levees-only river management strategy of the Army Corps of Engineers, the floods were a disaster waiting to happen. Just imagine if the town were private like your home or car. Insurance companies would have taken a huge role in risk assessment, not only charging more for higher risk but insisting on management strategies that reduce risk and rewarding those who adopt those strategies with better premiums. This works on the same principles as you home owners' insurance, which combines rules and incentives to reduce the likelihood of losses.

Government insurance, however, makes us less cautious and more willing to take risks. It prices coverage from losses far too low and creates an environment where disasters like flooding are waiting to happen. With programs like subsidized flood insurance, government is like a bad mother who pays her children to run with scissors.

Government ownership is even worse because there are no signaling systems in operation at all. It was also government that created a false sense of security for people in New Orleans, who were led to believe that the levees would hold and pumps would work. And when the floods finally did come, they were told the government would be there to manage the crisis.

But the government cannot manage crisis, as the response to Katrina demonstrated. The local government fled. The state government was dithering. And the federal government actively worked to prevent good things from happening. The thousands and millions of acts of private heroism that took place after Katrina occurred despite the government and not because of it.

And yet what lessons does the political culture want us to take from this? It is the same lessons we are instructed to learn after NASA spends and spends and still can't seem to make a reliable space shuttle. We are told that NASA needs more money. The public schools absorb many times more ? thousands times more ? in resources than private schools, and still can't perform well. So we are told that they need more money.

The federal government spends trillions over years to "protect" the country and can't fend off a handful of malcontents with an agenda. And so we are told that the government needs to start several new wars and erect a massive new bureaucracy and put sections of the country under martial law at the slightest sign of trouble.

So too, Congress can allocate a trillion dollars to fix every levee, fully preventing the last catastrophe, but not the next one. The real problem is the same in all these cases, not insufficient resources but public ownership and management.

Public ownership has encouraged people to adopt a negligent attitude toward even such obvious risks. Private developers and owners, in contrast, demand to know every possible scenario as a way to protect their property. But public owners have no real stake in the outcome and lack the economic capacity to calibrate resource allocation to risk assessment. In other words, the government manages irresponsibly and incompetently.

Actually, it was Mr. Bush who said one of the most sensible things, on September 2, 2005: "If you want to help, if you're listening to this broadcast, contribute cash to the Salvation Army and the Red Cross?. They're on the front lines providing help to the people who need help."

But it was two weeks later when his other instincts kicked in and he delivered a very different message, one that is deeply alarming. He said: "It is now clear that a challenge on this scale requires greater federal authority and a broader role for the armed forces ? the institution of our government most capable of massive logistical operations on a moment's notice."

Interesting that his beloved military was not there at a moment's notice. It now cites its own failures as the great excuse to expand its powers. So the government will spend the next several years preparing for another Katrina that will never come, just as it spent the last several years preparing for another 9-11 that will never come. The next crisis will be something completely unexpected, and once again the government will fail. But we will be left with a government with some very bad habits, among which are declarations of martial law, mandatory evacuations, gun and price controls, and other totalitarian ways.

And given that that this is a Republican administration with its own internal culture, and its attachment to military means, we get what can only be described as the continuation of the fascist track: the militarization of the country under its own armed forces.

So far as I know, this passing remark by Mr. Bush has provoked no commentary in the national press. Commentators in the organized conservative movement have displayed an appalling deference to administration's priorities, with National Review consistently arguing for more spending and militarization, Rush Limbaugh calling for price gougers to be strung up, and even some free-market friends calling for billions to rebuild New Orleans as a way of showing terrorists that we won't let the weather get in the way of progress. On the last point, I kid you not.

Conservatives have been especially bad on tolerating egregious uses of the military. We need to reflect on what it means to have the military take over in the event of crisis. What kind of ideology promotes such things, and looks the other way when it happens? I think I know, and it serves as a reminder that not all threats to freedom come from the Left.

A clue comes from the neo-Nazi novel called the Turner Diaries, sometimes cited as the motivating force for the bombing of the Oklahoma federal building, which ends in what the author regards as a political utopia. After a world war that exterminates all non-whites, a military regime takes over the United States and centrally plans the economy under permanent martial law. All food and water are distributed on military trucks, all production takes place on a planned basis, and the merchant class is required to obey or be shot.

The author describes this race-based national socialism as if it is a system with an inherent appeal to the reader, and perhaps there are people economically ignorant enough and full of enough loathing for humanity and freedom to regard it as attractive. I do know that in our own times there are people waiting in the wings who long for power and who are drawn to the ideal of a militarized society and a centrally managed economy. Some call themselves conservatives, and they are as much a threat to civilization as those who call themselves liberals.

But let me end with several notes of optimism. The first is implied in all that I said above. The government cannot actually do what it promises, and there is a way in which we can only be thankful for that. It cannot succeed in managing a central plan. Its plans will always fail. The government tries to use its failures as an excuse for more power, but with every failure comes a substantial degree of public humiliation for the public sector, and that humiliation can provide a basis for the undoing of government authority.

Some people say that a loss of government authority will mean the breakdown of civilization. Actually it will create the preconditions for the reestablishment of civilization, and in a state of freedom that can happen very quickly. The aftermath of Katrina illustrated in a million individual acts of charity and enterprise that people can manage their affairs, even amidst the chaos.

The calamity following Katrina was an egregious display, one that gave the federal government a black eye. The Democrats will continue to use this to harm the Republicans, which is fine by me, but it is not just Mr. Bush that is suffering, but the whole apparatus of central planning by decree from above. A government that cannot manage a crisis should not be trusted to manage anything at all. Thanks to Katrina and its dreadful aftermath, I think it's fair to say that the age of not trusting government has returned with a vengeance.

It took decades for the rot to give way underneath the Soviet apparatus of central planning. But eventually the implausibility of the entire project was no longer possible to deny. It gave way under an intellectual reaction against the whole of socialism. We are seeing something like that take place today, as government fails in Iraq and New Orleans and in every place around the country and the world where it causes problems and creates no solutions.

The age of confident central planning is behind us. Right now, the state is just trying to keep its head above water. If freedom is to have a future, the time will come when it will sink to an ignoble end, and we will wonder how we ever believed in this myth called government crisis management.

The advocates of freedom and the partisans of private enterprise will be there with the intellectual equivalent of flotillas, barges, buses, helicopters, and the whole apparatus necessary to rescue liberty from every attempt to kill it. And when our City on a Hill comes to be, it will be privately built to withstand any flood.

Under the Microscope
From an Ingredient
In Cosmetics, Toys,
A Safety Concern

Male Reproductive Development
Is Issue With Phthalates,
Used in Host of Products
Europe, Japan Restrict Them
By PETER WALDMAN
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
October 4, 2005; Page A1

In the 12th week of a human pregnancy, the momentous event of gender formation begins, as X and Y chromosomes trigger biochemical reactions that shape male or female organs. Estrogens carry the process forward in girls, while in boys, male hormones called androgens do.

Now scientists have indications the process may be influenced from beyond the womb, raising a fresh debate over industrial chemicals and safety. In rodent experiments, common chemicals called phthalates, used in a wide variety of products from toys to cosmetics to pills, can block the action of fetal androgens. The result is what scientists call demasculinized effects in male offspring, ranging from undescended testes at birth to low sperm counts and benign testicular tumors later in life. "Phthalate syndrome," researchers call it.

Whether phthalates -- pronounced "thallets" -- might affect sexual development in humans, too, is now a matter of hot dispute. Doses in the rodent experiments were hundreds of times as high as the minute levels to which people are exposed. However, last year, federal scientists found gene alterations in the fetuses of pregnant rats that had been exposed to extremely low levels of phthalates, levels no higher than the trace amounts detected in some humans.

Then this year, two direct links to humans were made. First, a small study found that baby boys whose mothers had the greatest phthalate exposures while pregnant were much more likely than other baby boys to have certain demasculinized traits. And another small study found that 3-month-old boys exposed to higher levels of phthalates through breast milk produced less testosterone than baby boys exposed to lower levels of the chemicals.

RELATED READING


See various studies related to phthalates:
? Phthalate Exposure and Human Semen Parameters

? Phthalate exposure and reproductive hormones in adult men

? Dose-Dependent Alterations in Gene Expression and Testosterone Synthesis in the Fetal Testes of Male Rats Exposed to Di (n-butyl) phthalate

? Analysis of Consumer Cosmetic Products for Phthalate Esters

? Phthalate Exposure during Pregnancy and Lower Anogenital Index in Boys: Wider Implications for the General Population?

? Decrease in Anogenital Distance among Male Infants with Prenatal Phthalate Exposure

? Medications as a Source of Human Exposure to Phthalates

? Human Breast Milk Contamination with Phthalates and Alterations of Endogenous Reproductive Hormones in Three Months Old Infants

? Follow-Up Study of Adolescents Exposed to Di(2-Ethylhexyl) Phthalate (DEHP) as Neonates on Extracorporeal Membrane Oxygenation (ECMO) Support

Scientists are raising questions about phthalates at a time when male reproductive disorders, including testicular cancer, appear to be on the rise in many countries. Seeking an explanation, European endocrinologists have identified what some see as a human counterpart to rodents' phthalate syndrome, one they call "testicular dysgenesis syndrome." Some think it may be due in part to exposure to phthalates and other chemicals that interfere with male sex hormones.

"We know abnormal development of the fetal testes underlies many of the reproductive disorders we're seeing in men," says Richard Sharpe of the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, a researcher on male reproduction. "We do not know what's causing this, but we do know high doses of phthalates induce parallel disorders in rats."

