Michelle Malkin is on the story of the AP trusted source that isn’t what he or they say he is.

I've been following up with CENTCOM on the Associated Press/sketchy sources brouhaha. Just heard this morning from Michael B. Dean, Lieutenant, U.S. Navy MNC-I Joint Operations Center, Public Affairs Officer:
From CPATT PAO:
BG Abdul-Kareem, the Ministry of Interior Spokesman, went on the record today stating that Capt. Jamil Hussein is not a police officer. He explained the coordinations among MOI, the Ministry of Health and the Ministry of Defense in attempting to track down these bodies and their joint conclusion was that this was unsubstantiated rumor.
He went on to name several other false sources that have been used recently and appealed to the media to document their news before reporting. He went into some detail about the impact of the press carrying propaganda for the enemies of Iraq and thanked "the friends" who have brought this to their attention.
AP did attend the press conference.

And, what’s more:

For example, we have some of the respected news outlets that deal with news fast and have a relation with many TV channels and the media in general, who distributed a story quoting a person called Jamil Hussein. Afterward, we searched our sources in our staff for anyone by this name-- maybe he wore an MOI uniform and gave a different name to the reporter for money. And the second name used is Lt. Maythem.

What will the AP have to say for itself now? We await, with baited breath, especially when AP’s International Editor (who seems to have little difficulty swallowing Syrian fodder) has so put AP out on the limb sawn off by calling the exposers of the AP’s source “frankly ludicrous.” Maybe he’ll next be employed by Al Jazeera?

But, that’s not enough. The AP, and other major media, must – if they’re to retain any credibility, or recover any – immediately fund and cooperate with a major, independent, published examination of their reporting practices in Iraq (throw in the Palestinian areas, as well), with focus on the vetting of stringers and sources.

There's much more at Malkin's post.

Heh! Even the New York Times takes note. So should every other major media organization, and get behind a full-scale, credible, public self-examination. That should be quite a scoop!

AP REPLIES at FloppingAces with a “we believe ourselves” response. Curt dissects:

Basically a "you believe what you want and we will believe what we want" kind of statement don't you think? They are unwilling to prove to Centcom that this source of theirs is a real police officer. I mean all you have to do is produce the damn guy. Have him rebut his supposed "bosses".
But no.....we get this joke of a response.
Typical

SEE Want to get to the truth about AP's Iraq reporting?

MSM Hung By Own Stringers

Another UPDATE:
Tblumer at BizzyBlog.com phoned the office of the AP’s International Editor (Mr. “frankly ludicrous”), and contrasts this admission with the AP’s wire story crying wolf about possible censorship by equating the Iraq government’s request that facts be checked with the practices of Saddam.

AP now admits that the part of the original story about four mosques burning is down to one that is “badly damaged by explosives and shows signs of scorching from fire.” I am not aware of any formal correctons sent out to AP subscribers to correct this stunning error.

· No name identification of the remaining five alleged victims has been done. A person from AP who called me back in response to my phone request to speak with John Daniszewski, and my message left for him (my message was left with a person, not on his VoiceMail), confirmed this fact this afternoon. I informed this person that I was having a hard time believing that in roughly six days, some local Iraqi news outlet hadn’t published the names of the victims yet (that is, if there are really five other victims). I was told they’re “doing all they can.”

· AP utterly failed to explain how their “story” can possibly be true in light of the following assertion by Brig. Gen. Abdul-Karim Khalaf, spokesman for Iraq’s Interior Ministry: “Khalaf said the ministry had dispatched a team to the Hurriyah neighborhood and to the morgue but found no witnesses or evidence of burned bodies.”

And I’m sorry, AP’s last paragraph so over the top I wonder why they shouldn’t just be booted out the country for being immature, childish jerks:
Under Saddam Hussein’s regime, the government imposed censorship on local media and severely restricted foreign media coverage, monitoring transmissions and sending secret police to follow journalists. Those who violated the rules were expelled and in some cases jailed.

Y’know, Eason Jordan at CNN admitted it (a couple of years before he falsely accused the US military of “targeting journalists“), but surely other media outlets were willing to self-censor their Saddam-era coverage of Iraq to maintain their precious “access.” What Iraq’s Interior Ministry is asking is a courtesy that is no different than any other municipal police department, namely that they (the police, and by extension the military in this case) be allowed to have their side of the story presented before news outlets go off half-cocked and issue incomplete and possibly inaccurate reports about what may or may not have happened when incidents take place. Without the context from the police or military, the chances that errors in reporting will take place are greatly increased. Since the errors and lies appear to routinely exaggerate the level of violence and mayhem, and to routinely claim or exaggerate the degree of civilian casualties, their inaccurate reporting could very well be feeding the anger that leads to the violence.

Moles inside Hillel? This is a very real prospect to consider after reading the Dafka report, How Some Pro-Israel Groups Get Silenced at UC Berkeley Hillel, which urges us not to donate funds to Berkeley Hillel. Hat tip to Chuck Minning for the link in an email where he asks the question: “Is it possible that Yael Richardson is but one more example of the infiltration of this insidious group of Jewish Jew-Haters into campus Hillel organizations?”

This was in response to my recent blog, Hillel at Brown U. Acquiesces to MSA, where I revealed the disgraceful complicity of Yael Richardson, president of Hillel at Brown University for allowing herself to be persuaded to cancel Hillel’s pro-Israel speaker by objections from MSA.

Dafka revealed Hillel's growing tendency to welcome anti-Israel viewpoints to the exclusion of the more conservative pro-Zionist side. Hillel at Berkeley has embraced and cooperated with such groups as Students For Justice In Palestine (SJP) and Jewish Voice For Peace (JVOP), which seek to dismantle the state of Israel and promote divestment from Israel on campus. Concern is being raised that operatives from these groups are infiltrating Hillel acting as a fifth column showing ostensible support for Israel and then shifting gears in compliance with Muslim and pro-Palestinian groups.

Rather, more likely I think Yael may be an agent of a cardinal humanistic tenet of Jewish tradition, that in an effort to appear as sensitive and amicable as possible, is actually sanctioning the enemy and doing the most damage to ourselves as a people and to the state of Israel.

I received the following email on the subject from an Israeli, Ori Cohen who puts it more bluntly:

We are finished by our own doing, Jews with their sympathy and guilt, to their own enemy and destroyers, will bring the end to Israel and the Jewish race, it is just a question of time.

We need to wake up and heed Ori's advice and keep silent no more.

I’ve long, and fruitlessly, called for a credible, independent examination of the stringer policy and procedures of the major media operating in Iraq (and, the Palestinian areas as well). Case after case has accumulated, well-documented, of the major media being used as avenues of lies and propaganda by our enemies, as well as our enemies themselves saying that’s part of their modus operandi. I know of at least one respected academic working on such a study, but far more is needed.

Now that the Associated Press and CENTCOM (along with many blogs) have thrown down their gauntlets to each other, there’s such an opportunity to get such a comprehensive examination, with the case of the purported six Sunnis set aflame as the case study to open the now secretive door to major media’s reliance on stringers and suspect sources.

Curt, at Flopping Aces blog, brings us up to date, along with the critical links.

The Associated Press, like any business, depends upon its customers. Indeed, the Associated Press is responsive to its customers. Those customers are the media that buy AP stories and feeds, providing their customers – the readers and viewers – with a wide range of content that any particular venue cannot itself provide. The AP’s Board of Directors are, themselves, the owners and chief executives of other newspaper and media organizations.

I suggest that you write a brief, polite letter to each of the AP Board members, and to the chief editor of your local newspaper, requesting a comprehensive, independent examination of the AP’s handling of this matter, and that the study be published in its entirety.

Here’s a prototype letter:

Dear _______________:
As a customer of the news provided by the Associated Press and your (newspaper, TV station/network) I depend upon the reliability of what I (read/see).

As a concerned American, I depend upon that news reporting in judging the viability of national policy.

I appreciate how difficult it is to report from a war zone. However, after a number of instances of reports that have been proven or appear substantially unreliable, my confidence in your product is shaken.

I request that you use your position as a (Board member/customer) of Associated Press to press for an immediate, comprehensive, independent, published examination of the AP’s reporting of the purported six Sunnis set aflame, to include the detailing of policies and procedures for vetting stringers and sources.

Thank you, in advance, for working to increase confidence in our (underline “our”) media,
SIGN

You can go to this source to link to every newspaper in America to get the contact info for the AP Board members and for your local editors, or Google their organization to get contact info.

UPDATE: Some have written me they prefer an easier way to write one letter. The AP does not have an email address for its Board, but does offer this, which should filter through:
For general questions and comments;or to contact a specific employee: info@ap.org

The AP Board members are:

AP Board of Directors
Burl Osborne – Chairman
Publisher Emeritus
The Dallas Morning News
Dallas, Texas

R. Jack Fishman
Publisher and Editor
Citizen Tribune
Morristown, Tennessee

Dennis J. FitzSimons
Chairman, President and CEO
Tribune, Co.
Chicago, Illinois

Joe Hladky
President and Publisher
The Gazette Co.
Cedar Rapids, Iowa

Walter E. Hussman Jr.
Publisher
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Little Rock, Arkansas

Julie Inskeep
Publisher
The Journal Gazette
Fort Wayne, Indiana

George B. Irish
President
Hearst Newspapers
New York, New York

Boisfeuillet (Bo) Jones
Publisher and CEO
The Washington Post
Washington, D.C.

Mary Junck
President and CEO
Lee Enterprises, Inc.
Davenport, Iowa

David Lord
President
Pioneer Newspapers, Inc.
Seattle, Washington

Kenneth W. Lowe
President and CEO
E.W. Scripps Company

Douglas H. McCorkindale
Chairman
Gannett, Co. Inc.
McLean, Virginia

R. John Mitchell
Publisher
Rutland Herald
Rutland, Vermont

Steven O. Newhouse
Chairman,
Advance.Net
New York, New York

Gary Pruitt
Chairman, President and CEO
The McClatchy Company
Sacramento, California

Michael E. Reed
CEO
Liberty Group Publishing, Inc.
Downers Grove, Illinois

Bruce T. Reese
President and CEO
Bonneville International Corp.
Salt Lake City, Utah

Jon Rust
Publisher
Southeast Missourian
Co-president, Rust Communications
Cape Girardeau, Missouri

William Dean Singleton
Vice Chairman and CEO
MediaNews Group Inc.
Denver, Colorado

Jay R. Smith
President
Cox Newspapers, Inc.
Atlanta, Georgia

David Westin
President
ABC News
New York, New York

H. Graham Woodlief
President, Publishing Division
Vice President,
Media General Inc.
Richmond, Virginia

Brian Montopoli blogs for CBS’ Public Eye. He self-describes his credentials as a journalist here:

I came to Public Eye from Columbia Journalism Review, where I wrote about everything from the press coverage of the 2004 presidential campaign to the rise of blogging to the future of network news. Prior to my job at CJR, I was a contributing writer at Washington City Paper. I've also written for The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Slate, Salon, The New York Observer, The Washington Monthly, and a number of other publications. Some of my favorite story topics have been youth soccer, public radio, and local politicians, not to mention the TV show Jeopardy!, which was kind enough to offer me a tryout (and merciful enough not to let me on the air).

So, we know how he did on TV’s Jeopardy game show tryout, and there’s no indication of military reporting or war experience, so one might understand that he only gets half the “word” in his post about the exposes of faux reporting by the Associated Press, and others, based on reliance upon lying stringers.

Still, this is the first small break I’ve been able to find within the MSM that there’s even a story. His more experienced brethren within the major media haven’t yet even gotten half the word.

Brian says, “A number of right-leaning bloggers are criticizing the Associated Press for a pair of stories from Iraq,” then outlines a bit of the evidence presented, particularly that CENTCOM questions the “credibility” of the AP’s source, not mentioning much more of the proofs.

Brian then says he hesitates to believe:

It's important to remember that we don't actually yet know if the AP's stories are "bogus." They may well be. They may not. Reporters face unique challenges in a war, and it's worthwhile to question the way they operate in Iraq, on everything from the necessary-but-risky use of stringers to the reliance on named and anonymous sources that may not be trustworthy. But because of their instinctive distrust of the mainstream media, some bloggers have drawn conclusions that, at this point, strike me as premature.

At least, at last, Brian turns toward the game board and admits:

It's important, when looking at a situation like this, to take a step back and try to look objectively at all the facts, even the ones that don't fit our preconceived notions. The blogs deserve credit for raising this issue. Now it's time to get to the bottom of it.

Yes, let’s “get to the bottom of it” and before it’s a footnote to Americans abandoning Iraq due to misleading MSM hysteria-stirring. While we’re at it, let’s get to the bottom of the whole MSM reliance on stringers.

Rick Moran (incidentally, to those readers who blithely dismiss “rightleaning blogs,” Rick has called for withdrawals from Iraq), at Redstate blog, does a superb job of discussing the issue of stringers, and suggests the questions that must be answered by media organizations.

Who are they? What are their backgrounds? Are they journalists? If so, what kind of experience have they had? Have then been vetted to make sure they aren't out and out insurgent sympathizers? Or militia mouthpieces?

Do they have axes to grind against America? How does the reporter in Iraq or the editor back home establish their objectivity or accuracy? Does the reporter on site even try and confirm information from the stringers? If so, how many sources are used to confirm their stories? How do you gauge the reliability of those confirming sources?