It isn't surprising to find traces of phthalates in human blood and urine, because they are used so widely. Nearly five million metric tons of phthalates are consumed by industry every year, 13% in the U.S. They are made from petroleum byproducts and chemically known as esters, or compounds of organic acid and alcohol. The common varieties with large molecules are used to plasticize, or make pliable, otherwise rigid plastics -- such as polyvinyl chloride, known as PVC -- in things like construction materials, clothing, toys and furnishings. Small-molecule phthalates are used as solvents and in adhesives, waxes, inks, cosmetics, insecticides and drugs.

Users and producers of phthalates say they are perfectly safe at the very low levels to which humans are exposed. Phthalates are among the most widely studied chemicals and have proved safe for more than 50 years, says Marian Stanley of the American Chemistry Council, a trade association.

She says studies suggest primates, including humans, may be much less sensitive to phthalates than are rodents. She cites a 2003 Japanese study of marmoset monkeys exposed to phthalates as juveniles, which found no testicular effects from high doses. The study was sponsored by the Japan Plasticizer Industry Association. Scientists involved in a California regulatory review questioned the study and maintained it didn't support the conclusion that humans are less sensitive to phthalates than rodents are.

Ms. Stanley's conclusion: "There is no reliable evidence that any phthalate, used as intended, has ever caused a health problem for a human."

Societal Issue

The phthalate debate is part of the larger societal issue of what, if anything, to do about minute, once-undetectable chemical traces that some evidence now suggests might hold health hazards.

With much still unknown about phthalates, scientists and regulators at the Environmental Protection Agency are moving cautiously. "All this work on the effects of phthalates on the male reproductive system is just five years old," says the EPA's leading phthalate researcher, L. Earl Gray. "There appears to be clear disruption of the androgen pathway, but how? What are phthalates doing?"

To Rochelle Tyl, a toxicologist who works for corporations and trade groups studying chemicals' effects on animals, the broader question is: "If we know something bad is happening, or we think we do, do we wait for the data or do we act now to protect people?" Based on her own studies of rodents, Dr. Tyl says it is still unclear whether low levels of phthalates damage baby boys.

Some countries have acted. In 2003, Japan banned certain types of phthalates in food-handling equipment after traces turned up in school lunches and other foods.

The European Union has recently banned some phthalates in cosmetics and toys. In January, the European Parliament's public health committee called for banning nearly all phthalates in household goods and medical devices. In July, the full parliament asked the EU's regulatory body, European Commission, to review a full range of products "made from plasticised material which may expose people to risks, especially those used in medical devices."

With the controversy particularly hot in Europe, the European market for the most common phthalate plasticizer, diethylhexyl phthalate, or DEHP, has fallen 50% since 2000, says BASF AG, the German chemical giant. In response, BASF says it is ceasing production of DEHP in Europe this month. A spokesman for the company says the cutback won't affect its phthalate production in the U.S.

The U.S. doesn't restrict phthalates, and has lobbied the EU hard in recent years not to burden manufacturers with new regulations on chemicals. Still, a few companies, under pressure from health groups, have agreed to abide by European standards in their products sold in the U.S. Procter & Gamble Co. said last year it would no longer use phthalates in nail polish. Last December, Unilever, Revlon Inc. and L'Or?al SA's American unit promised to eliminate all chemicals banned in European products from the same items in the U.S.

For medical bags and tubes, Baxter International Inc. pledged in 1999 to develop alternatives to phthalate-containing PVC, as did Abbott Laboratories in 2003. (Abbott has since spun off its hospital-products unit.) In a June study by Harvard researchers of 54 newborns in intensive care, infants who'd had the most invasive procedures had five times as much of the phthalate DEHP in their bodies -- as measured in urine -- as did babies with fewer procedures.

Researchers aren't yet sure what this means. Another study by doctors at the Children's National Medical Center in Washington, published last year, found that 19 adolescents who'd had significant exposure to phthalates from medical devices as newborns showed no signs of adverse effects through puberty.


Kaiser Permanente, the big health-maintenance organization, promised in 1999 to eliminate phthalates in hospital supplies. Demand from the HMO has helped drive development of medical gloves that don't contain phthalates, as well as non-PVC carpeting and a new line of phthalate-free plastic handrails, corner guards and wall coverings.

In the early 1990s, the EPA set exposure guidelines for several types of phthalates, based on studies that had been done decades earlier. Since then, much more has been learned about them.

Consider dibutyl phthalate, which is used to keep nail polish from chipping and to coat some pills. The EPA did a risk assessment of it 15 years ago, relying on a rodent study performed in 1953. The now half-century-old study found a "lowest adverse-effect level" -- 600 milligrams a day per kilogram of body weight -- that killed half of the rodents within a week.

A 2004 study of the same chemical, published in the journal Toxicological Sciences, found far subtler effects, at far lower exposures. It detected gene alteration in fetuses of female rats that ingested as little as 0.1 milligram a day of the phthalate for each kilogram of body weight. That dose is one six-thousandth of the 1953 "lowest adverse-effect" level.

It's also an exposure level found in some U.S. women, says Paul Foster of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, a co-author of the gene study. So "now we're talking about 'Josephina Q. Public' -- real women in the general population," he says. "The comfort level is receding."

EPA Caution

Still, because researchers don't know the function of the genes that were altered in the rat study, EPA experts say it's too early to base regulatory decisions on such gene changes. "We're a long way, in my opinion, from considering changes in gene expression as 'adverse' for risk assessment," says the environmental agency's Dr. Gray.

Exxon Mobil Corp. and BASF dominate the $7.3 billion phthalates market. An Exxon Mobil spokeswoman says risk assessments by government agencies in Europe and the U.S. confirm "the safety of phthalates in their current applications."

Phthalates are cheaper than most other chemicals that can soften plastics. But a BASF press release says European manufacturers have been replacing phthalates with plasticizers designed for "sensitive applications such as toys, medical devices and food contact."

Makers of pills sometimes coat them with phthalates to make them easier to swallow or control how they dissolve. A case study published last year in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives said a man who took a drug for ulcerative colitis, Asacol, for three months was exposed to several hundred times as much dibutyl phthalate as the average American. The drug's maker, Procter & Gamble, says it coats the pill with the phthalate so it will stay intact until it reaches inflamed colon areas. P&G says a daily dose of the drug has less than 1% of the 0.1 milligram of dibutyl phthalate per kilogram of body weight that the EPA regards as a safe daily dose.

Sperm Count

Attributing health effects to specific industrial chemicals is a dicey business. Scientists often look for associations: statistical correlations that suggest, but don't prove, a possible causal link.

With phthalates, they've found a few. For instance, a 2003 study divided 168 male patients at a fertility clinic into three groups based on levels of phthalate metabolites in their urine. The study found that men in the highest third for one of the phthalates were three to five times as likely as those in the lowest third to have a low sperm count or low sperm activity. Men highest in a different phthalate also had more abnormally shaped sperm, according to the study, which was done by researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health and published in the journal Epidemiology.

The scientists now are extending the research to 450 men. In their next paper, they're also planning to discuss a separate Swedish study, of 245 army recruits, that found no link between phthalate exposure and sperm quality.

The latest human study, on 96 baby boys in Denmark and Finland, found that those fed breast milk containing higher levels of certain phthalates had less testosterone during their crucial hormonal surge at three months of age than baby boys exposed to lower levels.

Authors of the study, led by Katharina Main of the University of Copenhagen and published Sept. 8 in Environmental Health Perspectives, said their findings support the idea that the human testis is vulnerable to phthalate exposure during development -- possibly even more vulnerable than rodents' genitalia. They added, however, that "before any regulatory action is considered, further studies on health effects of [phthalates] are urgently needed" aimed at "verifying or refuting our findings."

Physical Differences

A human study of 85 subjects published in June linked fetal exposure to phthalates to structural differences in the genitalia of baby boys.

Researchers measured phthalate levels in pregnant women and later examined their infant and toddler sons. For pregnant women who had the highest phthalate exposure -- a level equivalent to the top 25% of such exposure in American women -- baby sons had smaller genitalia, on average. And their sons were more likely to have incompletely descended testicles.

Most striking was a difference in the length of the perineum, the space between the genitalia and anus, which scientists call AGD, for anogenital distance. In rodents, a shortened perineum in males is closely correlated with phthalate exposure. A shortened AGD also is one of the most sensitive markers of demasculinization in animal studies.

Males' perineums at birth are usually about twice as long as those of females, in both humans and laboratory rodents. In this study, the baby boys of women with the highest phthalate exposures were 10 times as likely to have a shortened AGD, adjusted for baby weight, as the sons of women who had the lowest phthalate exposures.

The length difference was about one-fifth, according to the study, which was led by epidemiologist Shanna Swan of the University of Rochester (N.Y.) School of Medicine and Dentistry and published in Environmental Health Perspectives. Among boys with shorter AGD, 21% also had incomplete testicular descent and small scrotums, compared with 8% of the other boys.

Does it matter? The researchers intend to track as many of the boys as possible into adulthood, to address a key question: Will they grow up with lower testosterone levels, inferior sperm quality and higher rates of testicular tumors, as do rats with phthalate syndrome?

When the boys are 3 to 5 years old, Dr. Swan plans to assess their play behavior to see if exposure to phthalates appears associated with feminized neurological development. She says such tests have shown that little girls with high levels of androgens, or male hormones, gravitate toward "masculine" play. But she says no one has studied whether boys' play is affected by fetal exposure to chemicals that block androgens.

"In rodents, the changes result in permanent effects. Future studies will be necessary to determine whether these boys are also permanently affected," Dr. Swan says.

She and others agree that a study of just 85 subjects needs to be enlarged and repeated. She notes that although boys' genitalia were affected in subtle ways, no substantial malformations or disease were detected.

Some endocrinologists call this the first study to link an industrial chemical measured in pregnant women to altered reproductive systems in offspring. "It is really noteworthy that shortened AGD was seen," says Niels Skakkebaek, a reproductive-disorder expert at the University of Copenhagen, who wasn't an author of the study. "If it is proven the environment changed the [physical characteristics] of these babies in such an anti-androgenic manner, it is very serious."

Ms. Stanley of the American Chemistry Council doubts that any study can "tease out" the cause of a human health condition, given the wide variety of chemical exposures in people's lives. She notes that some of the specific phthalates associated with reproductive changes in the two human-baby studies haven't been linked to such changes in rodents. So, she says, it's possible the changes in anogenital distance and hormone levels may merely reflect normal variability.

Dr. Tyl, the chemical-industry toxicologist, says her own rat studies confirm that AGD is very sensitive to phthalates. She says that in rats that had very high phthalate exposures, a shortened AGD at birth was closely associated with a number of serious reproductive disorders later in life. However, in rats exposed to much lower doses of phthalates, a shortened AGD at birth did not always lead to later troubles. Many of these rats grew up to breed normally, she says, despite their slightly altered anatomy.

Dr. Tyl suggests that the same may be true of humans. Dr. Swan's study is "potentially important," Dr. Tyl says, because it suggests that "at low levels of exposure, humans are responding" to phthalates. But it remains quite possible, Dr. Tyl theorizes, that the boys with shortened AGD will grow up normally. "At what point do changes like this cross the line" to become dangerous, she asks. "We don't know yet."

Write to Peter Waldman at peter.waldman@wsj.com

http://www.danielpipes.org/article/3005

Woof Szymon:

The idea common to all these stories is that they are about people defending themselves or defending other people.

Does this help?

Crafty Dog

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dy...5100301649.html


Facing Abductor, Girls Proved Martial Arts Training

By Jamie Stockwell and Tom Jackman
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, October 4, 2005; Page B01

When the masked man attacked them inside their bedroom in the middle of the night Sunday, the twin 10-year-old girls responded just as they had been taught in their martial arts class: They fought back.

The commotion woke their parents, who rushed in and thought they recognized the tall, ponytailed intruder. The girls' father whacked him with the base of a table lamp and yanked off part of his mask. As the intruder ran from the Vienna townhouse, the parents were pretty sure it was "Andy," an instructor at Mountain Kim Martial Arts studio in Vienna, where their daughters take classes every week, the mother told police.



Suspect Andrew Jacobs had taught the girls martial arts skills. (Fairfax County Police Department - Fairfax County Police Department)





Hours later, Andrew Jacobs, 42, a part-time instructor at the studio who holds a black belt, was arrested at the brick house he shares with his sister, not far from the girls' home. Yesterday, he appeared in court, with a black eye and bruises on his face, on charges of assault, attempted abduction and burglary. A judge ordered him held without bond.

Capt. Mike Miller, the acting police chief of Vienna, said that Jacobs had taught the twins, who hold blue belts. When they were attacked in their bedroom about 12:30 a.m. Sunday, Miller said, "the children responded the way they were instructed to by the suspect" in their training.

"He had attempted to gag one of the 10-year-olds," Miller said, which attracted the attention of her sister. Jacobs told police that he had brought wire ties and a cut-up towel to the house to tie up the residents, Miller said.

There was no sign of a break-in at the townhouse, one of several on a quiet, shaded street in the Townes of Moorefield subdivision off Nutley Street. After his arrest, Jacobs told police that he intended to tie up the residents to "keep everybody quiet" while he stole valuables, including "loose money, jewelry and VCRs." according to a search warrant affidavit filed yesterday in Fairfax Circuit Court.

One of the sisters told police that Jacobs "struck her in the face with his hand and placed one of the [towel bits] around her mouth," the affidavit says. The other girl then screamed, and moments later the parents rushed into their room.

Reached at home yesterday, the mother referred calls about their ordeal to Vienna police. On Sunday evening, the father told a reporter that the family "took care of it" and declined to comment further.

Grandmaster Mountain Kim, who owns the Vienna martial arts studio, said Jacobs has been a student and occasional instructor for him off and on for many years. He said that Jacobs wasn't around for about 10 years but showed up again this summer.

"I thought he was okay. He was not ever real friendly, but I knew him for a long time," Kim said yesterday afternoon as young students wearing white wrap jackets filed out of a van and into the studio. "It's a terrible situation, and I'm very sad that it happened."

No one answered the door at Jacobs's home, a detached brick house with a freshly mowed lawn and manicured bushes. A blue pickup with the license plate AMJ 4X4 sat at the curb.

Next door, Jennifer Copp, 34, stood on the driveway with her 2-month-old daughter. She said she has known Jacobs for about a year.

"He didn't talk much to anyone or socialize a whole lot," she said. "We knew him only as the man next door. We knew him only as Andy and didn't know whether he had a job. We never saw him leave."

Copp said her husband watched as Jacobs was led in handcuffs from his house Sunday evening. When they watched the news later that night, she said, she "almost fainted."

"Good for them for fighting back. I guess the girls were taught well," she said. If the allegations prove true, she continued, "who else will the family wonder about in their lives? Here was someone who was supposed to be teaching them how to be safe."

Staff writer Nikita Stewart contributed to this report.

Troops Wait for Body Armor Reimbursements
Associated Press  |  September 30, 2005
WASHINGTON - Nearly a year after Congress demanded action, the Pentagon has still failed to figure out a way to reimburse soldiers for body armor and equipment they purchased to better protect themselves while serving in Iraq.

For Marine Sgt. Todd Bowers that extra piece of equipment - a high-tech rifle scope bought by his father for $600 and a $100 pair of goggles - turned out to be a life or death purchase. And he has never been reimbursed.

Bowers, who is from Arizona but going to school in Washington, D.C., was shot by a sniper during his second tour in Iraq, but the round lodged in his scope, and his goggles protected his eyes from the shrapnel that struck his face.

"We weren't provided those going to Iraq," he said Thursday. "But they literally saved my life."

He and other soldiers and their parents are still spending hundreds and sometimes thousands of dollars for armor they say the military won't provide. One U.S. senator said Thursday he will try again to force the Pentagon to obey the reimbursement law it opposed from the outset and has so far not implemented.

Sen. Christopher Dodd, D-Conn., said he will offer amendments to the defense appropriations bill working its way through Congress to take the funding issue out of the hands of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and give control to military unit commanders in the field.

"Rumsfeld is violating the law," Dodd said. "It's been sitting on the books for over a year. They were opposed to it. It was insulting to them. I'm sorry that's how they felt."

Dodd said men and women in uniform "are serving halfway around the world. And they shouldn't have to rely on bake sales and lemonade stands to raise money" to get them the equipment they need.

Pentagon spokeswoman Air Force Lt. Col. Ellen Krenke said the department "is in the final stages of putting a reimbursement program together and it is expected to be operating soon." But defense officials would not discuss the reason for the delay.

Krenke said the Pentagon's first priority is to ensure that soldiers "have all they need to fight and win this nation's wars."

Others don't see it that way.

"Your expectation is that when you are sent to war, that our government does everything they can do to protect the lives of our people, and anything less than that is not good enough," said a former Marine who spent nearly $1,000 two weeks ago to buy lower-body armor for his son, a Marine serving in Fallujah.

The father asked that he be identified only by his first name - Gordon - because he is afraid of retribution against his son.

"I wouldn't have cared if it cost us $10,000 to protect our son, I would do it," said Gordon. "But I think the U.S. has an obligation to make sure they have this equipment and to reimburse for it. I just don't support Donald Rumsfeld's idea of going to war with what you have, not what you want. You go to war prepared, and you don't go to war until you are prepared."

Under the law Congress passed last October, the Defense Department had until Feb. 25 to develop regulations for the reimbursement, which is limited to $1,100 per item. Pentagon officials opposed the reimbursement idea, calling it "an unmanageable precedent that will saddle the DOD with an open-ended financial burden."

In a letter to Dodd in late April, David Chu, undersecretary of defense for personnel, said his office was developing regulations to implement the reimbursement, and would be done in about 60 days.

Soldiers and their families have reported buying everything from higher-quality protective gear to armor for their Humvees, medical supplies and even global positioning devices.

"The bottom line is that Donald Rumsfeld and the Defense Department are failing soldiers again," said Paul Rieckhoff, executive director of Operation Truth, an advocacy group for Iraq veterans.

"It just became an accepted part of the culture. If you were National Guard or Reserve, or NCOs, noncommissioned officers, you were going to spend a lot of money out of your pocket," said Rieckhoff, who was a platoon leader with the 3rd Infantry Division and served in Iraq from the invasion in March 2003 to spring 2004.

Dodd said he is worried the Pentagon will reject most requests for reimbursement. Turning the decision over to troop commanders will prevent that, he said, because the commanders know what their soldiers need and will make better decisions about what to reimburse.

Dodd also said he wants to eliminate the deadline included in the original law, which allowed soldiers to seek reimbursement for items bought between September 2001 and July 2004. Now, he wants it to be open-ended.

From another forum.  Anyone have anything on this?