This is the nuts and bolts of journalism. Raw information is not news. It has to be poked and prodded, examined and re-examined in a process that is supposed to reduce that information to its most basic and understandable parts and then massaged by the reporter and polished by the editor to appear as "news" in the newspaper or on the TV broadcast.

UPDATE:
The Anchoress has had some communications with CBS Public Eye's Brian Montopoli, which leads to her astonishment that journalists wonder why news consumers' are skeptical.

She just alerted me that the Associated Press' International Editor has replied to the charges by accusing questioners, apparently including CENTCOM, of being "frankly ludicrous and hints at a certain level of desperation to dispute or suppress the facts of the incident in question." The AP says it has new witnesses:

On Tuesday, two AP reporters also went back to the Hurriyeh neighborhood around the Mustafa mosque and found three witnesses who independently gave accounts of the attack" on 6 Sunni men purportedly burned to death by Shiites.

How convenient! But, how reliable or believable?

The AP says it stands by its frequent "police" source, only saying he "has long been known to the AP reporters and has been interviewed in his office and by telephone on several occasions during the past two years," not mentioning his other suspect information.

Nor does the AP reveal whether the AP reporters who "know" him are, themselves, stringers, who may be suspect sources. This AP rework of its initial reporting does not say.

I repeat, a full, in depth, credible, independent examination of major media reporting practices, particularly its reliance on stringers, must occur, and soon.

Here's a place to start, with the reconstruction of the "evolving" AP coverage, courtesy of Mary Katherine Ham, and her link to the other mysterious sources to the AP from Michelle Malkin's blog.

I just fired off an irate letter to the New York Post in response to the mealy-mouthed letter to the editor from Yael Richardson, president of Hillel at Brown University. This letter was in response to Adam Brodsky’s op-ed Dissent Crushed, about Hillel’s decision to cancel guest speaker, Nonie Darwish after protests from the Muslim Students Association (MSA). Complaining that she was “too controversial,” Muslim students objected to Darwish’s planned appearance and Hillel timidly complied, not wanting to “upset its ‘beautiful relationship’ with the Muslim community” although no one seemed to mind the hate speech emanating from Brown’s anti-Israel events during “Palestinian Solidarity Week.” Fortuitously, I am proud to have met a more gutsy and defiant Hillel president here in New York, Michael Abdurakhmanov a student at Pace University. I recently posted his report of the censorship and viewpoint discrimination he is facing from MSA and Pace administrators, who are intent on banning the film “Obsession” that Hillel had planned to show at a recent event.

Here is Yael Richardson’s letter:

I was disappointed to read Brodsky's inaccurate portrayal of Brown Hillel and Brown's campus community.

After reviewing input from both the Jewish and Muslim communities, the Hillel student board chose not to sponsor Darwish's lecture. The Hillel student board made a thoughtful decision, and I stand by it.

Darwish has a fascinating life story and would have brought an interesting perspective to campus. But it is not Hillel's place to sponsor a speaker who has made statements which denigrate Islamic observance.

Hillel certainly has a responsibility to provide an outlet for a variety of views on Israel, but it also has an obligation to do so in a considerate and respectful way. If that makes us "Jewish enablers," then I am proud to be one.

Yael Richardson
Student President
Brown Hillel
Providence, R.I.

Here is my reply:

Shame on Yael Richardson, president of Hillel at Brown University for acquiescing to the intimidation from the Muslim Students Association (MSA) and no doubt, from Brown administrators who protect anti-Israel hate speech in the name of academic freedom. She should at least not be so disingenuous as to frame Nonie Darwish as someone who denigrates Islam, which Mrs. Darwish has never done. Rather in numerous interviews and articles she praises the beauty of Muslims who practice Islam correctly while speaking out against terrorism and the violent radical strain that has commandeered their religion. Hers is a voice that needs to be heard, rather than bowing to the loud mouth threats of MSA, the campus recruiting arm of Wahhabi Islam, which is the puritanical anti-Western sect at the heart of radical Islam.

One of my favorite blogging arguing and discussion fellows is Steve Bainbridge. When he stopped blogging, he said he was going to come back to focus on his law-related specialty. I’m glad to see that he’s now back to blogging, but his resolve to concentrate has given way to a conglomerate of blogs.

This site http://www.professorbainbridge.com/ serves as a portal to my three blogs, each of whose most recent posts can be accessed from the links;
StephenBainbridge.com: my journal, focusing on politics and culture

BusinessAssociationsBlog.com: my professional blog, focused on law and economics

ProfessorBainbridgeOnWine.com: my wine and food blog

I wrote to Steve that I didn’t get his logic. Today, he responded in his blog.

On the other hand, a friend in the blogosphere emailed this question: "I'm confused by the fragmentation. Why? What are the advantages?"…

I'm now free to do very technical legal analysis at the Business Associations Blog, without worrying that my generalist readers will get bored….

As Clay Shirky observes:
"It is obvious that both the networks and their advertisers are soon going to have to adapt to a fragmented media market where nothing regularly reaches 20 million people, and the only way to get mass will be niche plus niche plus niche."

The analogy to the blogosphere seems clear. There are a handful of stand-alone blogs that reach a mass audience. They dominate the blogosphere the way the broadcast networks still dominate TV. Competing with them looks to be a non-starter. Instead, for the rest of us, targeting "niche plus niche plus niche" allows us to build mass in the fragmented world of the blogosphere.

Or so I'm betting.

I’ve never been a fan of business conglomerates, the synergies usually being overblown and the impediments to effective coordination usually being too high. Bainbridge’s blog conglomerate may follow this generalization, or not, but most lost – even if the “bet” works -- is the cross-fertilization of ideas to the readers who appreciated his old blend. We need more informed generalists, educated to decipher the specialists.

There’s little reason to doubt that there’s severe sectarian violence between some Iraqis in some parts of Iraq. The real questions are: How much is there really?; and, consequently, How really difficult is America’s and other Iraqis’ mission there to construct a reasonably stable and free country that won’t export or encourage terrorism?

There’s, also, little reason to doubt that much of the reporting we’re getting, which is feeding despair among many Americans, is unreliable. The major media has not been forthcoming about its reporting practices, so we are left in the dark with our -- possibly excessive, but definitely debilitating – fears.

The major media’s failure to examine itself and to share that with its customers is nothing short of malfeasance of the highest order. The media’s influence on the fates of hundreds of millions of people and the future of nations requires such transparency, and quickly.

The latest instances were unearthed by citizen bloggers, operating with only their keyboard. The key question that arises, then, is why the major media with all their vast resources could not or would not vet their own stories?

Flopping Aces blog documents Associated Press and other prime news reporters relying on false reports, and Patterico’s blog pretty well demonstrates “the L.A. Times reporting unconfirmed enemy propaganda from an Iraqi stringer with ties to the insurgency,” and Dan Riehl points out another instance of “trash” reporting.

Last September, I posted about Reuters seed-funding NewAssignment.Net with $100,000 to “draw ‘smart crowds’ – groups of people configured to share intelligence – into collaboration at NewAssignment.Net and get stories done that way that aren’t getting done now.” I proposed:

…the first project to be the detailing of the backgrounds of the thousands of stringers employed by the major media around the world. There are, at least, three fundamental questions to be answered: Is the world’s media being manipulated, by whom, and how much?

Instead, if one looks at the link to NewAssignment.Net (above) one will see its direction aimed at more of the liberal left’s agenda of “scandals.”

Without Reuters’ $100,000, however, conservative bloggers have repeatedly revealed the biggest scandal of all, that we can’t depend on – or minimally, don’t know what to depend upon -- in what we hear from the media about the war in Iraq, which has taken tens of thousands of American, allies, and Iraqis’ lives, not to mention hundreds of billions of American dollars, and which directly affects the fates of hundreds of millions of people in the region, Europe and the U.S.

This isn’t a new problem. It was a significant influence on America’s mistakes and ultimate failure in Vietnam, as a new detailed history explains:

Despite a heavy influx of personnel and war supplies via the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Laos, by 1962 the war against the communists had experienced a dramatic turnaround and was going well. Yet Diem's mandarin ways of governing also drew sharp criticism from some of his own people, and Western observers, and this included the American ambassador, Henry Cabot Lodge. The overthrow of Diem on November 1, 1963, instigated by Lodge without the consent of President Kennedy, is seen by Mr. Moyar as a terrible miscalculation that resulted in a needless defeat — "Triumph Forsaken" as stated in the title of the book (Cambridge, 562 pages, $32).

Mr. Moyar's basic thesis is not new. It was argued in the 1960s by some of the most experienced American journalists on the scene such as Marguerite Higgins, Keyes Beach, and Joseph Alsop, as well as by scholars like Ellen J. Hammer and Dennis J. Duncanson. The contrary view was pushed by two young reporters, David Halberstam of the New YorkTimes and Neil Sheehan, who looked upon Vietnam as if it were fundamentally the same as the United States and attributed all difficulties to Diem's authoritarian rule. Lodge shared this outlook, and this caused him to view the Diem regime with fierce contempt.

Some of the most interesting parts of Mr. Moyar's book describe how Mr. Halberstam and Mr. Sheehan presented Lodge and their readers in the United States with grossly inaccurate information on the Buddhist protest movement and on South Vietnamese politics, much of it unwittingly received from two secret Communist agents. Pham Ngoc Thao was a colonel in the South Vietnamese army and was touted by the Americans as a brilliant Young Turk who could help turn South Vietnam around. Pham Xuan An worked as a stringer for Reuters and brilliantly manipulated and misled the foreign press. As a result of disinformation and driven by their own bias, Mr. Halberstam and Mr. Sheehan seized upon the Buddhist protest movement as evidence that the Diem government was hopelessly repressive, lacked public support, and therefore deserved to be overthrown. They argued that 70% or 80% of the South Vietnamese population was Buddhist and that to alienate the Buddhists was to alienate the country's majority. In fact, the number of Buddhists was between 10% and 27% of the population, depending upon whether non-practicing Buddhists were counted. Most of South Vietnam's Buddhists lived in the countryside and knew nothing of the political disturbances in Saigon and Hue.

A significant number of the protesters against Diem were communist agents and this included some of the monks. Such infiltration was easy, for any Vietnamese man could pose as Buddhist monk by shaving his head, donning a monk's robe, and acting with humility. For many years the Hanoi regime kept silent about the sensitive subject of its involvement in the Buddhist movement, but in the early 1990s it began publishing detailed accounts of its complicity. A high-level communist resolution in 1961 had advised planting agents in religious organizations: "Once our agents are planted, they then lead these organizations to work for the cause of the people." According to one communist history, the Central Committee of the National Liberation Front "quickly directed the people of all classes of the population to cooperate actively with the Buddhist monks and nuns in a resolute struggle until the goals were achieved."This account credits the NLF with organizing several demonstrations in provincial capitals in which the demonstrators denounced the United States and Diem and demanded "freedom of religion" and "democracy."

I’ve written about this stringer problem several times, pointing at a key cause of today’s increased dependence on stringers, the cheapness of our major media to fund foreign reporting by qualified journalists. See here and here. Others have pointed out simply sloppy, unprofessional journalism. See here and here.

The conclusion is here, that our major media owe us and their own credibility basic journalistic transparency and standards.

Elemental standards of journalism include that headlines should accurately reflect the story, and that a story should be verifiable and corroborated. Instead, much of the major media is too often engaged in tabloid journalism: rumor-mongering and sensationalism.

The MSM has not been forthcoming about its policies and controls in its use of Iraqi stringers. The MSM has not been forthcoming in verifying the statements of “witnesses”, instead echoing their statements….

The MSM has a responsibility to itself and to Americans to start coming clean and clear about its reporting policies and practices, and enforcing them. Or, admit to being a tabloid journalism, not claim to be reporters of record.

The key question that must be answered is where the funding will come from for a major, credible examination of major media reporting in Iraq? It's not coming from the major media, or J-schools, or J-journals. Their paychecks depend upon not revealing the Emperor's illusory threads. It hasn't come from a Republican Congress and is even less likely from a Democrat one, as politicians avoid retribution for their own selfish survival over their national duty. Where's a patriotic billionaire when one needs one?

UPDATE:
Michelle Malkin’s excellent post, updated with “when it rains, it pours...here's a third must-read from milblogger John Noonan raising questions about AP stringer Bassem Mroue,” steers me to another example of MSM stringeritis, here.

With Republicans on the defensive in Congress and in the increased number of state legislatures dominated by Democrats, the coming debates on health care could, in fact, be healthy both for Republicans and other Americans.

As in so many other areas of public debate, the Democrats have had a virtually free pass over the past years to criticize Republican policies and administration. That changes somewhat when they have to actually legislate, be more practical, and take responsibility for their actions.

Libertarian and small-government Republicans who criticized their big-government-type brethren or who isolated themselves in ideological corners effectively outside the public debate are probably the majority of conservative activists and commentators. They will also have to either be more involved in the coming debate or yield to even more and more pernicious Democrat big-government schemes.

In short, both activist Democrats and Republicans will have to be either more practical or be more at risk of recrimination or recusal from impact.