===================================
Explosion Kills One at University of Oklahoma

Sunday, October 02, 2005


NORMAN, Okla. ? One person was killed in an explosion near a packed football stadium at the University of Oklahoma on Saturday night in what authorities said appeared to be a suicide.

The blast, in a traffic circle about 100 yards from Oklahoma Memorial Stadium, could be heard by some in the crowd of 84,000, but university President David Boren said no one inside the stadium was ever in danger.

"We are apparently dealing with an individual suicide, which is under full investigation," Boren said in a statement. There was no information about the person who was killed, and no reports of any other injuries.

A police bomb squad detonated explosives found at the site of the blast. The area near the stadium was searched by bomb-sniffing dogs.

Jaclyn Hull, an OU freshman who left the game shortly before the explosion, said she saw "a little bit of smoke, about as much as you would see coming up from a grill."

Officers cordoned off an area west of the stadium after the explosion and nobody was allowed out of the stadium for about a half-hour after the blast, which occurred shortly before 8 p.m., about halftime of the Sooners' game against Kansas State. The game continued.

WT Perspective: I'll bet we don't hear another word about this. We should, but we won't.

Admitting it was, if it was, would not be good for business or politics. I wonder. Was this a terrorist event gone wrong?

They say it was a suicide. I investigated many suicides in my time in service. I never saw on done with explosives.
============

http://www.homelandsecurityus.com/

==========

INTELL PROVIDED BY MEMBERS

? Islamic Bomb-Making documents, Other Jihad Materials Reportedly Removed from Suspect's Park View Apartment

? Suspect's Apartment located Near the Islamic Society of Norman, OK

Law enforcement sources close to the Northeast Intelligence Network have confirmed that search and seizure warrants were served today upon the residence of the ?suicide bomber, 21-year-old Joel Henry Hinrichs III of Colorado Springs, CO, who was a resident of the Park View Apartments on campus.

Speaking strictly ?off the record,? the officials stated that they recovered ?a significant amount? of Islamic ?Jihad? type literature, some possibly written in Arabic, along with the suspect?s computer. Some of the documentation included material on how to construct bomb-making vests.

Further reports by the same officials indicated that the bomb was detonated prematurely when the suspect was either arming a bomb vest or backpack, which contained TATP, a homemade explosive.

TATP (triacetone triperoxide) is a very potent but relatively easily manufactured explosive compound that was used in the July London bombings. It is important to note that TATP has been cited in numerous Jihad bomb-making manuals.

The same officials, requiring anonymity as the investigation is ongoing, continued to confirm that ?other un-detonated explosive devices were found in the area cordoned off by police and federal officials.? Those devices WERE NOT DETONATED, but carefully confiscated for further forensic testing. Initially, information provided to the Northeast Intelligence Network suggested that that the so-called ?suicide-bomber? was attempting to attach bombs to the buses parked in the area when one of the bombs detonated prematurely. The investigation has expanded into the possibility that others might have been involved.

WT Editorial -

Suspicions confirmed? Lots of Jihadi connections in OK. Another post will contain more material. I will venture a theory. This American Hadji was going to go inside the stadium and blow himself up killing lots of americans. When they tried to evacuate, more deaths.

Now, the authorities can either say this was a terrorist event or that it was not. If they say it was not, everyone sheds a tear for the dead guy and discussions on how the sad tragedy of a suicide could have been averted. If they state it was a terror attack gone wrong, what would the reaction accross the country be???

I think we know WHY they are being quiet about this. The same thing happened with the Beltway Sniper case as well as with the Egyptian Shooter at LAX. If any WTers are privy to discussions held at the high levels of police admin it would be interesting to hear the logic behind their thinking.
===========

MANY PATHS SEEM TO INTERSECT IN NORMAN, OKLAHOMA

? In early July 2000, Mohammed Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi visited the Airman Flight School in Norman, Oklahoma.

? On or about 29 September, 2000, Zacharias MOUSSAOUI contacted Airman Flight School in Norman, Oklahoma using an e-mail account he set up on September 6 with an internet service provider in Malaysia.

? On or about 26 February 2001, Zacharias MOUSSAOUI opened a bank account in Norman, Oklahoma where he deposited approximately $32,000 in cash.

? Between 26 February 2001 and 29 May 2001, MOUSSAOUI attended the Airman Flight School in Norman, Oklahoma, ending his classes early.

? And more recently...26 September 2005: A University of Oklahoma student charged with bringing an explosive device to an airport pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge in federal court in Oklahoma City.

Charles Alfred Dreyling Jr. of Norman, Oklahoma faces up to a year in prison and a $100,000 fine at a future sentencing hearing. Dreyling, 24, was arrested in August at the Will Rogers World Airport after security personnel noticed a suspicious object in his carryon bag as he was leaving for a family vacation with his parents.

He later told FBI agents the device -- a modified carbon dioxide cartridge filled with gunpowder -- was "basically a pipe bomb," according to court papers that he had forgotten was in his bag. (Former Oklahoma City, OK Mayor Kirk Humphreys-- who was also DREYLING'S landlord-- spoke on behalf of DREYLING at his bail hearing).

? On a bus trip to the University of Oklahoma, Zacharias MOUSSAOUI was on the same bus as Nicholas BERG, the American man who was beheaded in Iraq in 2004 by Islamic terrorists. At some point on that trip, MOUSSAOUI asked BERG if he could use BERG'S laptop computer. Government sources said BERG gave the MOUSSAOUI his computer password...

? September 11 hijacker Ziad Jarrah?s ticket (United Airlines Flight 93) was purchased from a computer terminal at Oklahoma University.

? Norman, OK is also cited on a number of occasions in the best-selling book, the most comprehensive investigative work by Jayna Davis titled The Third Terrorist, about the truck bomb blast that killed 171 souls and destroyed the Murrah Federal Building on 19 April 1995
__________________

http://www.michaelyon.blogspot.com/?BMIDS=17137839-4e534328-81766

While there, take a look around.  This is a good blog.

Heart of Darkness
From Zarqawi to the man on the street, Sunni Arabs fear Shiite emancipation.

BY FOUAD AJAMI
Wednesday, September 28, 2005 12:01 a.m. EDT

The remarkable thing about the terror in Iraq is the silence with which it is greeted in other Arab lands. Grant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi his due: He has been skilled at exposing the pitilessness on the loose in that fabled Arab street and the moral emptiness of so much of official Arab life. The extremist is never just a man of the fringe: He always works at the outer edges of mainstream life, playing out the hidden yearnings and defects of the dominant culture. Zarqawi is a bigot and a killer, but he did not descend from the sky. He emerged out of the Arab world's sins of omission and commission; in the way he rails against the Shiites (and the Kurds) he expresses that fatal Arab inability to take in "the other." A terrible condition afflicts the Arabs, and Zarqawi puts it on lethal display: an addiction to failure, and a desire to see this American project in Iraq come to a bloody end.

Zarqawi's war, it has to be conceded, is not his alone; he kills and maims, he labels the Shiites rafida (rejecters of Islam), he charges them with treason as "collaborators of the occupiers and the crusaders," but he can be forgiven the sense that he is a holy warrior on behalf of a wider Arab world that has averted its gaze from his crimes, that has given him its silent approval. He and the band of killers arrayed around him must know the meaning of this great Arab silence.





There is a clich? that distinguishes between cultures of shame and cultures of guilt, and by that crude distinction, it has always been said that the Arab world is a "shame culture." But in truth there is precious little shame in Arab life about the role of the Arabs in the great struggle for and within Iraq. What is one to make of the Damascus-based Union of Arab Writers that has refused to grant membership in its ranks to Iraqi authors? The pretext that Iraqi writers can't be "accredited" because their country is under American occupation is as good an illustration as it gets of the sordid condition of Arab culture. For more than three decades, Iraq's life was sheer and limitless terror, and the Union of Arab Writers never uttered a word. Through these terrible decades, Iraqis suffered alone, and still their poetry and literature adorn Arabic letters. They need no acknowledgment of their pain, or of their genius, from a literary union based in a city in the grip of a deadening autocracy.
A culture of shame would surely see into the shame of an Arab official class with no tradition of accountability granting itself the right to hack away at Iraq's constitution, dismissing it as the handiwork of the American regency. Unreason, an indifference to the most basic of facts, and a spirit of belligerence have settled upon the Arab world. Those who, in Arab lands beyond Iraq, have taken to describing the Iraqi constitution as an "American-Iranian constitution," give voice to a debilitating incoherence. At the heart of this incoherence lies an adamant determination to deny the Shiites of Iraq a claim to their rightful place in their country's political order.

The drumbeats against Iraq that originate from the League of Arab States and its Egyptian apparatchiks betray the panic of an old Arab political class afraid that there is something new unfolding in Iraq--a different understanding of political power and citizenship, a possible break with the culture of tyranny and the cult of Big Men disposing of the affairs--and the treasure--of nations. It is pitiable that an Egyptian political class that has abdicated its own dream of modernity and bent to the will of a pharaonic regime is obsessed with the doings in Iraq. But this is the political space left open by the master of the realm. To be sure, there is terror in the streets of Iraq; there is plenty there for the custodians of a stagnant regime in Cairo to point to as a cautionary tale of what awaits societies that break with "secure" ways. But the Egyptian autocracy knows the stakes. An Iraqi polity with a modern social contract would be a rebuke to all that Egypt stands for, a cruel reminder of the heartbreak of Egyptians in recent years. We must not fall for Cairo's claims of primacy in Arab politics; these are hollow, and Iraq will further expose the rot that has settled upon the political life of Egypt.

Nor ought we be taken in by warnings from Jordan, made by King Abdullah II, of a "Shia crescent" spanning Iran, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon. This is a piece of bigotry and simplification unworthy of a Hashemite ruler, for in the scheme of Arab history the Hashemites have been possessed of moderation and tolerance. Of all Sunni Arab rulers, the Hashemites have been particularly close to the Shiites, but popular opinion in Jordan has been thoroughly infatuated with Saddam Hussein, and Saddamism, and an inexperienced ruler must have reasoned that the Shiite bogey would play well at home.

The truth of Jordan today is official moderation coupled with a civic culture given to anti-Americanism, and hijacked by the Islamists. In that standoff, the country's political life is off-limits, but the street has its way on Iraq. Verse is still read in Saddam's praise at poetry readings in Amman, and the lawyers' syndicate is packed with those eager to join the legal defense teams of Saddam Hussein and his principal lieutenants. Saddam's two daughters reside in Jordan with no apologies to offer, and no second thoughts about the great crimes committed under the Baath tyranny. Those who know the ways of Jordan speak of cities where religious radicalism and bigotry blow with abandon. Zarqa, the hometown of Abu Musab, is one such place; Salt, the birthplace of a notorious suicide bomber, Raad al-Banna, who last winter brought great tragedy to the Iraqi town of Hilla, killing no fewer than 125 of its people, is another. For a funeral, Banna's family gave him a "martyr's wedding," and the affair became an embarrassment to the regime and the political class. Jordan is yet to make its peace with the new Iraq. (King Abdullah's "crescent" breaks at any rate: Syria has no Shiites to speak of, and its Alawite rulers are undermining the Shiites of Iraq, feeding a jihadist breed of Sunni warriors for whom the Alawites are children of darkness.)





It was the luck of the imperial draw that the American project in Iraq came to the rescue of the Shiites--and of the Kurds. We may not fully appreciate the historical change we unleashed on the Arab world, but we have given liberty to the stepchildren of the Arab world. We have overturned an edifice of material and moral power that dates back centuries. The Arabs railing against U.S. imperialism and arrogance in Iraq will never let us in on the real sources of their resentments. In the way of "modern" men and women with some familiarity with the doctrines of political correctness, they can't tell us that they are aggrieved that we have given a measure of self-worth to the seminarians of Najaf and the highlanders of Kurdistan. But that is precisely what gnaws at them.
An edifice of Arab nationalism built by strange bedfellows--the Sunni political and bureaucratic elites, and the Christian Arab pundits who abetted them in the idle hope that they would be spared the wrath of the street and of the mob--was overturned in Iraq. And America, at times ambivalent about its mission, brought along with its military gear a suspicion of the Shiites, a belief that the Iraqi Shiites were an extension of Iran, a community destined to build a sister-republic of the Iranian theocracy. Washington has its cadre of Arabists reared on Arab nationalist historiography. This camp had a seat at the table, but the very scale of what was at play in Iraq, and the redemptionism at the heart of George Bush's ideology, dwarfed them.

For the Arab enemies of this project of rescue, this new war in Iraq was a replay of an old drama: the fall of Baghdad to the Mongols in 1258. In the received history, the great city of learning, the capital of the Abbasid Caliphate, had fallen to savages, and an age of greatness had drawn to a close. In the legend of that tale, the Mongols sacked the metropolis, put its people to the sword, dumped the books of its libraries in the Tigris. That river, chroniclers insist, flowed, alternately, with the blood of the victims and the ink of the books. It is a tale of betrayal, the selective history maintains. A minister of the caliph, a Shiite by the name of Ibn Alqami, opened the gates of Baghdad to the Mongols. History never rests here, and telescopes easily: In his call for a new holy war against the Shiites, Zarqawi dredges up that history, dismisses the Shiite-led government as "the government of Ibn Alqami's descendants." Zarqawi knows the power of this symbolism, and its dark appeal to Sunni Arabs within Iraq.

Zarqawi's jihadists have sown ruin in Iraq, but they are strangers to that country, and they have needed the harbor given them in the Sunni triangle and the indulgence of the old Baathists. For the diehards, Iraq is now a "stolen country" delivered into the hands of subject communities unfit to rule. Though a decided minority, the Sunni Arabs have a majoritarian mindset and a conviction that political dominion is their birthright. Instead of encouraging a break with the old Manichaean ideologies, the Arab world beyond Iraq feeds this deep-seated sense of historical entitlement. No one is under any illusions as to what the Sunni Arabs would have done had oil been located in their provinces. They would have disowned both north and south and opted for a smaller world of their own and defended it with the sword. But this was not to be, and their war is the panic of a community that fears that it could be left with a realm of "gravel and sand."





In the aftermath of Katrina, the project of reforming a faraway region and ridding it of its malignancies is harder to sustain and defend. We are face-to-face with the trade-off between duties beyond borders and duties within. At home, for the critics of the war, Katrina is a rod to wave in the face of the Bush administration. To be sure, we did not acquit ourselves well in the aftermath of the storm; we left ourselves open to the gloatings of those eager to see America get its comeuppance. Even Zarqawi weighed in on Katrina, depicting a raid on the northern town of Tal Afar by a joint Iraqi-American force as an attempt on the part of "Bush, the enemy of God" to cover up the great "scandal in facing up to the storm which exposed to the entire world what had happened to the American military due to the wars of attrition it had suffered in Iraq and Afghanistan."
Those duties within have to be redeemed in the manner that this country has always assumed redemptive projects. But that other project, in the burning grounds of the Arab-Muslim world, remains, and we must remember its genesis. It arose out of a calamity on 9/11, which rid us rudely of the illusions of the '90s. That era had been a fools' paradise; Nasdaq had not brought about history's end. In Kabul and Baghdad, we cut down two terrible regimes; in the neighborhood beyond, there are chameleons in the shadows whose ways are harder to extirpate.

We have not always been brilliant in the war we have waged, for these are lands we did not fully know. But our work has been noble and necessary, and we can't call a halt to it in midstream. We bought time for reform to take root in several Arab and Muslim realms. Leave aside the rescue of Afghanistan, Kuwait and Qatar have done well by our protection, and Lebanon has retrieved much of its freedom. The three larger realms of Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Syria are more difficult settings, but there, too, the established orders of power will have to accommodate the yearnings for change. A Kuwaiti businessman with an unerring feel for the ways of the Arab world put it thus to me: "Iraq, the Internet, and American power are undermining the old order in the Arab world. There are gains by the day." The rage against our work in Iraq, all the way from the "chat rooms" of Arabia to the bigots of Finsbury Park in London, is located within this broader struggle.

In that Iraqi battleground, we can't yet say that the insurgency is in its death throes. But that call to war by Zarqawi, we must know, came after the stunning military operation in Tal Afar dealt the jihadists a terrible blow. An Iraqi-led force, supported by American tanks, armored vehicles and air cover, had stormed that stronghold. This had been a transit point for jihadists coming in from Syria. This time, at Tal Afar, Iraq security forces were there to stay, and a Sunni Arab defense minister with the most impeccable tribal credentials, Saadoun Dulaimi, issued a challenge to Iraq's enemy, a message that his soldiers would fight for their country.

The claim that our war in Iraq, after the sacrifices, will have hatched a Shiite theocracy is a smear on the war, a misreading of the Shiite world of Iraq. In the holy city of Najaf, at its apex, there is a dread of political furies and an attachment to sobriety. I went to Najaf in July; no one of consequence there spoke of a theocratic state. Najaf's jurists lived through a time of terror, when informers and assassins had the run of the place. They have been delivered from that time. The new order shall give them what they want: a place in Iraq's cultural and moral order, and a decent separation between religion and the compromises of political life.

Over the horizon looms a referendum to ratify the country's constitution. Sunni Arabs are registering in droves, keen not to repeat the error they committed when they boycotted the national elections earlier this year. In their pride, and out of fear of the insurgents and their terror, the Sunni Arabs say that they are registering to vote in order to thwart this "illegitimate constitution." This kind of saving ambiguity ought to be welcomed, for there are indications that the Sunni Arabs may have begun to understand terror's blindness and terror's ruin. Zarqawi holds out but one fate for them; other doors beckon, and there have stepped forth from their ranks leaders eager to partake of the new order. It is up to them, and to the Arab street and the Arab chancelleries that wink at them, to bring an end to the terror. It has not been easy, this expedition to Iraq, and for America in Iraq there has been heartbreak aplenty. But we ought to remember the furies that took us there, and we ought to be consoled by the thought that the fight for Iraq is a fight to ward off Arab dangers and troubles that came our way on a clear September morning, four years ago.

Mr. Ajami teaches International Relations at Johns Hopkins University.

NRA Files Suit To Stop Firearm Seizures In New Orleans


Help support NRA's efforts in New Orleans. Click here to make a contribution.

(Fairfax, VA) - Today, the National Rifle Association (NRA) filed a motion in United States District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana seeking a temporary restraining order to block authorities from confiscating law-abiding citizens' firearms in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

 

"New Orleans is the first city in the United States to forcibly disarm peaceable law-abiding citizens and it must be the last.  Victims are dealing with a complete breakdown of government.  At a time when 911 is non-operational and law enforcement cannot respond immediately to calls for help, people have only the Second Amendment to protect themselves, their loved ones and their property," said NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre.

 

"The NRA stands with law-abiding Americans, who agree that at their most vulnerable moment, their right to defend themselves and their families should not be taken away," said Chris W. Cox, NRA's chief lobbyist.