Many conservative commentators have, rightfully, noted that only post-election are media analyses emerging with coverage favorable to Republican stewardship of the economy, or the comparative corruption of Democrats, or the wild-eyed ‘60’s gleam in the eye of the next Democrat Congressional committee chairmen, or, or, or… Conveniently, or otherwise, ultimately facts can’t be denied, completely and continuously.

Even the most biased of reporters are directly subject to the same threats to the quality, availability and cost of health care as everyone else. Here, too, facts are creeping in to reporting.

Today’s Los Angeles Times reports that, “On drug prices, are Democrats in a fix?”

"From a rhetorical perspective, Democrats may feel like they gain a lot with this issue, but there are many substantive hurdles that the government faces in trying to negotiate prices," said Dan Mendelson, president of Avalere Health, a consulting firm that tracks the Medicare prescription program.

"If you look historically at the government's experience in trying to regulate prices, it's poor."…

In other words, the VA offers lower drug prices, but fewer choices.

American consumers have repeatedly resisted efforts to save money on medical care by restricting choice. Health maintenance organizations, for example, were once seen as the answer to rising healthcare costs, but millions of people rejected the approach, saying they wanted the freedom to choose their doctors.

One prominent advocate of government-negotiated prices has had a change of heart. Tommy G. Thompson, President Bush's first Health and Human Services secretary, once expressed regret that he hadn't been given the power to bargain.

But in a recent interview he said: "This plan is working much better than ever anticipated. When you've got a law that is working well in the federal government, why change it?"

Why, indeed.

The Washington Post has a similar report, “Success of Drug Plan Challenges Democrats:Medicare Benefit's Cost Beat Estimates.”

It sounded simple enough on the campaign trail: Free the government to negotiate lower drug prices and use the savings to plug a big gap in Medicare's new prescription-drug benefit. But as Democrats prepare to take control of Congress, they are struggling to keep that promise without wrecking a program that has proven cheaper and more popular than anyone imagined….

The cost of the program has been lower than expected, about $26 billion in 2006, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. The cost was projected to rise to $45 billion next year, but Medicare has received new bids indicating that its average per-person subsidy could drop by 15 percent in 2007, to $79.90 a month.

Urban Institute President Robert D. Reischauer, a former director of the Congressional Budget Office, called that a remarkable record for a new federal program.

Initially, he said, people were worried no private plans would participate. "Then too many plans came forward," Reischauer said. "Then people said it's going to cost a fortune. And the price came in lower than anybody thought. Then people like me said they're low-balling the prices the first year and they'll jack up the rates down the line. And, lo and behold, the prices fell again. And the reaction was, 'We've got to have the government negotiate lower prices.' At some point you have to ask: What are we looking for here?"

Government-run nationalized health care is a cure worse than the disease as the way to increase availability, control cost escalation, and create more regulated quality. Some welcome this leaching of the free-market life blood that has, actually, created greater quality, available to more, and at costs – if one includes quality and access – that most Americans support compared to rationing prevalent in the crumbling systems in Canada and western Europe, whose costs are also rapidly rising past affordability by their stagnant welfarist economies. Some despair of preventing the factually hollow populist arguments of providing something for nothing.

Instead, practical resolutions like increasing the competition in the market, a la the Medicare Rx program, and increasing self-responsibility, a la the Massachusetts experiment, are actually the coming wave in health care.

Sterile arguments for statism will not have traction, and offer an opportunity for Republican free-market commentators to drive home the difference. If they will.

No subject I write about gets fewer responses, or links, than health care. Conservative bloggers and commentators need to get up to speed on this issue, or miss an opportunity to impact the public’s understanding of the practical implications of Democrats stuck in the ‘60’s by being Republicans stuck in the ‘50’s.

To educate yourself for the feeling of gratitude means to take nothing for granted, but to always seek out and value the kind that will stand behind the action. Nothing that is done for you is a matter of course. Everything originates in a will for the good, which is directed at you. Train yourself never to put off the word or action for the expression of gratitude.

---------Albert Schweitzer

The only way that Democrats favoring government-run healthcare are going to get their way is by eliminating free market choices, to increase dissatisfaction so that Democrat proposed nationalization panaceas will be seen as the only alternative.

That’s their strategy in attacking Medicare’s Part D prescription benefit, the premium costs of which have come in well lower than government forecasts due to sharp price negotiating by experienced insurance companies. Democrats point to the Veterans Administration direct negotiating sometimes lower prices, but fail to mention that the VA’s list of drugs is far narrower than available to Medicare Part D participants.

Now, Democrats want to undermine the HMO Medicare Advantage alternative to conventional Medicare, which offers broader benefits at lower out-of-pocket costs to seniors. Democrats want to reduce the subsidies that go to insurance companies that offer Medicare Advantage, saying it goes to insurers’ profits. However:

The insurance industry counters that the payment gap varies by region. In urban areas, the payments for managed care are comparable to fee-for-service. It's in rural areas where the difference is most dramatic, said Karen Ignagni, president and CEO of America's Health Insurance Plans.

But that is by design, she said. Medicare also has a subsidy for rural hospitals. If it didn't, then there would be fewer hospitals in rural parts of the country. The same concept applies to insurers.

If the payments are lowered, she said, "there would be a contraction of choices, and members of Congress have worked very hard to get choices in those areas." …

Insurers get only a portion of that funding. Most of the money is passed through to the health care providers they contract with.

You can bet it won't be a beautiful swallowtail.

I was interviewed by Scott Jaschik of Inside Higher Ed for an article (see below) on the controversies surrounding the possible appointments of two professors, Nadia Abu El-Haj of Barnard College of Columbia University, and Wadie Said, who may land a job on the law faculty at Wayne State. I was quoted accurately and think the article gives a fair picture of the controversy, although Campus Watch was mis-identified as "a pro-Israel group that publicizes information about professors who are critical of Israel," which isn't, in fact, what we do. We critique Middle East studies in North America, whether or not those studies (or the professors who perfom them) have anything to do with Israel.

The most compelling parts of the article, however, are the reactions of Juan Cole of the University of Michigan, and Roger Bowen, general secretary (that really is his title) of the American Association of University Professors. Both men come to this story with baggage--see David White's Campus Watch stories on Cole's misadventures at Yale and his unfortunate appearance at Duke. Bowen was president of SUNY New Paltz in 1997 when it hosted an S&M conference titled "Revolting Behavior: The Challenge of Women's Sexual Freedom," which Roger Kimball critiqued in City Journal. Candace de Russy, in her capacity as a trustee of SUNY, led the charge against Bowen, who has a long history of attacking those who object to contemporary academe's homogeneous political atmosphere. Mitchell Langbert has examined one instance of Bowen's selective employment of what one might call his official opprobrium.

Both men object when outside groups and individuals take notice of what goes on in universities. As I told Scott Jaschik during our conversation, they're asking for exemption from the same scrutiny undergone by every politician, from dog catcher to president, as well as from persons in every walk of life: clergy, chefs, movie directors, artists, authors, doctors, businessmen, bankers, psychologists, and craftsmen. All segments of society in a democracy are open to critiques. What differentiates men like Cole and Bowen from the rest of us is their arrogance in the face of criticism.

Read the article and see what you think. And ask yourself: should universities be off-limits to external criticism?

Here's the text of the article:

http://insidehighered.com/news/2006/11/21/disputes

Hiring and tenure decisions are typically decided (and appropriately decided, most in academe would say) by academics. A series of lobbying campaigns by pro-Israel groups, however, have some scholars worried that those who criticize Israel are being subjected to political tests and having their jobs endangered.

At Barnard College, Nadia Abu El-Haj, an anthropologist who is coming up for tenure, is under attack by some alumnae and pro-Israel groups for a book, published by the University of Chicago Press, that was critical of Israeli archaeology and its use in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. At Wayne State University, similar groups are pushing the university not to hire Wadie Said for a faculty position in the law school. In that case, critics of Said are attacking him and his late father, the literary theorist Edward Said, saying that both Saids’ activism on behalf of the Palestinian cause has amounted to support for violent groups.

These debates follow the cancellation last month of a lecture by Tony Judt, a professor at New York University, at the Polish consulate in New York City, amid charges that the Anti-Defamation League had encouraged Polish officials to call off the talk. And in June, Yale University turned down Juan Cole, a University of Michigan professor who is a leading figure in Middle Eastern studies, for a position — after a lengthy period in which critics of Cole argued that he was not a suitable choice for the position, in part because of his criticism of Israel. And Princeton University has faced criticism over a possible hire as well.

This weekend, the Middle East Studies Association, of which Cole is the president, voted to expand the work of its academic freedom committee — which has focused on helping scholars in the Middle East — to engage in efforts on behalf of colleagues in the United States.

“The subtext of these controversies is whether it is going to be allowed for Palestinians to hold positions in academe in the United States. Is it going to be allowed for people who are not Zionists to hold positions? Is there a Zionist litmus test in the United States?” said Cole in an interview Monday. He characterized the pro-Israel groups’ activities as “the privatization of McCarthyism” and said that they represented the most serious threat today to academic freedom in the United States.

Winfield Myers, director of Campus Watch, a pro-Israel group that publicizes information about professors who are critical of Israel, said that Cole and others in Middle Eastern studies are distorting what is going on and that his group respects the right of faculty members to decide academic appointments. Myers said, however, that non-academics have every right to make their views known and that Middle Eastern studies professors are trying to prevent that from happening. “It is ultimately for faculty to decide. We’re not saying ‘approve this guy and turn this other fellow down,’ ” Myers said. But he said that academics do not have the right to make these decisions in a “cocoon of silence” in which information about scholars’ “politicized work” isn’t well known.

The professors who are being criticized were not available for comment on the criticism, much of which is taking the form of e-mail campaigns urging alumni and others to weigh in against them with senior administrators. In the case of El-Haj, much of the criticism concerns her book Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society.

Material published on Campus Watch states that the book’s aim is to undermine the historic connection between the Jewish people and Israel, that the critique of Israeli archaeology is poorly researched and written, and that the author’s anti-Israel bias undercuts her work. The material also questions whether El-Haj knows enough about Israel and has enough mastery of Hebrew to conduct any anthropological work about Israeli society. The material includes Barnard President Judith Shapiro’s e-mail address and phone number.

Wayne State President Irvin Reid has had his contact info — as well as that of Frank H. Wu, the law dean — widely distributed by those seeking to prevent Said’s appointment. The Web site of the pro-Israel group Stand With Us states that Said “shares his father’s views” and is “supportive of his father’s legacy of ‘post-colonial,’ ‘Orientalist’ slander against Israel.” Said is also criticized for his participation in the defense team of Sami Al-Arian, the former University of South Florida professor who reached a plea agreement with the government on various charges against him after a jury rejected some charges and was divided on others.

David Horowitz’s magazine is also coming out against Said. (Defenders of El-Haj and Said make much of the tone of the Web sites attacking them, but some of the Web sites defending them aren’t exactly subtle in their tones either. One site defending Said says “the Negro President of WSU Irvin Reid is a staunch supporter of the racist state of Israel” and that because of his “unconditional support for the settler-colonial state of Zionist Israel,” he has no business running a university in Detroit, home to a large Arab-American population.)

It is unclear what impact the campaigns will have. The academic job market is tough enough that when someone doesn’t get a position, there are any number of reasons that could explain that decision. Winning tenure at Barnard or a faculty position at Yale aren’t easy things to do regardless of whether one is being criticized on pro-Israel Web sites. At the same time, some of those who have lost their shot at jobs — like Cole at Yale — had strong faculty backing and appeared well positioned to gain certain positions prior to the lobbying campaigns.

Wu, the law dean at Wayne State, said that lobbying administrators there will have no impact. He said that the tradition at the law school — which he supports — is that job offers come only after two-thirds of the faculty agree. Wu said he has never tried to influence the faculty vote, and would never do so — or attempt to block a candidate who gained that level of support. Wu said he feels so strongly about this principle that he does not even vote as a faculty member. “We have a celebrated tradition of shared governance and academic freedom,” he said. Sending him an e-mail about Said’s candidacy would have about as much impact, he said, as sending an e-mail about Said to the dean of Harvard Law School, where Said is not a candidate for anything.

If the pro-Israel groups start lobbying professors, Wu warned that the effort might backfire. He said that his faculty holds a range of views politically and that professors likely don’t all agree on whether it’s appropriate for members of the public to seek to influence their hiring decisions. “Some might welcome [the e-mails]. Some might be offended. Some might be so turned off by the e-mail coming in that they may be persuaded to take a position that they might not have otherwise,” Wu said

Roger Bowen, general secretary of the American Association of University Professors, said flatly that outside groups do not have a role in these hiring and tenure decisions. “Non-academics and external advocacy groups should not be permitted to intrude in hiring and tenure cases in the academy, he said. “Academic freedom also requires recognition that scholars alone have the right to pass judgment on the quality of a professor’s credentials. No scholar should have to be subjected to political litmus tests conjured up by partisan groups.”

A Barnard spokeswoman said that the college has received around 25 letters and e-mail messages from alumnae about El-Haj. The spokeswoman said that the college would never comment on the status of a tenure review. Judith Shapiro, Barnard’s president, has posted on the alumnae Web site a letter about the dispute. In her letter, Shapiro noted that a review of El-Haj’s work would include outside evaluations, by experts in the field. Shapiro — a cultural anthropologist herself — did not offer an opinion on El-Haj’s work. But she defended the type of work done, saying that “it is a legitimate cultural anthropological enterprise to show how archaeological research can be used for political and ideological purposes,” and noted that such critiques are not unique to the Middle East.