 

According to The New York Times, the New Orleans superintendent of police directed that no civilians in New Orleans will be allowed to have guns and that "only law enforcement are allowed to have weapons."  ABC News quoted New Orleans' deputy police chief, saying, "No one will be able to be armed. We are going to take all the weapons."

 

"The NRA is determined to stop this blatant abuse of power by local politicians.  It is disgraceful that any government official would further endanger the lives of innocent victims by issuing this ridiculous order.  We are very grateful to the many rank and file police officers who have come forward and assisted NRA in exposing these violations of constitutional freedoms.  We are also pleased that the Second Amendment Foundation is joining us in this effort," added Cox.

 

"The actions of the New Orleans government have destroyed the one levee that stands between law-abiding citizens and anarchy - the Right to Keep and Bear Arms.  The NRA will not rest until this injustice is resolved," concluded LaPierre.    

--nra--

 

Established in 1871, the National Rifle Association is America's oldest civil rights and sportsmen's group.  Four million members strong, NRA continues its mission to uphold Second Amendment rights and to advocate enforcement of existing laws against violent offenders to reduce crime.  The Association remains the nation's leader in firearm education and training for law-abiding gun owners, law enforcement and the armed services.

Frankly, I don't have the time to follow this important issue of the Eminent Domain and the vile KELSO decision from the Supreme Court as closely as I  would like, but for anyone so inclined:

=====================================

I get email updates through the Castle Coalition. Hope it helps,
John


Thank you to all who attended and submitted testimony for the Senate committee hearing on the eminent domain legislation!

Here is just one of the many news clips on the events yesterday:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dy...5092000989.html

-----------------------------------
For the time being, there is video available of yesterday's press conference and Senate hearing on eminent domain:
Fox News: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,112935,00.html Click on Questioning Eminent Domain on the right side of the page

C-SPAN: http://www.c-span.org/ Click on Senate Judiciary Cmte. Hearing on Eminent Domain

Also, all the hearing testimony is available online at: http://judiciary.senate.gov/hearing.cfm?id=1612.

You can still submit testimony to the Senate to Dimple Gupta with the Judiciary Committee: Dimple_Gupta@judiciary-rep.senate.gov.

Best wishes,
Steven Anderson, Castle Coalition Coordinator
Elizabeth Moser, Outreach Coordinator
www.castlecoalition.org
www.ij.org
__________________

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Will the New National ID Track Your Movements?
8/31/05
by James Plummer
Printable Format

James Plummer is the policy director for the Liberty Coalition.

By the end of September virtually unaccountable bureaucrats inside the Department of Homeland Security will likely have decided whether the new de facto national ID card will broadcast your sensitive identification information wherever you go?Minority Report style.

This comes as a result of the REAL ID Act. REAL ID was signed into law in May. As a result of negotiations over the intelligence-reform bill passed last December, the law had been attached to the first ?must-pass? bill of 2005, which turned out to be ?emergency? spending for the Iraq war. Thus a vote against this national ID would have been spun as a vote ?against the troops? as well.

REAL ID gave the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) the sole right to issue ?design requirements? for driver?s licenses, needing only to ?consult? (that is, ignore) state officials and the Department of Transportation. Though the official publication of the design requirements is still some months off, DHS is expected to make an internal decision on one of those requirements, regarding ?machine-readable technology? standards, by early fall. And there is a lot of pressure on DHS from the surveillance-technology industry to make radio-frequency identification (RFID) microchips the required machine-readable technology.

The REAL ID Act repealed a provision in the intelligence-reform bill to assemble a committee of state officials, privacy watchdogs, and federal officials to set standards for state driver?s licenses. As a result, those moderating voices of federalism, privacy, and common sense have now been silenced. One of those voices, the National Conference of State Legislatures, has conservatively estimated compliance costs at up to $750 million initially and $75 million annually thereafter?just another expense to be passed on to the taxpayer for the ?privilege? of driving or flying with a national ID card.

States that don?t go along with the new standards will find that their citizens cannot use their state driver?s licenses for federal identification. That means the Transportation Security Administration won?t let Americans with noncompliant driver?s licenses board airplanes, unless perhaps they have a passport?which themselves are scheduled to have RFID soon.

RFID technology in an identification card consists of an embedded microchip and antenna that broadcasts identity information, decodable by specially designed readers. On an identifying document such as a driver?s license, RFID is an unnecessary, dangerous technology in today?s information-rich world. RFID-enabled identity cards can broadcast identifying information to persons and institutions without the knowledge or consent of the license holder. That information, such as a name, birth date, identification number, or even digital photo, could then be cross-referenced through commercial and government databases to gain increasingly sensitive identity information on the individual.

That kind of technology on essentially mandatory government documents can lead to identity fraud, endangering the victim?s finances, privacy, and even physical safety.

RFID technology could also enable tracking of individuals, as the chip broadcasts the cardholder?s presence to each reader he passes. No matter how secure the RFID protocols allegedly are, broadcasting one?s presence to a series of readers leaves a record of one?s place and time. That information can be taken by hidden readers just about anywhere an American goes?a political meeting, a gun show, a place of worship. It is an open invitation to stalkers and thieves, as well as government agents who regard constitutional proscriptions on search and surveillance as obstacles rather than as American principles.

Advocates of the technology often claim RFID can be set to only broadcast a limited distance, such as a few centimeters. But as security expert Bruce Schneier has pointed out, ?This is a spectacularly na?ve claim. All wireless protocols can work at much longer ranges than specified. In tests, RFID chips have been read by receivers 20 meters away. Improvements in technology are inevitable.?

There is no significant security benefit in mandating that driver?s licenses and/or identification cards carry an RFID chip. There are, however, significant risks to security and privacy. If an RFID reader must purportedly be within a few centimeters of the identification card, there is no logical reason not to close the security loop and require the card make contact with the reader.

Tri-National ID

Some quick background: The original version of the REAL ID Act would have had every state join into something called the ?Driver License Agreement,? which would have included states of Mexico and provinces of Canada as well, creating a de facto tri-national ID card. Although that provision was removed from the final legislation after protests by privacy advocates, there is a danger that RFID standards in particular could easily be integrated into international identification schemes. The United Nations? International Civilian Aviation Organization (ICAO) is pushing for standardized RFID on the passports of every nation. The U.S. State Department has already announced plans to include RFID in passports in the near future, with standards based on ICAO recommendations. And meanwhile, the British government?s plans for a national ID card include ICAO RFID standards.

Could DHS be seriously considering turning state driver?s licenses into national ID cards, essentially internal passports based on UN standards? It seems they may indeed be headed that way.

As Americans learn more about RFID technology, they are rightly concerned about these dangers. The California Assembly is considering a bill to ban RFID from state identification documents for at least three years as security questions are studied. The Montana House of Representatives has already passed a bill opting out of any nationalized ID standards. Montana legislators were concerned that such a system would endanger the privacy of that state?s citizens. If DHS adopts mandatory RFID for driver?s licenses, those concerns would be proven valid.

If the Department of Homeland Security takes personal security and privacy, not to mention constitutional values, at all seriously, it will reject RFID or any kind of contactless reading technology as appropriate for driver?s licenses ? the new de facto national identification cards

This is my column from today's Times.

Ed



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September 19, 2005

Hate Crimes: When Forbidden Acts Become Forbidden Beliefs

By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN

Thirty years ago, hate crimes did not exist, though plenty of crimes committed out of hatred did. Could it be that the only thing that has changed is that we now have both? And perhaps that the concept of hate crime is more a burden than a benefit?

Such was the unease I felt on Tuesday night at the New York Tolerance Center of the Simon Wiesenthal Center listening to a panel of human rights advocates discuss a new report about hate crimes. The report, "Everyday Fears: A Survey of Violent Hate Crimes in Europe and North America," written by Michael McClintock, the director of research for Human Rights First (formerly the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights), focuses on the United States, Canada, and 53 European and Central Asian countries.

It argues that hate crimes are on the increase and are not being taken seriously enough. In France, reports of violence against gay men more than doubled from 2002 to 2003. In Britain, anti-Semitic assaults on individuals doubled from 2003 to 2004. In the Netherlands, anti-Muslim violence flared after the murder of the filmmaker Theo van Gogh in 2004, leading to acts of arson and assault. The particular accounts are chilling.

What is to be done? At the panel, Mr. McClintock argued that "data stops hate," that knowing the extent of hatred would lead to legislation and control. His report argues for the expansion of legal and governmental structures to monitor and prosecute hate crimes.

Europe might already seem well armed. The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe has increased its focus on hate crimes in its Office of Democratic Institutions and Human Rights. According to Mr. McClintock's report, the security organization also has an international hate crimes program that has been documenting its member nations' failures to document those crimes. The European Commission Against Racism and Intolerance and the European Monitoring Center on Racism and Xenophobia also combat what the monitoring center calls "racism, xenophobia, Islamophobia and anti-Semitism at the European level."

But Human Rights First also says that only 19 of the 55 nations in the security organization actually have hate crime legislation and that only five include "sexual orientation and disability bias" in their criteria. Denmark does not make racism a factor in criminal law; France does but won't separate out statistics about particular groups. As for the United States, in the latest survey 90 percent of enforcement agencies did not report data on hate crimes at all.

The report suggests that all hate crimes are vastly undercounted, noting that "the highest levels of violence were found where there was increasingly effective monitoring and reporting (in Germany and France)."

But how are such crimes to be identified? The concept of hate crime developed only in recent decades out of a particular political perspective. It asserts that there are groups so injured by being at society's margins that any further injury rising out of hatred is particularly heinous. A hate crime is not just an individual crime but a reflection of a presumed social crime. Prosecution of hate crimes is a form of social exorcism, a declaration that traces of past sins will be expunged.

This is more peculiar than it may seem at first. Usually, a crime is prosecuted because it is a forbidden act; a hate crime is prosecuted because of a forbidden belief. Usually, punishment is assessed by judging a criminal's plans: Was the murder premeditated? Was it accidental? In hate crimes the motive is central: Was it done out of greed? Was it done out of hatred? Prosecuting hate crimes is meant to be an attack on prejudice, meant to reform feelings, not just behavior.

Thus hate crimes tend to fit a particular political ideology. It is not really group hatred that gives hate crimes their meaning, but social grievance. In the United States, for example, there is palpable discomfort when an incident of black-on-white crime is called a hate crime. It doesn't fit the model: where's the victim's social grievance? Anti-Semitism has also typically been seen as the spur to a hate crime only when it comes from the far right, as an extension of familiar fascistic victimization.

Human Rights First refers to terrorist acts as spurring hate crimes in retaliation but not as hate crimes themselves. They are ignored even though the Washington sniper of 2003, John Allen Muhammad, made his group hatred apparent, and even though radical Islamic clerics regularly preach hatred against Jews, infidels and Westerners and urge that it be acted upon (with considerable success). These are not considered hate crimes because the victims are not considered socially aggrieved.

In fact, debates about hate crimes can even resemble debates over who merits social restitution. This report urges that the concept be standardized: hate crimes should be crimes based on prejudice motivated by race, religion, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation and disability.

Given all this, it is not surprising that statistics are inconsistent and difficult to come by, that some hate crimes prove to be crimes committed for other motives, that some hate crimes are not crimes at all and that others go unrecognized. Hate crimes are hard to prove and easy to claim, related to feelings not acts. It is not clear that monitoring and reporting will eliminate hate crimes. More agencies and legal structures are now devoted to them than ever before, without diminishing their prevalence.

Is it possible that one of the best ways to eliminate hate crimes is to jettison the concept itself? As for eliminating acts of hatred ... well, that is a more serious problem.

Connections, a critic's perspective on arts and ideas, appears every other Monday.

I find myself with a strong gut instinct to let Freedom solve most things.  If people want to put their shoulder to the wheel and take hold of their own lives, , , , sounds good to me.

Doctor: Officials gave hospital staffers mops as people died

Friday, September 16, 2005; Posted: 1:19 p.m. EDT (17:19 GMT)

A doctor reported that sick people languished in the New Orleans airport while he mopped floors.
Image:  

(CNN) -- As violence, death and misery gripped New Orleans and the surrounding parishes in the days after Hurricane Katrina, a leadership vacuum, bureaucratic red tape and a defensive culture paralyzed volunteers' attempts to help.

Doctors eager to help sick and injured evacuees were handed mops by federal officials who expressed concern about legal liability. Even as violence and looting slowed rescues, police from other states were turned back while officials squabbled over who should take charge of restoring the peace.

Warehouses in New Orleans burned while firefighters were diverted to Atlanta for Federal Emergency Management Agency training sessions on community relations and sexual harassment. Water trucks languished for days at FEMA's staging area because the drivers lacked the proper paperwork.

Consider the stories of these frustrated volunteers:


Dr. Bong Mui and his staff, evacuated with 300 patients after three hellish days at Chalmette Medical Center, arrived at the New Orleans airport, and were amazed to see hundreds of sick people. They offered to help. But, the doctor told CNN, FEMA officials said they were worried about legal liability. "They told us that, you know, you could help us by mopping the floor." And so they mopped, while people died around them. "I started crying," he recalled. "We felt like we could help, and were not allowed to do anything." (Watch the video of hundreds languishing sick at the airport -- 4:16)


Steve Simpson, sheriff of Loudoun County, Virginia, sent 22 deputies equipped with food and water to last seven days. Their 14-car caravan, including four all-terrain vehicles, was on the road just three hours when they were told to turn back. The reason, Simpson told CNN: A Louisiana state police official told them not to come. " I said, "What if we just show up?' He says, 'You probably won't get in.' " Simpson said he later learned a dispute over whether state or federal authorities would command the law enforcement effort was being ironed out that night. But no one ever got back to him with the all-clear.


FEMA halted tractor trailers hauling water to a supply staging area in Alexandria, Louisiana, The New York Times quoted William Vines, former mayor of Fort Smith, Arkansas, as saying. "FEMA would not let the trucks unload," he told the newspaper. "The drivers were stuck for several days on the side of the road" because, he said, they did not have a "tasker number." He added, "What in the world is a tasker number? I have no idea. It's just paperwork and it's ridiculous."


Firefighters who answered a nationwide call for help were sent to Atlanta for FEMA training sessions on community relations and sexual harassment. "On the news every night you hear 'How come everybody forgot us?' " Pennsylvania firefighter Joseph Manning told The Dallas Morning News. "We didn't forget. We're stuck in Atlanta drinking beer."

The government's response to Hurricane Katrina has been sharply criticized. Elected officials -- chiefly President Bush, Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco and New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin -- have acknowledged flaws in the response.

Some take responsibility
"To the extent that the federal government didn't fully do its job right, I take responsibility," Bush said earlier this week. On Thursday, in a nationally televised address from New Orleans, he proposed a large aid package for the city and other areas that were hit hard by Hurricane Katrina. In the speech, he said the lessons from Katrina call for a new approach to responding to disasters. (Full story)

"There were failures at every level of government -- state, federal and local," Blanco told Louisiana legislators Wednesday evening in Baton Rouge. "At the state level, we must take a careful look at what went wrong and make sure it never happens again," she said. "The buck stops here, and as your governor, I take full responsibility."

Nagin, once angry and embattled, was also conciliatory.

"I think now we are out of nuclear crisis mode, it seems as though myself, the governor and president have done some retrospection as far as what we could have done better, and ultimately we're all accountable at the level of local state and federal government," he told CNN. "And that's what leadership is all about. We should take responsibility and we should try and do better."

While Blanco did not elaborate on her mistakes, Nagin said he mistakenly assumed that if New Orleans could hold out for a day or two, help would surely come.

"I am not going to plan in the future for the cavalry to come in three days," he told CNN. "I'm going to buy high water vehicles, helicopters, whatever I can do to make sure that I am in total control ... of the total evacuation process."

Vice Admiral Thad Allen, of the U.S. Coast Guard, is now heading the federal government's recovery effort. On Wednesday, he encouraged state and local officials to bring their issues to him.

"Whether you're a person or an agency, whatever you're doing, if you have concerns and they're not stated where somebody can act on them, that's just going to fester," he said. "And I, as the principal federal official in this response, am encouraging any leader that wants to talk to me about real or perceived problems of what's going on out there to do that."

Where was Chertoff?
But the men in charge of the federal Department of Homeland Security and FEMA in the critical days immediately after the hurricane haven't shared the blame.

Michael Chertoff, the Homeland Security secretary, has offered no explanation as to why he waited three days after the National Hurricane Center predicted a catastrophic hurricane to declare Katrina an incident of "national significance."

In a memo written the day after Katrina made landfall, Chertoff said the Department of Homeland Security will be part of the task force and will assist the [Bush] administration. But the National Response Plan, designed to guide disaster recovery and relief, dictates that the Homeland Security secretary leads the federal response. ( Watch video on Chertoff's delays -- 3:09)

Chertoff appointed Michael Brown, then director of FEMA, as the federal official in charge in the Gulf states. Brown was relieved of his post late last week and resigned from FEMA Monday after taking the brunt of the criticism over the response.

Ex-FEMA boss blames governor
Speaking to The New York Times, his first public comments since he was relieved, Brown laid the blame on Blanco and Nagin. He told the newspaper he frantically called Chertoff and the White House in the hours after Katrina hit, telling them Blanco and her staff were disorganized and the situation was "out of control."

"I am having a horrible time," Brown said he told his superiors. "I can't get a unified command established."

Brown told the Times that he had such difficulty dealing with Blanco that he communicated with her husband instead.

"I truly believed the White House was not at fault here," he told the Times.

On August 30, the same day Chertoff wrote his memo, Brown said he asked the White House to take over the response from FEMA and state officials.

A Senate panel launched the first formal inquiry into the response on Wednesday. But the Senate's Republican majority defeated a bid by Democrats to establish an independent commission to investigate the disaster response.

Maine Republican Sen. Susan Collins, the panel's chairwoman, said the response to Katrina was plagued by confusion, communication failures and widespread lack of coordination despite the billions of dollars spent to improve disaster response since the terror attacks.

'Sluggish' response
"At this point, we would have expected a sharp, crisp response to this terrible tragedy," Collins said. "Instead, we witnessed what appeared to be a sluggish initial response."

One of the issues the committee will examine is whether FEMA should stay under the Department of Homeland Security instead of operating as a separate agency as it had in the past.

Sen. George Voinovich, a Republican from Ohio, said the committee would "get into the bowels" of Homeland Security as its members investigate how the federal government, specifically FEMA, planned for and responded to the disaster.

Members of the former 9/11 commission blasted Congress and the Bush administration for inaction on some of its recommendations. Had they been in place, lives could have been saved, they said.

"If Congress does not act, people will die. I cannot put it more simply than that," said former New Jersey Gov. Thomas Kean, referring to what could happen in the next major disaster or terrorist attack.