And while Shapiro said she welcomed feedback from alumnae, she also said she wanted to share “my concern about communications and letter-writing campaigns orchestrated by people who are not as familiar with Barnard as you are, and who may not be in the best position to judge the matter at hand.”

Cole said that in both the Barnard and Wayne State disputes, good scholars are having their careers unfairly maligned. (In both cases, he said that he knows their work, but isn’t a personal friend.)

El-Haj is “very well respected” and the issues she raises in her work are important ones, Cole said. A long-standing concern of Palestinians, he said, is that Israeli archaeologists dig through materials that cover centuries of key developments in the region to focus on the period of ancient Israel. “Getting rid of this professor would be like replicating what she is writing about in terms of what was done on the ground,” he said.

And while Cole is no critic of Edward Said, he also said it was unfair and inappropriate for people who didn’t like his ideas to take that out on his son. “This shows that it’s a blood feud,” he said.

Ari Drissman, president of the Wayne State chapter of Students for Israel, said that there were legitimate reasons to oppose Said’s appointment. Drissman said that the environment at the university is “very tense” for students who support Israel, who are barraged with anti-Israel leaflets that are “without any facts.” He characterized the publicity being given to Said’s background as similar to a background check done by a business before hiring a new employee.

And Myers of Campus Watch used similar language. He stressed that all the groups are doing is publicizing information, not trying to intrude on actual decisions. As for his opinion, he said that El-Haj’s work is “part of an ongoing effort to delegitimize the modern Israeli state,” and that Said has “some rather radical politics.”

In getting out the word about these people, Myers said, his group “is not part of some effort to silence the Arab voice.” Rather, he said, his group is trying to open up debate. If Middle Eastern studies scholars are offended by the work of Campus Watch, Myers said, “they aren’t used to getting criticism,” adding that information put out by all groups — his own included — should be open for critique.

A few days ago I had a distressing phone conversation with Michael Abdurakhmanov, president of Hillel at Pace University. A friend of mine and Pace alumnus had mentioned to me that students were being censored and bullied into compliance at Pace simply for proposing to show the film Obsession at their campus club event. I asked Michael to write up a brief report documenting the events and some good-hearted people concerned about student’s academic rights and the partisan campuses will stand up and join him in the fight. Already Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) has contacted us expressing interest in his case and David Horowitz will post his story on Frontpage Magazine. Here is the report he emailed to me:

Hello,
I am going to describe two situations that occurred in our school were students rights were suppressed. The first one was with the film “Obsession” and the second is with students who got arrested for a peaceful protest.

1) I am President of “Hillel”, a Jewish club at Pace University. Part of our “Judaism awareness week” (week long full of events relating to Judaism- Nov 13 – 17th) we wanted to show the film “Obsession”. Three weeks before the day of the event I contacted MSA – Muslim Student Association, and notified them that I was going to show the film and have a panel of speakers discuss the film before and after it was viewed. I asked MSA if they would like to collaborate with us on and offered them a chance to bring a speaker of their choice. Two weeks later I hear rumors that the Dean, Dr. Marijo Russell O'Grady wants to pull the plug on the film (I was not told of this by the administration until I made the appointment to see them). The Dean O’Grady, Mr. David Clark, who is head of the student organizations on campus, and I met one week before the event. About 5 – 10 minutes into our conversation Dean O’Grady “warns” me that because of the recent Hate crimes that were committed against the Koran at our school it would point figures and me and my organization. The police will also get involved and begin to look at my record even deeper. The fact is that Hate crimes were committed against the Muslim religion and the Jewish religion but the school only made notice of the Muslim students. 4 Days later a mediation meeting occurred – The Dean, David Clark, two people from Affirmative Action and two professional Mediators were called. The president and secretary of MSA were present and I was the only one present for Hillel. MSA has sent Hillel several E-mails that were full of anger, and hate not only against us but made direct statements about or Club and what our religion stands for. During the mediation MSA spoke first. For about 10min the president of MSA was shouting at me until I finally asked her to stop shouting and that was the only time that the “professional” mediators acknowledged her shouting at me. The six administrators that were present were creating excuses for MSA’s behavior. The president was constantly shouting at me and at the administrators, towards the end she cursed twice loud enough for everyone to hear and yet nothing was said to her. But when I tried to speak up in defense of the film and our club I was physically put back in my seat. David Clark was sitting next to me and twice he put his hand on my shoulder and pushed me down as a way to silence me. No one from the administration of MSA ever saw the film so they have no way of knowing what it truly is about. I offered them the opportunity to view the film and both MSA and the administration have turned it down. They didn’t want to hear anything that I had to say because they felt the film would only give the school more bad press. There solution was to put on joint events that focus of “eco-terrorism”. With all do respect but Eco-terrorism did not taken down the World Trade Towers, did not blow two busses in London, hold a school hostage in Russia and continuingly killing thousands in Africa….Radical Islam is the cause and to ignore this and silence those who want to expose this truth is just wrong. When I confronted the Dean about why I was silenced in such a way her response to me was “I am sorry you feel that way”. Its interesting how one group of students gets treated as opposed to another?

2) The second issue was with a demonstration that occurred Thursday Nov 16th. A group of students at Pace organized a protest against the school. Covering issues of increased tuition, poor student support, and freedom of speech. The students proceeded to come closer to the school and the administration arrested 5 students for trespassing. 18 and 19 year old kids were arrested for walking closer to their own University. The same Dean supported these actions.

Let me know if you need anymore information of any of these cases. I am willing to go as far as needed for this cause. I feel that the administration has done great wrong against not only me but my organization. Below are the names of the higher administrators of my university.

President: David A. Caputo, -
President's Office at 212-346-1097, email: president@pace.edu

PhD Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs: Joseph C. Morreale

Dr. Marijo Russell O'Grady, Dean for Students –
41 Park Row, 9th floor, Room 907; (212) 346-1306/1307; fax (212) 346-1563

What contributes to the extreme arguments about the morality of Western conduct in modern wars is not so much the tactics but rather our failure to sacrifice. Due to inadequate means, our war-fighting capacity is too often inadequate to the tasks, which increases the frustrations that lead to either demands to be more brutal or receptivity to those who would have the West be lambs to the slaughter.

Some will argue that there’s no place in war for morality, particularly when one’s adversaries choose entirely immoral means that leave Westerners at a disadvantage, and particularly (the case of Israel most often cited) where actual survival is in immediate peril. Such arguments have validity, especially when placed against the other extreme so common in the West among internal adversaries of Western civilization -- whether directly or through timidity or relativist confusion -- that almost anything done by the West is immoral.

But the validity of being far more brutal – not just having more sensible rules of engagement that recognize battlefield realities – holds up only if one is willing to ignore that we are Westerners. The values and interests we are willing to fight for include limitations on levels of violence that were once more common and accepted in the West.

Where Westerners have diverged more from the past – and its lessons -- is in forsaking preparedness for war. To be unprepared is the larger immorality, and creates needs for or conditions for individual combat immoralities. Europe is incapable of deploying, without U.S. logistics, even puny forces against puny foes. Israel has slacked in its preparedness, not yet fatally. But, the U.S. is, also, incapable of fielding forces adequate to the larger foes.

Consequently, going to war with the military we have (as Rumsfeld had to, following the “peace dividend” ‘90’s reduction of our military), results in less forces being applied than necessary to complete the job in Iraq. Perhaps we’ll craft a solution, through perseverance of our superb volunteer military and some able statecraft. Those forces are still formidable.

However, it would have been more moral – defined as lower casualties among Americans and Iraqis, more infrastructure built there, more assurance of more lasting internal and regional peace, and even more impetus to spreading democracy -- to have at hand and committed adequate forces to begin with.

A Richard Cohen, at least partially, tries to be honest about his shifting motivations being due to perceptions of whether we’re winning or not:

There is the "I" who originally thought the Vietnam War was morally correct, that the communists were awful people and that the loss of South Vietnam (the North was already gone) would result in a debacle for its people. That's, in fact, what happened. It was only later, when I myself was in the Army, that I deemed the war not worth killing or dying for. By then I -- the second "I" -- no longer felt it was winnable, and I did not want to lose my life so that somehow defeat could be managed more elegantly.

Things are precisely the same with Iraq…

Iraqis have similar perceptions about which course works for them, reliance on the inadequate U.S. presence or on their own sect and settling matters themselves.

Joe Galloway’s empathy for the battlefield grunt impels him to much of his opposition to our Iraq engagement, in my opinion excessively negatively. Still, his core point about “Time to Fix What's Broken,” is completely on target, if we care about morality of either tactics or strategy, not to mention winning and survival.

In this dangerous world, Americans must be willing to pay for an Army, and they must be willing to send their sons and daughters to serve in that Army. Nations that are unwilling to defend themselves and are governed by an elite that's unwilling to send its own children to be part of that defense, are doomed.

The Bush administration says we're embarked on what it defines as a long war - 40 or 50 or 60 years of struggle with the forces of Islamic fundamentalism - and if that's true, then it's long past time to begin making some sacrifices at home to prepare to fight and win that war.

Mr. Gates can begin his brief tour as secretary of defense by jacking up the most recent Quadrennial Defense Review, the Pentagon's 20-year look at the future and what will be funded in our defense budgets, and re-ordering its priorities. He must make the hard decisions that Mr. Rumsfeld promised to make but never did.

We cannot have business as usual in the Pentagon. We cannot continue to fund huge aircraft and ship purchases for the Air Force and Navy while starving the Army and Marines who are bearing the brunt of the fighting and dying in this brave new world of ours. Boots on the ground are not as glamorous - or as lucrative to defense contractors - as the high technology so beloved by Mr. Rumsfeld. But in places such as Iraq and Afghanistan, there is still no substitute for them.

My old friend Col. (ret.) T. R. Fehrenbach wrote in his landmark history of the Korean War that a nation that wants to hold the barbarians at bay must be willing to put its sons on the ground, in the mud and the blood. It also must be willing to pay the price for an Army and a Marine Corps that's fully manned, well trained, and equipped and supported with everything it needs.

Without that, this brave new century and millennium that were celebrated as America's will swiftly become someone's else's, and we will become no more than a footnote in history - a nation whose days of glory and power numbered only half a century or so.

I’m critical of Republicans who’ve lost their way from First Principles rooted in limited government and of Democrats who’ve lost their way from most any principles outside of resurrecting the welfare state mentality and pelf thought to have been swept aside in the ‘90’s.

Yet, there’s still an underlying, consistent constituency in both parties called national security voters. Their interests are in a strong defense of America, Western values, and of those abroad who are oppressed or in whose lands or periphery dire threats to the West germinate and grow. National security voters are being either taken for granted or ignored by most Republican and Democrat leaders, treated as inconvenient to both’s overriding interest in controlling the government’s spending spigot to perpetuate their entrenchment and self-enrichment.

At the 1996 Republican Convention in San Diego, I was shut up when questioning a leading Republican pollster why he was ignoring national security issues, told that it wasn’t an important issue. Later, I asked George Shultz why this attitude prevailed. He shook his head and said that without a perception of threats, even though there were many, normal politics concentrated on the domestic.

Americans, Republican and Democrat and independent, have paid for that perception since, not only in 9/11 -- and awakening to the threats in Afghanistan and Iraq, where as many brave American troops have lost their lives – but as well in the increased division among Americans in being able to come together to address domestic needs.

The basic truth is that most Americans are pragmatic realists, who continue to be willing to defend vital interests and believe America is worthy of being unique, but not the realpolitik “realists” who acquiesce by abandoning faith in others in order to extend our comforts a while longer whenever the going gets tough nor the “moralists” who believe our values are easily transplanted.

A MIT poll in November 2005 had far more Republicans than Democrats thinking the war in Iraq “worth fighting”, but – although still more Republicans than Democrats – a majority of both parties’ adherents approved the use of U.S. military troops “to destroy a terrorist camp,” “to intervene in a region where there is genocide or a civil war,” and “to protect American allies under attack by foreign nations.” Only 6.5% of Democrats, 17% of independents, and 53.2% of Republicans, however, were willing to use U.S. troops to “assist the spread of democracy.”

The October 2006 Battleground poll from George Washington University found 92% of voters “believe that Washington puts partisan politics before the needs of the electorate,” while “45% think the War in Iraq is worth fighting; 57% think of the War in Iraq as part of the War on Terrorism, and 49% support keeping U.S. troops in Iraq until the situation is confirmed to be stable.”

These may be considered national security voters. Hardly enough by themselves to carry the day, but still close to majority, despite the disappointments in the “long war”, and a number that swells to overwhelming after successes or after direct attacks shift perceptions. The problem is, like in 1996, after may be too late to prevent, and successes don’t just happen but require focus and perseverance.

Instapundit Glenn Reynolds comments on the 60-year “security blanket” the U.S. has provided Europe: “I'd like to see a timetable for getting troops out of Europe. It's time they took responsibility for their own security and stopped their childlike dependence upon / resentment of America. They need to work on more responsible democratic institutions, too. The Iraqis I'll give a bit longer.”

The psychiatrist of Shrinkwrapped blog focuses on the Left’s opinion elite “dirty little secret”: “In order to avoid the deeply hidden questions, maintain consistency in their rationalizations, and continue to retroactively justify their anti-Vietnam War beliefs, the anti-War campaigners are willing to once again abandon people who trusted us….We should not rationalize our failure of will as a triumph of morality; we did that once and it was the height of immorality.”

They may shout loudly, and dominate major media, but time and again they are shown not to represent the voice -– or conscience -- of America and Americans.

The main reason most Democrat leaders may restrain themselves from forcing an abandonment of Iraq is they don’t want to again pay the 40-year electoral price of national security weakness. The main reason that most Republican leaders may restrain themselves from acquiescing in abandonment is to not lose their advantage among national security voters. It’s up to you to remind both on which side their electoral bread is buttered. Both may lack principles, but not self-interest.

The New York Times’ ace-snark David Sanger’s report from Vietnam emphasized the turnout of Vietnamese for President Clinton, when he visited at the end of his administration, compared to little turnout in the streets for President Bush during his stop in Vietnam for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation meeting.

David Sanger’s nose for negative news about President Bush missed that,

Residents along the route from Tan Son Nhat airport to the New World have been ordered by the public security to stay in their homes before and after the arrival time.

David Sanger apparently was too engaged elsewhere to attend the telephone press conference of democracy dissidents, held despite arrests and intimidation.

Ultimately, reporters from CNN Radio, LA Times, AFP, and Reuters were connected to Prof. Nguyen Chinh Ket in Saigon and Attorney Le Thi Cong Nhan in Hanoi. Do Nam Hai was unable to participate as he was still being held at the Phu Nhuan public security station.
Many of the questions focused on the isolation of democracy activists by the public security and even the physical lockdown of their residences. Questions were posed regarding the group beating of Dr. Pham Hong Son on Friday and the detention of Do Nam Hai today.

The San Jose Mercury News is among the very few U.S. newspapers who did report some of the reality, perhaps because there are so many Vietnamese refugees in its circulation area.

Dissidents throughout the country say they have been harassed, detained and, in one case, beaten up by authorities to keep them from meeting with foreign journalists or engaging in any protests while the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation meeting convenes.
The home and cellular phones of many prominent dissidents have been disconnected. Some activists have been locked inside their homes. Throughout the city, barricades have been erected at the homes of many dissidents, typically with four or five police officers standing guard. Signs around the homes warn visitors: ``Restricted Access,'' ``No Foreigners'' and ``No Pictures.''

David Sanger may want to on a future trip to Vietnam to visit more than a Pho restaurant or Hanoi victory museums.

I had intended to blog about the “culture of corruption” that has pervaded federal and state government, singling out New York State, which according to the NYU Brennan Center’s report, is the most dysfunction state legislature in the nation. Before launching into self-reflection on the corruption within my own party, no more culpable than the Democrats, something must be said in defense of President Bush and the GOP. Both have become the target of vilification and abuse, not only from Democrats, the liberal press and academia, but from the Conservative and Republican base as well. New York Republican Senate majority leader Joseph Bruno lashed out at the president, angrily blaming his administration for the election defeat saying that the results of the election was “aimed directly at what people see as the lack of leadership and the right direction out of Washington, out of the White House specifically.”

Mitchell Langbert recently sent me a fascinating article written by Clinical Psychologist, Robert Godwin, who revealed the contemporary irrational logic that dictates a group fantasy intent on demonizing President Bush that is driven by irrational fears and anxiety. This is an unconscious revival of the primordial “ritual slaying of the divine king” that took place in most primitive tribes. The resignation of Rumsfeld after the election was the president’s ritual offering of the secretary’s head impaled on a pike to satiate the public’s appetite for ceremonial sacrifice. Yet the silence of Bush and company has only fed the flames of public rage for blood. The public relations failure of the Bush administration to communicate the reality of economic prosperity and our noble objectives in Iraq and rally the public to unite in a time of war has only exacerbated the anger and fanned the flames of censure that germinate from this unconscious irrational level of the public psyche.

The media/academia driven public neurosis of wrath against our president and the GOP is a case of mythical thinking fed by the unconscious perceptions of elitist intellectuals and academics who use the power of intellect to justify myths and fantasies that have no basis in fact. One ubiquitous example is that President Bush’s alleged slow reaction to Hurricane Katrina proves that he is a racist and doesn’t care about black people. The reality that 100,000 state and federal emergency personnel flooded New Orleans within three days rescuing 100,000 individuals from harm, making this the fastest rescue operation in our history, are facts that get in the way of the mythical slaying of the dragon. Other myths are the oft-repeated mantras claiming that the Bush administration doesn’t tolerate dissent, that he stole the 2002 elections in a national coup, that Bush is plotting to destroy our civil liberties, and he lied to get us into an illegal war to enrich his buddies in big oil companies. Facts are deliberately ignored in order to promote emotionally satisfying illusions.

Now let's look at the economic and political reality of President Bush and the formerly Republican majority in Congress, free from the constraints of the group fantasy painting an illusory perception of gloom and doom. Let me preface this with the caveat that the facts show that spending was at an all time high, that not a single spending bill was vetoed (except for stem cell research), national Medicaid abuse is up to $90 billion in fraudulent payments and nothing was done to abolish the NEA, DOE and the other worthless behemoths stealing from the public dole. Yet the elitist promoters of public illusions will not touch this reality of corruption of a party grown complacent with power. But the overriding truth is that the economy is positively bullish with corporate profits and the stock market at an all time high and unemployment at an all time low. While the Center on Budget and Public Policy Priorities and other liberal think tanks continue to lambaste the Bush tax cuts and the deficit, these measures were stimulants that propelled the economy to new heights due to the simple principle that tax cuts generate economic growth. The fact that economic policy instituted by Bush and the Republican congress cut income tax rates from 39% to 35% and cut capital gains and dividend taxes to 15%, means more capital in the hands of entrepreneurs who put people to work and maintain a prosperous robust economy all across the board from poor to wealthy Americans. “Tax cuts for the rich” is another partisan media driven illusion promoted by the new 2007 chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, Charles Rangel and his minions who aim to repeal the Bush tax cuts before 2010.

Turning to the war, President Bush is under increasing pressure to pull our troops out of Iraq and issue timetables for early withdrawal. As the New York Post powerfully editorialized today, Nancy Pelosi, representing her San Francisco constituents who have expelled the JROTC from city high schools, wants immediate evacuation from Iraq. Calls for a “phased redeployment” of our forces, which is a euphemism for “cut and run,” are heard from Senator Carl Levin (D-Mich.) the new chairman of the Armed Services Committee and Harry Reid (D-Nev.), the next Senate majority leader. But President Bush, has stuck by his principles to win in Iraq no matter how long it takes. As a man of conviction who lives by his principles, he has not caved in to the mounting calls for withdrawal or the 65% disapproval rating indicating the public anger and anxiety over the war in Iraq. This disapproval rating is fed by the purveyors of illusions and misinformation about Iraq. The Vietnam quagmire comparison is one of the major illusions invoked. However the “cut and run” elitists do not bring this illusion to its logical conclusion that the ensuing bloodbath after American forces pulled out of Vietnam could be a cause for alarm. North Vietnam took advantage of the American retreat that cost the lives of millions of innocent South Vietnamese and Cambodians. Has it ever occurred to the illusionist mentality of these elitists and the new Democratic majority that a much more costly nightmare could ensue from quitting in Iraq? Have they considered that the vultures of the Sunni and Shiite insurgency as well as Al Queda and Iranian terrorists would finish off the rotting carcasses of millions more innocent lives? If the Democrat’s call for surrender were heeded, the jihadists would soon set up shop in the heart of the Middle East. The Post editorial poses the question:

With America gone and its enemies in control, how long before oil becomes a powerful strategic weapon - and before those enemies set their sights beyond the region, to places like Europe? And, eventually, America itself? Do Americans really want Iraq left to become a staging ground for terror attacks on New York or Washington?

We can be grateful and proud that our chief executive is the only dominant voice of sanity that has not succumbed to the voices of illusion and group fantasy calling for an early withdrawal. I believe that history will favorably judge the presidency of George W. Bush, should he stand by his principles to the end of his term. Despite the myths, the GOP still remains the only party with the firm agenda to keep America safe, strong and the economy growing. Having said that, I believe that we have a big job ahead to resuscitate the party from its corruption in power, restoring these original principles.

Sixteen-miles. That’s how far stretches the surviving individual records of what happened to millions of the Jews exterminated by the Nazis. Those records have been kept under lock and key by the International Red Cross since they were captured by the Allies after World War II. Soon, they will become available on digital copies.

The Nazi’s meticulous record-keeping, which fell apart late in the war, captures the fates of so many who today are only remembered in big numbers that fail to capture the individual horrors. Similarly, the scope of the death operations is now known to be even larger than previously described.

The files will support new research from other sources showing that the network of concentration camps, ghettos and labor camps was nearly three times more extensive than previously thought.

Postwar historians estimated about 5,000 to 7,000 detention sites. But after the Cold War ended, records began pouring out of the former communist nations of East Europe. More sites were disclosed in the last six years in claims by 1.6 million people for slave labor reparations from a $6.6 billion fund financed by the German government and some 3,000 industries.

"We have identified somewhere in the neighborhood of 20,000 camps and ghettos of various categories," said Geoffrey Megargee of the Holocaust Museum in Washington, who is compiling a seven-volume encyclopedia of these detention centers.

The archive [also] has some 3.4 million files of DPs _ Displaced Persons….

[Also] Some 50 million pages _ scraps of paper, transport lists, registration books, labor documents, medical and death registers _ make reference to 17.5 million individuals caught up in the machinery of persecution, displacement and death.

When I was a very young child, I recall the extended family gathering around a short note from the International Red Cross about the fate of part of my family: Taken out of their village in Belarus by local sympathizers of the Nazi’s, to dig ditches, then hammered on their heads with the shovels, some shot, and tossed into the ditch like garbage.

I recently came across some eyewitness accounts from a village in the area. Some excerpts:

Itzak Nahmanovitch's Account [4]
The year 1939 arrived. David-Horodok was taken by the Soviets. Many Jewish refugees from western Poland migrated to David-Horodok to settle. Then in 1940 the Soviets began arresting and exiling Zionists and others. The town shuddered. The mood was strained. Still there was the motto: “All for one and one for all.”

Then July 6, 1941 arrived. The town was captured by Hitler’s troops. Many Jews wanted to save themselves in Russia, but the NKVD and border guards would not let them pass. So the Jews of David-Horodok were forced to remain under Nazi rule. Then began the horror, and the Belarusans showed their murderous side. They began catching Jews in the streets and forcing them to do labor.

Many of Hitler’s troops passed through the streets of the town heading east. A few days later they returned because of the bad roads, intending to find another path through the marshes. In town it was rumored that the Germans had been driven back by the Red Army. This was exploited by the newly-proclaimed mayor, the villainous feldsher [paramedic] Ivan Maraiko, who went to Gestapo headquarters in Pinsk to report that the Jews were spreading the rumors and that the Jews were attacking the German army. This vile slander brought on the bloody 17th of Av [August 10, 1941], about one month after the Germans had captured the town.

Bas-Sheva Kushner and Gunm Polavin's Account[5]
On July 5, 1941 the Germans entered David-Horodok. Several weeks before the capture of the town, local Christians headed by Maraiko, Kulogo and Latun, may their names be blotted out, succeeded in creating the impression that the town Jews were waiting for the Red Army to return. As a result the Christians received permission from the SS headquarters in Pinsk to handle the Jews at their own discretion.

The Slaughter of the Men
In August 1941, German SS infantry and cavalry regiments were ordered to clear Polesye’s swampy and wooded areas of the remnants of retreating Soviet units. They preferred the easier task of killing Jews. Thus the first days of Nazi occupation were marked by mass executions or aktionen organized by locals and the Einsatzgruppen, the special sections of the SS delegated with the task of annihilating Jews in their own villages and towns. In the months of August-October 1941, tens of thousands of Jews in the small shtetls of Western Belarus were murdered—in the towns of Hanzevitch, Eishishok, Lohishyn, Luninets, and David-Horodok[6]

On the 16th of Av, 5701 [August 9, 1941], an order was delivered in David-Horodok that at six o’clock the next morning all Jewish men over the age of 14 were to gather at the marketplace opposite the Catholic church, taking shovels with them. It was implied that they would be taken to work. Early the next morning the Jews began assembling at the marketplace, which was surrounded by armed German SS troops and many Horodtchukas. After all had gathered the Horodtchukas spread around town checking for holdouts. The brothers Issur and Hershl Gurvitch, who were found in a hiding place, had their eyes gouged out while being taken to the marketplace.
All those gathered at the marketplace were led away on foot by a strongly armed SS detachment, accompanied by hundreds of Horodtchukas, to Hinavsk, a village four-and-a-third miles from David-Horodok. There the graves had already been prepared. Surrounded on all sides by artillery and machine guns, every single man was shot to death. The cries and the screaming of the unfortunate victims carried through the air and reached as far as David-Horodok.

The gathered Horodtchukas fulfilled a triple mission: They made sure that no one fled from the field. They removed the gold rings, watches, clothing, shoes, boots and even tore out gold teeth. Finally they carried out the job of throwing the victims into the graves, not looking to see if they were really dead or still half-alive. Only two children succeeded in escaping unnoticed from that frightful slaughter. Wandering through the fields they joined a partisan group and thus survived.