======================================

Student Arrested After Pilot Uniform Found
The Associated Press
Friday, September 16, 2005; 3:22 PM




MEMPHIS, Tenn. -- A university student from Egypt was ordered held without bond after prosecutors said they found a pilot's uniform, chart of Memphis International Airport and a DVD titled "How an Airline Captain Should Look and Act" in his apartment.

The FBI is investigating whether Mahmoud Maawad, 29, had any connection to terrorists. He is awaiting trial on charges of wire fraud and fraudulent use of a Social Security number.

Maawad, who is in the United States illegally, told the judge during a hearing Thursday that he is studying science and economics at the University of Memphis.

"My school is everything. I stay in this country for seven years; I stay for the school," he said.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Steve Parker said Thursday that the airport-related items were found during a Sept. 9 search.

"The specific facts and circumstances are scary," Parker said.

U.S. Magistrate Judge S. Thomas Anderson ruled that Maawad be held without bond.

"It is hard for the court to understand why he has a large concentration of those (aviation) items, and nothing else to indicate Mr. Maawad plans to stay in the community," Anderson said.

Maawad had ordered $3,000 in aviation materials, including DVDs titled "Ups and Downs of Takeoffs and Landings," "Airplane Talk," "Mental Math for Pilots" and "Mastering GPS Flying," FBI agent Thad Gulczynski testified.

The company reported Maawad to authorities when he didn't pay for $2,500 of merchandise it had delivered, Gulczynski said.

THAT is precisely the FIRST question.

The second question is "WHO gets to decide?"

Where in the Constitution does it say that the Supreme Court gets to decide?

At the time of Roe, it was decided by the elected branches of government at the state level-- which seems quite correct to me.

If Roe is overruled, it does not mean an end to abortion.  It means a return to the respective states deciding.  In that the majority of the population in most states wants some forms of abortion, in those cases there will be some forms of abortion.

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Katrina Educates World On Need For Owning Guns
by Erich Pratt

"All our operators are busy right now. Please remain on the line and an operator will be with you shortly. Your call is important to us."

Can you imagine any words more horrifying after dialing 9-1-1? Your life's in danger, but there's no one available to help you.

For several days in September, life was absolutely terrifying for many New Orleans residents who got stranded in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. There were no operators... there were no phone calls being handled.

Heck, there was no 9-1-1. Even if the phone lines had been working, there were no police officers waiting to be dispatched.

Hundreds of New Orleans police officers had fled the city. Some took their badges and threw them out the windows of their cars as they sped away. Others participated in the looting of the city.

While there were many officers who acted honorably -- even apprehending dangerous thugs while grieving the loss of their own family members -- most residents were forced to fend for themselves.

Many did so successfully, using their own firearms, until New Orleans Police Commissioner Edwin Compass III issued the order to confiscate their guns.

Anti-gun zealots confiscate firearms from law-abiding citizens

On September 8, several news outlets began reporting that officials in New Orleans were confiscating firearms... not from looters, but from law-abiding citizens who legally owned firearms!

"No one will be able to be armed," said Deputy Chief Warren Riley. "We are going to take all the weapons."

It was like a scene out of the former Soviet Union or Communist China.

The Associated Press quoted Compass, the police commissioner, as saying, "Only law enforcement are allowed to have weapons."

Well, there you have it. Given the chance, gun control advocates will always implement their real agenda -- confiscation of firearms from everyone... except the police!

ABC News video on September 8 showed National Guard troops going house-to-house, smashing down doors, searching for residents, and confiscating guns. Every victim of disarmament was clearly not a thug or looter, but a decent resident wanting to defend his or her home.

Many of the troops were clearly conflicted by their orders. "It is surreal," said one member of the Oklahoma National Guard who was going door-to-door in New Orleans. "You never expect to do this in your own country."

Many never would have expected it -- confiscating firearms from decent people who were relying on those firearms to protect themselves from the looters.

It was an outrageous order -- one that should not have been obeyed. There was no constitutional authority for the directive, and it ignored the fact that many good people had already used firearms to successfully defend their lives and property.

Guns were saving lives and protecting property prior to the confiscation order

As flood waters started rising in New Orleans, a wave of violence rolled through the city.

"It was pandemonium for a couple of nights," said Charlie Hackett, a New Orleans resident. "We just felt that when [looters] got done with the stores, they?d come to the homes."

Hackett was right... which is why he and his neighbor, John Carolan, stood guard over their homes to ward off looters who, rummaging through the neighborhoods, were smashing windows and ransacking stores.

Armed looters did eventually come to Carolan's house and demanded his generator. But Carolan showed them his gun and they left.

No wonder then that gun stores, which weren't under water, were selling firearms at a record pace to people looking to defend themselves. "I've got people like you wouldn't believe, lots of people, coming in and buying handguns," said Briley Reed, the assistant manager of the E-Z Pawn store in Baton Rouge.

"I've even had soldiers coming in here buying guns," Reed said.

Makeshift militias patrol neighborhoods

In the Algiers neighborhood of New Orleans, dozens of neighbors banded together to protect their neighborhood.

"There's about 20 or 30 guys in addition to us. We know all of them and where they are," Gregg Harris said. "People armed themselves so quickly, rallying together. I think it's why [our] neighborhood survived."

Harris isn't joking about the armaments. A gun battle erupted one afternoon between armed neighbors and looters. Two of the thugs were shot.

Since then, no more looters have bothered the neighborhood. But the neighbors aren't letting their guard down. They all take their turn keeping watch.

Gareth Stubbs sits in a rocking chair on his front porch, holding his shotgun and a bottle of bug spray.

In another home, a 74-year old mother keeps the following near the bed: her rosary, a shotgun and a 38-caliber pistol.

Vinnie Pervel and two other volunteers man a balcony-turned-watchtower with five borrowed shotguns, a pistol, a flare gun, and old AK-47 and loads of ammunition.

To be sure, many of the weapons were borrowed from neighbors who fled before the storm hit. Pervel and Harris did not have any working firearms themselves in the aftermath of the storm. But because Pervel had been keeping in contact (via phone) with neighbors who had already evacuated, he got permission to go into the vacant homes and get his neighbors' weapons.

"I never thought I'd be going into my neighbor's house and taking their guns," Pervel said. "We wrote down what gun came from what house so we can return them when they get back."


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Firearms were a hot commodity

It would be an understatement to say that firearms were the hottest commodity in the days following the massive destruction. In Gulf Port, Mississippi, Ron Roland, 51, lost everything -- three homes, four cars, a bait-and-tackle shop and a boat. It was all destroyed by Hurricane Katrina.

Nevertheless, Roland was determined to salvage what he could amidst the rubble -- with or without police protection. And it's a good thing, too, because there would be no such thing as "police protection" in the days following the storm.

Standing guard over one of his homes with a handgun in his waistband, Roland used his firearm to stop looters from rummaging through his storm-damaged property.

Roland and his son even performed a citizen's arrest on one plunderer and then warned future thieves by posting the following message in his yard: "NO TRESPASSERS! ARMED HOMEOWNERS."

Signs like this were common throughout the Gulf Coast region in the days following Katrina.

Unfortunately, some people had to learn the hard way about the utility of keeping firearms for protection.
Water, food... but what about guns?

The managers at the Covenant Home nursing center in New Orleans were more than prepared to ride out the hurricane. They had food and supplies to last the 80 residents for more than ten days.

They had planned for every contingency... or so they thought.

"We had excellent plans. We had enough food for 10 days," said Peggy Hoffman, the home's Executive Director.

But they had no firearms. So when carjackers hijacked the home's bus and drove by the center shouting "Get out!" to the residents, they were completely helpless.

All of the residents, most of them in wheelchairs, were evacuated to other nursing homes in the state.

Hoffman says she has now learned her lesson.

Next time, "We'll have to equip our department heads with guns and teach them how to shoot," she said.

Thank goodness someone is learning from their mistakes.
Does anyone remember Los Angeles?

We should have learned this lesson more than ten years ago when the entire country saw horrifying images coming out of Los Angeles.

If the riots of 1992 taught us anything, it is that the police can't always be there to protect us.

For several days, that city was in complete turmoil as stores were looted and burned. Motorists were dragged from their cars and beaten.

Further aggravating the situation, police were very slow in responding to the crisis. Many Guardsmen, after being mobilized to the affected areas, sat by and watched the violence because their rifles were low on ammunition.

But not everybody in Los Angeles suffered. In some of the hot spots, Korean merchants were able to successfully protect their stores with semi-automatic firearms.

In areas where armed citizens banded together for self-protection, their businesses were spared while others (which were left unprotected) burned to the ground.

The pictures of Korean merchants defending their stores left quite an impression on one group of people living in Los Angeles: those who had previously identified themselves as gun control advocates.

Press reports described how life-long gun control supporters were even running to gun stores to buy an item they never thought they would need -- a gun. Tragically, they were surprised (and outraged!) to learn there was a 15-day waiting period upon firearms.

Confiscating guns puts people at risk

Fast forward more than a decade, it seems that many folks still haven't learned the lessons from previous tragedies. If the Mayor and his cronies really wanted to help the decent citizens of New Orleans, they would have been issuing people firearms instead of taking them away.

These guns were the only thing that prevented many good folks from becoming victims in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

Now that residents are disarmed, will the Mayor provide 24-hour, round-the-clock protection for each of these disarmed families? Will he make himself personally liable for anyone who is injured or killed as a result of being prevented from defending himself or his family?

When your life is in danger, you don't want to rely on a police force that is stretched way too thin. And the last thing you want to hear when you call 9-1-1 is, "All our operators are busy right now...."

That might just be the last thing you ever hear.