The very few survivors are aged, and fewer everyday. Remembering and acting against any who engage in such mass murder, anywhere, is our sacred task.

The extended remarks below by America’s U.N. Ambassador John Bolton, according to a Google check, appeared in India, but not in U.S. newspapers. Perhaps, if the U.S. media broadcast and printed his remarks more often, and those of the rabid despoilers of freedom and decency he confronts at the U.N., Americans would have a better understanding of the international stakes.

John Bolton has done an exceptional job representing both American interests and the needs of others around the world who are subject to or threatened by oppression. You can’t get more American than that, and we should be both proud and thankful to have his voice at the U.N. See this Heritage analysis of Bolton’s job performance.

As U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, John Bolton has proven a forceful advocate of American interests, a powerful voice for U.N. reform, and a staunch defender of the cause of human rights. He has worked closely with Congress, testifying no less than six times before House and Senate committees. Bolton has been an outspoken critic of corruption, mismanagement, waste, and inefficiency at a world body that receives several billion dollars a year from U.S. taxpayers. He has shaken up an institution that has for decades resisted change and cast a revealing light on an elite U.N. establishment that has long thrived amid a culture of complacency and secrecy.

Due to Senate gridlock, President George W. Bush sent John Bolton to the United Nations in August 2005 as a recess appointment. The recess appointment expires when the new Congress convenes in January 2007, and the President has resubmitted Bolton for confirmation. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee is expected to vote on Bolton’s nomination in early December….

Bolton has not been afraid to speak his mind and upset the status quo. Nor has he been unwilling to call a dictator a dictator, expose the rampant hypocrisy of the U.N.’s human rights apparatus, or condemn the actions of dangerous rogue regimes. Effective diplomacy requires forceful leadership and the willingness to back up tough words with action. As former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher observed in a letter of support for John Bolton, “A capacity for straight talking rather than peddling half-truths is a strength and not a disadvantage in diplomacy. In the case of a great power like America, it is essential that people know where you stand and assume you know what you say.”

Unfortunately, a few putzes in the U.S. Senate have been standing in the way. Please read Bolton’s remarks below. Then, please contact your U.S. Senator demanding an up or down vote in the Senate in December.

As the Washington Post reports, “Bolton predicts he would win Senate vote on U.N. post.” Even the Chinese appreciate Bolton. So should the U.S. Senate.

"I enjoy working with him," China's U.N. Ambassador Wang Guangya said. "Professionally he is capable, he is effective but I don't want to get into the politics of the U.S."

Now, for the news from India, we should be getting from U.S. media: [HT: Pamela]

Bolton in extraordinary outburst against United Nations
Calcutta News.Net
Saturday 18th November, 2006

The U.S. Ambassador to the UN, John Bolton, launched a scathing attack on the United Nations Friday.

Bolton was furious over the adoption by the General Assembly of a resolution which said the assembly regretted the deaths of 19 civilians in an attack by the Israeli military in the town of Beit Hanoun last week.

Despite the resolution being significantly watered down at the behest of the United States, and being passing by 156 votes to seven, Bolton launched a blistering attack on the UN, and many of its members.

"Many of the sponsors of that resolution are notorious abusers of human rights themselves, and were seeking to deflect criticism of their own policies," he said.

"This type of resolution serves only to exacerbate tensions by serving the interests of elements hostile to Israel's inalienable and recognized right to exist."

"This deepens suspicions about the United Nations that will lead many to conclude that the organization is incapable of playing a helpful role in the region," Bolton continued.

"In a larger sense, the United Nations must confront a more significant question, that of its relevance and utility in confronting the challenges of the 21st century. We believe that the United Nations is ill served when its members seek to transform the organization into a forum that is a little more than a self-serving and a polemical attack against Israel or the United States," he said.

"The Human Rights Council has quickly fallen into the same trap and de-legitimized itself by focusing attention exclusively on Israel. Meanwhile, it has failed to address real human rights abuses in Burma, Darfur, the DPRK, and other countries," Bolton charged.

"The problem of anti-Israel bias is not unique to the Human Rights Council. It is endemic to the culture of the United Nations. It is a decades-old, systematic problem that transcends the whole panoply of the UN organizations and agencies," he continued.

The United States, and Australia joined Israel in voting against the motion, together with four small Pacific island nations. All countries in Europe, including Britain, voted to support the resolution.

The original text condemned Israel over the Beit Hanoun attack and its operations in Gaza, however the adopted resolution had the General Assembly expressing, "regret."

Rather than an outright investigation of the incident the assembly resolved to form a committee, "to look into the facts." The resolution also carried a demand that the Palestinian Authority take action to stop rocket attacks on Israel.

Bolton launched his attack despite gaining these concessions.

Equally critical was Israeli Ambassador Dan Gillerman who stormed out of the session after telling members, "I caution everyone who will support this resolution. By doing so, you will be an accomplice to terror. The blood of more innocents will be on your hands."

The resolution was taken to the General Assembly after the United States used its veto to squash a similar motion in the Security Council. It was the 31st time the U.S. had used its veto at the UN to stop resolutions concerning Israel and the Palestinians.

Jim Lehrer Reflects on Marines at Museum Dedication

Jim Lehrer spoke of his time in the Marines at the dedication of the National Museum of the Marine Corps in Quantico, Va., on the 231st anniversary of the corps.

JIM LEHRER: Mr. President, generals, colonels, majors, captains, lieutenants, warrant officers, sergeants, corporals, privates, ladies and gentlemen.

We are the Marines. And in this museum, our story is told. It is a single, monumental story, made up of 231 years of many separate stories of heroism and courage, of dedication and sacrifice, of service to our country and to our corps, of honor and loyalty to each other in war and in peace; 231 years of professionalism and pride, of squared corners and squared-away lockers, perfect salutes and good haircuts, well-shined shoes, and eyes right, 231 years of Semper Fis and DIs.

First time I came to Quantico was 51 years ago. I came as an officer candidate, a PLC on the train from Washington, having just traveled from Texas on the first airplane ride of my life. On the orders of a drill instructor, a DI, I fell in at attention with 40 other candidates on the platform at the train station over at Quantico.

And the DI told us to answer up, "Here, sir!" when our name was called. And he got to mine, and he said, "Le-here-er-er." And, like some kind of idiot, I blurted out, "It's pronounced Lehrer, sir!"

There was silence, absolute silence. And then I heard the terrifying click, click, click of leather heels on the deck of that train station platform coming in my direction. And suddenly there he was, the DI, right in front of me, his face right up in mine. And I paraphrase and cleanse it up a bit, but he said, "Candidate, if I say your name is Little Bo Peep, your name is Little Bo Peep!"

"Do you hear me?" Oh, I heard him all right. And I think it was at that very moment that I really became a United States Marine.

I'm still one today, and I will remain one forever, as did my late father, and as is my older and only brother.


On being a Marine
I came from a family of Marines into the family of Marines. My father served in the 1920s under the great Smedley Butler right here at Quantico. He saw combat in Haiti and came out a corporal. My brother and I were both 1950s Cold War Marines in the Third Marine Division in the Far East.

Since our corps was founded on this day in 1775, there have been more than 4 million men and women who have worn the uniform of a United States Marine. This museum is about all of them, including us three "Le-here-er-ers," and even the Little Bo Peeps. That's because this museum is about what it means to be a Marine, no matter the time, the length, place, rank, or nature of the service.

It's about the shared experience and the shared knowledge that comes from being a U.S. Marine, such as knowing that you are only as strong and as safe as the person on your right and on your left; that a well-trained and motivated human being can accomplish almost anything; that being pushed to do your very best is a godsend; that an order is an order, a duty is a duty, that responsibility goes down the chain of command, as well as up, as do loyalty and respect; that leadership can be taught, so can bearing, discipline and honor; that "follow me" really does mean "follow me"; and that that Semper Fidelis really does mean "always faithful"; and that the Marines hymn is so much more than just a song.

My Marine experience helped shape who I am now personally and professionally, and I am grateful for that on an almost daily basis. And I often find myself wishing everyone had a similar opportunity, to learn about shared dependence, loyalty, responsibility to and for others, about mutual respect and honor, and about the power of appealing to the best that's in us as human beings, not the worst.


People at the core
As a journalist, there has been one overriding effect of my Marine experience: While debates over sending Americans into harm's way are always about issues of foreign policy, geopolitics and sometimes even politics-politics, for me, they are also always about young lance corporals and second lieutenants and other very real people in all branches of the U.S. military, people with names, ranks, serial numbers, faces, families, and futures that may never be.

When Marines stand for or sing the Marines' hymn, as we will at the conclusion of this ceremony, it's never for ourselves personally. It's always for the Marines who went before us, with us, and after us, first and foremost for those who gave their lives, their health, their everything at places such as Tripoli, Belleau Wood, Haiti, Wake Island, Guadalcanal, Peleliu, Iwo Jima, Chosin, Inchon, Danang, Khe Sahn, Beirut, and Baghdad, Fallujah and Ramadi.

The death rate among Marines in Iraq has been more than double that of the other services. That's a first-to-fight, first-wave pattern that has pretty much held since the Revolutionary War, when 49 of the very first U.S. Marines of our country died in combat. Their mission was aboard ship; there are still Marines who serve at sea.

There are others who fly and maintain jets and helicopters, man the artillery, operate tanks and trucks, feed and supply the troops, compute and collate, train and inspect, march and make music, recruit, guard and escort, radio and communicate, patrol and snipe, as well as save tsunami, earthquake and other disaster victims around the world, collect toys at Christmastime for American kids in need, stage a marathon run through Washington, D.C., for charity, or do whatever else needs to be done, particularly if the need is for it to be done well and be done immediately.

We are the Marines. And in the language of the rifle range, we are always ready on the right, ready on the left, all ready on the firing line, whatever kind of firing is required, and wherever that line may be.

"A Witch's Brew: The Gutmann Affair and Middle East Studies," is the title of my latest column for the Washington Examiner. It represents my most recent thoughts about a story that was broken on this blog and at Campus Watch.

I place Gutmann's infamous photo against the background of contemporary Middle East studies, which, as practiced in universities, are morally and intellectually bankrupt.

Pull quote:

Until real suicide bombers are met with the same moral and intellectual opprobrium meted out to history's other odious actors, be they Adolf Hitler or Pol Pot, Klansmen, slave traders, or the guards at Auschwitz, we'll continue to pay a heavy price through a weakened ability to withstand the threats from violent jihadists.

A friend just forwarded this to me. I searched for a url. This essay is from Pat Conroy's book, My Losing Season.

End your evening, or start your morning, by reading this………and give thanks for our heroes and for those who are honest enough to see the errors of their ways.

Several of Pat Conroy's novels have been made into great movies -- The Prince of Tides, The Great Santini, and The Lords of Discipline. He lives on Fripp Island , South Carolina. This article is a most touching piece, and most appropriate in this time when so many Americans appear to be confused over what great causes are worth fighting for... more importantly, what great causes are worth dying for. I know it is a long story, but you will not regret taking the time to read it. -----------------------------------------------------

An Honest Confession by an American Coward by Pat Conroy

The true things always ambush me on the road and take me by surprise when I am drifting down the light of placid days, careless about flanks and rearguard actions. I was not looking for a true thing to come upon me in the state of New Jersey. Nothing has ever happened to me in New Jersey. But came it did, and it came to stay. In the past four years I have been interviewing my teammates on the 1966-67 basketball team at the Citadel for a book I'm writing. For the most part, this has been like buying back a part of my past that I had mislaid or shut out of my life. At first I thought I was writing about being young and frisky and able to run up and down a court all day long, but lately I realized I came to this book because I needed to come to grips with being middle-aged and having ripened into a gray-haired man you could not trust to handle the ball on a fast break.

When I visited my old teammate Al Kroboth's house in New Jersey, I spent the first hours quizzing him about his memories of games and practices and the screams of coaches that had echoed in field houses more than 30 years before. Al had been a splendid forward-center for the Citadel; at 6 feet 5 inches and carrying 220 pounds, he played with indefatigable energy and enthusiasm. For most of his senior year, he led the nation in field-goal percentage, with UCLA center Lew Alcindor (Kareem Abdul-Jabar) hot on his trail. Al was a battler and a brawler and a scrapper from the day he first stepped in as a Green Weenie as a sophomore to the day he graduated.

After we talked basketball, we came to a subject I dreaded to bring up with Al, but which lay between us and would not lie still. "Al, you know I was a draft dodger and antiwar demonstrator." "That's what I heard, Conroy," Al said. "I have nothing against what you did, but I did what I thought was right." "Tell me about Vietnam, big Al. Tell me what happened to you," I said.

On his seventh mission as a navigator in an A-6 for Major Leonard Robertson, Al was getting ready to deliver their payload when the fighter-bomber was hit by enemy fire. Though Al has no memory of it, he punched out somewhere in the middle of the ill-fated dive and lost consciousness. He doesn't know if he was unconscious for six hours or six days, nor does he know what happened to Major Robertson (whose name is engraved on the Wall in Washington and on the MIA bracelet Al wears).

When Al awoke, he couldn't move. A Viet Cong soldier held an AK-47 to his head. His back and his neck were broken, and he had shattered his left scapula in the fall. When he was well enough to get to his feet (he still can't recall how much time had passed), two armed Viet Cong led Al from the jungles of South Vietnam to a prison in Hanoi. The journey took three months. Al Kroboth walked barefooted through the most impassable terrain in Vietnam, and he did it sometimes in the dead of night. He bathed when it rained, and he slept in bomb craters with his two Viet Cong captors. As they moved farther north, infections began to erupt on his body, and his legs were covered with leeches picked up while crossing the rice paddies.

At the very time of Al's walk, I had a small role in organizing the only antiwar demonstration ever held in Beaufort, South Carolina, the home of Parris Island and the Marine Corps Air Station. In a Marine Corps town at that time, it was difficult to come up with a quorum of people who had even minor disagreements about the Vietnam War. But my small group managed to attract a crowd of about 150 to Beaufort's waterfront.

With my mother and my wife on either side of me, we listened to the featured speaker, Dr. Howard Levy, suggest to the very few young enlisted Marines present that if they get sent to Vietnam, here's how they can help end this war: Roll a grenade under your officer's bunk when he's asleep in his tent. It's called "fragging" and is becoming more and more popular with the ground troops who know this war is bullshit. I was enraged by the suggestion. At that very moment my father, a Marine officer, was asleep in Vietnam. But in 1972, at the age of 27, I thought I was serving America 's interests by pointing out what massive flaws and miscalculations and corruptions had led her to conduct a ground war in Southeast Asia .

In the meantime, Al and his captors had finally arrived in the North, and the Viet Cong traded him to North Vietnamese soldiers for the final leg of the trip to Hanoi. Many times when they stopped to rest for the night, the local villagers tried to kill him. His captors wired his hands behind his back at night, so he trained himself to sleep in the center of huts when the villagers began sticking knives and bayonets into the thin walls. Following the U.S. air raids, old women would come into the huts to excrete on him and yank out hunks of his hair. After the nightmare journey of his walk north, Al was relieved when his guards finally delivered him to the POW camp in Hanoi and the cell door locked behind him. It was at the camp that Al began to die. He threw up every meal he ate and before long was misidentified as the oldest American soldier in the prison because his appearance was so gaunt and skeletal.

But the extraordinary camaraderie among fellow prisoners that sprang up in all the POW camps caught fire in Al, and did so in time to save his life. When I was demonstrating in America against Nixon and the Christmas bombings in Hanoi, Al and his fellow prisoners were holding hands under the full fury of those bombings, singing "God Bless America." It was those bombs that convinced Hanoi they would do well to release the American POWs, including my college teammate.

When he told me about the C-141 landing in Hanoi to pick up the prisoners, Al said he felt no emotion, none at all, until he saw the giant American flag painted on the plane's tail. I stopped writing as Al wept over the memory of that flag on that plane, on that morning, during that time in the life of America .

It was that same long night, after listening to Al's story, that I began to make judgments about how I had conducted myself during the Vietnam War. In the darkness of the sleeping Kroboth household, lying in the third-floor guest bedroom, I began to assess my role as a citizen in the '60s, when my country called my name and I shot her the bird. Unlike the stupid boys who wrapped themselves in Viet Cong flags and burned the American one, I knew how to demonstrate against the war without flirting with treason or astonishingly bad taste. I had come directly from the warrior culture of this country and I knew how to act.

But in the 25 years that have passed since South Vietnam fell, I have immersed myself in the study of totalitarianism during the unspeakable century we just left behind. I have questioned survivors of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, talked to Italians who told me tales of the Nazi occupation, French partisans who had counted German tanks in the forests of Normandy, and officers who survived the Bataan Death March. I quiz journalists returning from wars in Bosnia, the Sudan, the Congo, Angola, Indonesia, Guatemala, San Salvador, Chile, Northern Ireland, Algeria.

As I lay sleepless, I realized I'd done all this research to better understand my country. I now revere words like democracy, freedom, the right to vote, and the grandeur of the extraordinary vision of the founding fathers. Do I see America's flaws? Of course. But I now can honor her basic, incorruptible virtues, the ones that let me walk the streets screaming my ass off that my country had no idea what it was doing in South Vietnam. My country let me scream to my heart's content - the same country that produced both Al Kroboth and me.

Now, at this moment in New Jersey, I come to a conclusion about my actions as a young man when Vietnam was a dirty word to me. I wish I'd led a platoon of Marines in Vietnam. I would like to think I would have trained my troops well and that the Viet Cong would have had their hands full if they entered a firefight with us. From the day of my birth, I was programmed to enter the Marine Corps. I was the son of a Marine fighter pilot, and I had grown up on Marine bases where I had watched the men of the corps perform simulated war games in the forests of my childhood. That a novelist and poet bloomed darkly in the house of Santini strikes me as a remarkable irony. My mother and father had raised me to be an Al Kroboth, and during the Vietnam era they watched in horror as I metamorphosed into another breed of fanatic entirely. I understand now that I should have protested the war after my return from Vietnam, after I had done my duty for my country. I have come to a conclusion about my country that I knew then in my bones but lacked the courage to act on: America is good enough to die for even when she is wrong.

I looked for some conclusion, a summation of this trip to my teammate's house. I wanted to come to the single right thing, a true thing that I may not like but that I could live with. After hearing Al Kroboth's story of his walk across Vietnam and his brutal imprisonment in the North, I found myself passing harrowing, remorseless judgment on myself. I had not turned out to be the man I had once envisioned myself to be. I thought I would be the kind of man that America could point to and say, "There. That's the guy. That's the one who got it right. The whole package. The one I can depend on." It had never once occurred to me that I would find myself in the position I did on that night in Al Kroboth's house in Roselle , New Jersey... an American coward spending the night with an American hero.

______________________________

Here's more about Al Kroboth from the POW Network.

If you’re busy fretting about which Washington fool is filling which leadership post, then you may want to look in the mirror. Not only did we elect them, but when our politicians make the entire country appear like fools before the world, we acquiesce. Between avaricious profiteers and those who see an opportunity to continue their '60's kowtowing, human rights are being traded for a handful of false promises.

A current Vietnamese internal document was just obtained that displays Vietnam’s ongoing persecution of minorities, and the U.S. knows better but ignores the evidence.

That’s exactly what’s happening right now with respect to the United States looking the other way as the Vietnamese overlords tantalize Western businesses with profits from young, cheap Vietnamese labor, promising respect for human rights while doing the opposite. The U.S. State Department ignored the advice of the Congressionally established independent, bipartisan U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom and, to polish President Bush’s visit to Hanoi on November 17, removed Vietnam from the list of nations that severely restrict religious freedom.

Yesterday, I received a copy of a current internal Vietnamese document that describes how “irregular” (read, unsubservient Christian and Buddhist) denominations are to be treated: "treat them severely and denounce them to the citizens." I was not familiar with the source, a British human rights organization via an evangelical group, so I held off on passing it on.

Human Rights Watch, apparently verifying it, has issued its text and issued the following:

(New York, November 14, 2006)
World leaders should continue to press Vietnam on human rights, religious freedom and political reforms when they meet in Hanoi this week for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit, Human Rights Watch said today. "Vietnam's economic progress has rightfully earned the praise of donors," said Sophie Richardson, deputy director of the Asia Division of Human Rights Watch. "But APEC delegates shouldn't assume that those gains have translated into greater respect for human rights."

Despite the high-profile release on Monday of a Vietnamese-American woman arrested for allegedly plotting to air anti-government radio broadcasts, Vietnam's track record on basic human rights remains abysmal, Human Rights Watch said.

Hundreds of political prisoners remain behind bars in harsh conditions. Dissidents who use the internet to advocate greater human rights are jailed. Nguyen Vu Binh, 38, is serving a seven-year sentence largely in solitary confinement for espionage after submitting written testimony about human rights in Vietnam to the US Congress in 2002 and circulating articles critical of the Vietnamese government on the internet. Truong Quoc Huy, 25, was detained in 2005 for more than eight months after participating in internet discussions about democracy. He was re-arrested in an internet caf� on August 18, 2006. He had reportedly expressed public support for the democracy movement.

Vietnamese workers are forbidden from organizing unions that are independent of the government. In 2006, hundreds of thousands of workers initiated wildcat strikes to demand independent unions, the right to bargain collectively, wage increases, and better working conditions.

Vietnamese law also continues to ban publications that oppose the government, and lists more than 2,000 prohibited activities in the area of culture and information, such as revealing party secrets or circulating "harmful" information. Internet caf� owners are required to monitor their customers' internet usage to make sure they do not access sites banned by the government. Demonstrations in front of places where government, party and international conferences are held are illegal.

"Free markets depend on free access to information," said Richardson. "If APEC is aiming for equitable development and common standards, its delegates should be pushing for the maximum � not the minimum � freedom of information across all their members."
Although they face state reprisals, activists are pushing ahead for reform in Vietnam. In the past six months, more than 2,000 people from different parts of the country have signed on to unprecedented public appeals calling for respect of basic human rights, a multiparty political system, and freedom of religion and political association. The government has responded with harassment; detaining, interrogating and confiscating documents and computers from many of the more prominent activists.

Despite the US lifting its designation of Vietnam as a "country of particular concern" for abuses of the right to religious freedom, Buddhist monks from the banned Unified Buddhist Church of Vietnam, including its Supreme Patriarch, Thich Huyen Quang, and second-ranking leader, Thich Quang Do, remained confined to their monasteries. Members of ethnic minority Christian churches in the northern and central highlands continue to be harassed and pressured to recant their faith.

Citizen complaint petitions and an internal government training document recently obtained by Human Rights Watch show how the Vietnamese government continues to treat certain religions with intense suspicion, as "hostile forces" that abuse religion to create political strife. The government document, entitled "Training Document: Concerning the Task of the Protestant Religion in the Northern Mountainous Region," is available online in Vietnamese here, along with an unofficial English translation here.

The government training document, issued in 2006 by the government's Central Bureau of Religious Affairs, instructs local cadre to limit and control the spread of Christianity among ethnic minority people in the north, calling on them to coerce forced recantations of religion by new converts who practice religion "irregularly" and whose faith is not yet "firmly established." This policy is in violation of international human rights conventions that Vietnam has signed, as well as national legislation it enacted in 2004 in order to address religious freedom concerns by the United States.

Petitions recently smuggled out of Vietnam describe arbitrary arrests and ongoing persecution of ethnic minority Christians in the central highlands, as well as difficulties for churches to register with the government. The wife of a Christian pastor in Dak Nong province wrote that interrogation and arrest on suspicion of plotting a demonstration or supporting the unauthorized "Dega" religion can be sparked by communicating with friends abroad on a mobile phone, receiving money from family overseas, or taking a sick relative to Ho Chi Minh City for treatment. Police regularly use pressure tactics and physical violence, she wrote in a complaint petition to local authorities obtained by Human Rights Watch:
"As a matter of course, the investigating police beat individuals who they pick up and use the methods of their profession to wrap up the file as soon as possible: they play on the fears of their relatives, on their limited education, and inadequate knowledge of Vietnamese [language]. The investigating officers threaten, coax, make promises, and even write the confession for their relatives to sign or do the rough draft for the person to copy and then force him to sign. This happened to the wives of [two men], who were forced to sign confessions before their husbands were released."

Human Rights Watch calls on APEC delegates to publicly raise these human rights violations with Vietnamese officials, and to press for amendments to the Labor and Criminal Codes to strengthen protections of freedom of expression, assembly and association. Human Rights Watch also urges APEC members to reiterate their expectations that Vietnam will abide by its commitments as it agreed to when it ratified the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights in 1982.

"Vietnam is on its best behavior while it's under the international spotlight," said Richardson. "But what will happen after the trade deals are signed and the APEC delegates go home? The world will be watching to see if Vietnam will demonstrate a new tolerance for dissent and criticism, or whether it will revert to business as usual."

AND, here’s Freedom House’s Center for Religious Freedom compilation of other “Official Secret Vietnamese Documents on How to Arrest the Spread of Christianity and Other Evidence of Religious Persecution.”

There’s continuing arguments whether the new verb “swiftboating” means a baseless or a well-founded attack on a politician’s purported record. As used by the MSM, it usually infers any attack that liberals disagree with, regardless of facts.

The MSM may have to reconsider its use of the term after John Murtha’s latest use of the term to distract from his trail.

"I thought we were above this type of swift-boating attack," he said… "This is not how we restore integrity and civility to the United States Congress."

John Fund punctures Murtha’s pompous posture with facts as surely as John O’Neill did John Kerry’s. This time, however, with so many of Murtha’s Congressional colleagues being witness to Murtha’s self-awarded earmarks, the MSM must pay closer attention and investigate than their purposeful ignoring of Kerry’s lies when exposed by his fellow Swiftees.

Speaking of which, the embarrassment that is Murtha should end up as shuffled aside as Kerry was today, being booted from the Democrat’s Senate leadership photo. Kerry, however, all puns intended, was appointed to chair the Senate’s Small Business and Entrepreneurship Committee, fitting for someone who is such small business and whose bio epitomized entrepreneurial invention. By this portent, Murtha will end up heading some corruption committee, either before the House bar or behind real ones.

Tuesday, November 14, 2006
Bravo, Claudia. Bravo Ambassador Bolton.
Posted by Hugh Hewitt | 12:04 AM

If Ambassador Bolton is refused an up-or-down vote by the Senate, I will join Claudia in the necessary fund-raising drive to collect and donate his salary to him.

I heard a lecture by the New York Times' James Traub at the Newberry Library in Chicago yesterday that convinced me Bolton is the greatest thing to happen to the U.N. since Ambassador Kirkpatrick. If Lincoln Chafee's seemingly infinite mediocrity prevents Bolton from having an up-or-down vote in the Senate, President Bush should again use his recess appointment power to keep Bolton at his post. ( I believe but am not certain that President Clinton followed this path with Bill Lann Lee.) Bolton would then serve without formal pay, but as Claudia notes, there are thousands of Americans willing to help keep him at his post if the president is willing to do so. Some third party would have to emerge as a trustee for the donations so that Bolton was unaware of who had donated to the cause, but that's the detail stuff. President Bush has an opportunity to signal seriousness when it comes to his authority over the Executive Branch. I hope he does so.

Email President Bush that you will contribute to Bolton’s salary. president@whitehouse.gov

HT: Larwyn

The bill to provide preferred trade status to Vietnam failed to clear the House of Representatives. Under accelerated procedure two-thirds approval was needed to provide President Bush with this beneficence during his trip to Hanoi in four-days for the Asian-Pacific Economic Cooperation meeting. Vietnam’s “new class” of government-sanctioned capitalists and Western businesses eager to profit are disappointed, and House Republican leaders are chagrined that a third of Republicans voted against, while Democrats could only muster 90 pro-votes. (Roll call is here.)

At work was both recognition that Vietnam’s human rights record is still execrable, along with a lack of rush to further increase the U.S. trade deficit – already running about $7-billion negative with Vietnam – by another several billion.

Surely, also weighing on the vote was the deplorable action by the State Department to ignore the realities of continuing religious persecution in Vietnam – and the appeal of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), a bipartisan, independent federal agency created by Congress, to not do so -- by removing Vietnam from the list of nations that severely restrict religious freedoms, in order to further President Bush’s photo-op in Hanoi.

The Los Angeles Times’ looks for “a hint” of increased freedom in Vietnam. This is an awfully faint hint:

Tran Ngoc Ha crouched on a small blue plastic stool in a grove of woods a dozen miles outside the noisy bustle of the city. In his gamble to bring political change to his tightly controlled communist homeland, he knew it was the only place safe enough to talk freely.

To shake the ever-present government agents, the underground newspaper publisher had insisted that a Western reporter travel four hours on a circuitous route — beginning at 4 a.m., going by cab and motorcycle, reciting various code phrases ("Do you want coffee?" "No, I'd rather be fishing.") along the way.

Speaking softly and keeping a vigilant eye, he said his covert army of resistors finally sees hope amid the gloom: Several political parties have recently formed in Vietnam without seeking government approval — a sure sign, he says, that the Communists are slowly losing their iron grip on Vietnamese culture and thought.

"This is a breakthrough," said Ha, who is so fearful of being identified by the government that he insisted on using a pseudonym. "One group declaration drew 118 signatures from inside Vietnam, brave people who gave their names and addresses. Before this year, they would either be in jail or be dead."

How long will that 118 remain unpersecuted after the APEC meetings are over? Not long.

Can we expect the Los Angeles Times to follow-up? Not likely.

Can we expect the House’s Republican leaders to bring the trade bill up again in a few days under ordinary procedures where a bare majority can be enough to pass it? Bet on it.

Can those here and abroad who care about freedom be encouraged? No.

UPDATE:
The Montagnard Foundation would like to know “Is Trade More Important Than Human Rights?”

According to the New York Times:

The White House still hopes for the bill’s approval in the next couple of days so that Mr. Bush can cite its passage as a milestone in relations with Vietnam while attending the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation summit meeting in Hanoi.

I’d say it would be more a milestone in mercantile immorality.

WHY DID THE STATE DEPARTMENT REMOVE VIETNAM FROM THE RELIGIOUS WATCH LIST AHEAD OF BUSH’S VISIT TO HANOI?
IS TRADE MORE IMPORTANT THAN HUMAN RIGHTS?

TROOPS SURROUND VILLAGES, MONTAGNARD HOUSE CHURCH CHRISTIANS ARRESTED, TORTURED, ONE HOUSE CHRISTIAN KILLED AND HANGED


BACKGROUND: The indigenous Montagnard Degar Peoples have suffered decades of persecution by the Vietnamese communist government, namely; confiscation of their ancestral lands, Christian religious repression, torture, killings and imprisonment. To date over 350 Degar prisoners remain in Vietnamese prisons for merely standing up for their human rights, for spreading Christianity or for fleeing to Cambodia repression inside the Central Highlands is continuing at an alarming rate ahead of President Bush’s visit to the APEC summit in Hanoi.

President George Bush is scheduled to attend the Asian Economic Cooperation Forum (APEC) summit this week from 17 November 2006 in Hanoi, Vietnam. The Montagnard Foundation has received information from its people inside the Central Highlands of Vietnam over the last few weeks that Vietnamese authorities have increased the mobilization of soldiers to the region. Hundreds of villagers report soldiers stationed at their villages. Further, in the last few weeks and months, the Vietnamese security police have confiscated mobile cell phones from numerous Montagnard Degar people, often beating and torturing these people. Arrests, torture and one reported killing have occurred in the last few weeks. Some villages report that troops occupy the village while others report soldiers stationed surrounding the village. In some cases smaller groups of soldiers have been stationed at the village who are prepared to radio for reinforcements. The villagers report the soldiers and security police have threatened to shoot any Montagnards who attempt to leave these villages or speak to foreigners about what is happening.

VILLAGES OCCUPIED BY SOLDIERS & POLICE IN DAK LAK PROVINCE
On 5 November 2006 the Vietnamese government sent soldiers to occupy the following Degar villages in Daklak province where they remain to this day:

1. Buon Sut Hluot village, district Cu Mgar has stationed 20 police and 20 soldiers.
2. Buon Tring village, district Krong Buk, has stationed 20 police and 30 soldiers.
3. Buon Ea Hmlai village, district Mdrak, has stationed 10 police and 30 soldiers.
4. Buon Moak village, district Mdrak, has stationed 10 police and 30 soldiers.
5. Buon Cuoi village, district Krong Ana, has stationed 20 police and 30 soldiers.
6. Buon Cam village, district Krong Ana, has stationed 20 police and 30 soldiers.
7. Buon Ea Tieu village district Krong Ana, has stationed 20 police.
8. Buon Drec village, district Buon Don, has stationed 30 police.
9. Buon Cuor Knia village, district Buon Don, has stationed 20 police & 30 soldiers.
10. Buon Emap village, district Cu Mgar, has stationed 30 police.
11. Buon Cuor Hdang village, district Cu Mgar, has stationed 30 police & 30 soldiers.
12. Buon Ea Khit village, district Krong Ana, has stationed 20 police.
13. Buon Cu Mblim village, district Krong Ana, has stationed 20 police.
14. Buon Tong Ju village, district Krong Ana, has stationed 20 police.
15. Buon Sup village, district Ea Sup, has stationed 30 police.
16. Buon Don village, district Buon Don, has stationed 30 police.

HOUSE CHURCH CHRISTIAN ABDUCTED, MURDERED & HANGED
On October 22, 2006 at around 8pm a Montagnard Christian named Moi went to the latrine outside of his village. He failed to return. The entire village searched for him but could not find him. Later that next morning two Vietnamese police named Can and Thai, came to the village and told the villagers Moi was dead and hanging from a tree about 1km from the village. The whole village rushed to where the police said his body was and found Moi hanging on a tree tied up with Vietnamese military issue shoestrings. Moi’s skull was cracked, both arms broken and his body was covered in bruises and cutmarks. People from his village reported that Vietnamese officials had long hated Moi because he was a Christian who refused to join the official church.

ARRESTED BY POLICE: WHEREABOUTS UNKNOWN:
On October 15, 2006 police from Dak Mil district, Dak Nong province arrested three of our Christian Brothers from their village of Buon Jun Yuh because they are Christians who refused to join the government church. Their current whereabouts and state of health remain unknown. Their names are as follows:

· Y-Tai, age 27 from Buon Jun Yuh village, commune Duc Minh, district Dak Mil, province Dak Nong.
· Y- Huyen, age 28 from Buon Jun Yuh village, commune Duc Minh, district Dak Mil, province Dak Nong.
· Y-Nhat, age 23 from Buon Jun Yuh village, commune Duc Minh, district Dak Mil, province Dak Nong.

ARRESTED BY POLICE: WHEREABOUTS UNKNOWN:
On October 13, 2006 police from Dak Mil district, Dak Nong province arrested two of our Christian Brothers from Buon Jun Yuh village because they refused to join the government church. Their whereabouts and state of health remain unknown. Their names are as follows:

· Chuan, age 26 from Buon Jun Yuh village, commune Duc Minh, district Dak Mil, province Dak Nong.
· Y- Ntun, age 24 from Buon Jun Yuh village, commune Duc Minh, district Dak Mil, province Dak Nong.

TORTURED BY POLICE NAMED NGUYEN VAN THANG AND LAM
On October 9, 2006 two Vietnamese police, named Nguyen Van Thang, Duc and Lam arrested our Christian Brother named Y-Leng Ya while he was riding his tractor to join his relatives for rice harvest at his farm. The police tortured him by beating him with their fists and kicking him until he passed out. Witnesses said blood was coming out of his mouth, nose, ears and the police threw him on their jeep and took him to the prison in Cu Jut district. The police accused him of wanting to escape to Cambodia. He remains in police custody and the condition of his health remains unknown.
ARRESTED BY POLICE: WHEREABOUTS UNKNOWN:
On September 30, 2006 the police from Dak Mil district, Dak Nong province arrested Montagnard Christian Brother from his village of Buon Dak Mler because he is a Christian who refused to join the government church. His whereabouts and state of his health, remains unknown. His name is as follows.

· Ngram, age 46 from Buon Dak Mler village, Duc Minh commune, Dak Mil district. Dak Nong province.


THE MONTAGNARD FOUNDATION CALLS ON THE US PRESIDENT, THE US STATE DEPARTMENT AND ALL THE PARTICPANTS OF APEC:

Ø To urgently raise the ongoing human rights violations of the Montagnard People with the Vietnamese government in order to create a permanent solution to this issue.

Ø To urgently demand the Vietnam government releases all the 350 Degar Prisoners identified in the Human Rights Watch report of 14 June 2006. http://www.hrw.org/english/docs/2006/06/14/vietna13542.htm

Ø To urgently demand that Vietnam permits a permanent humanitarian presence in the Central Highlands by US, UN and international NGOs.

The defense of the Republican’s losses in the 2006 House races sounds like that corruption-tainted candidates only looked and acted like tramps but have good hearts and come from a good family. Another exercise in moral myopia is to remind us that the other girls are also tramps, Democrats acting similarly.

In fact, both parties have tolerated moral sleaziness, fed by the temptations of big monies floating through their hands from big government. Basic morality, however, does not provide any cover for temptation leading astray.

Sure, the Soros-funded CREW added fuel to the fire targeted at Republicans, and unfairly or not the major media jumped on and stayed on their stories. But, CREW’s opportunity to do so was, at least, presented on a platter by Republican leaders’ indifference.

Karl Rove expresses surprise and realizes that his and other Republicans’ blind spot handed the balance to the Democrats. But, such recognition only goes as far as ruing the electoral result of indifference, not the underlying sources of indifference – more concern with power than its moral uses – and the underlying source of temptation – big government. (See “Captain” Ed Morrissey’s essay on First Principles.)

As any sane parent would say, I don’t care what the other girls do, I care about what you do. We must act like real parents to our misguided children running the Republican Party.

Our very health may suffer the most lasting domestic damage that may come from the Democrat ascension in Congress. While those abroad who aspire to a better life, or their very survival, tremble at what foreign resolve weakening is in store, Americans must also tremble.

The San Diego Union-Tribune’s editorial today succinctly summarizes the “Health Peril.”

UNION-TRIBUNE EDITORIAL
Health peril: Victorious politicians want to fix the system November 12, 2006

The biggest winners in last week's election, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and House Speaker-in-waiting Nancy Pelosi, each promised swift government action on health care. This lifted our blood pressure a few points.

America's system of delivering health care is far from perfect, and politicians love to court voters by complaining about it. However, it is by far the world's best. The greatest risk is that poor government policies will destroy it.

Rapidly rising costs are indeed troubling. Yet American health care is still a great deal, notes Harvard health economics guru David Cutler. A baby born in 1950 could expect to live 68 years, and society spent the equivalent in today's dollars of $500 per person on health care. Babies born today may live to 78 on average, while costs have surged to nearly $6,000 per person.

Most of that extra spending goes to heart surgeries, cancer treatments and highly effective drugs that didn't exist in 1950. We'll happily pay $5,500 a year to live an extra decade. Speaker Pelosi doesn't share such gratitude.

Her plan to “fix” health care is thin gruel, consisting mainly of expanding federal subsidies to middle-class seniors. She plans to pay for it all by “negotiating” lower prices on drugs.

This would send costs soaring for the majority of Americans who are too young to go on the dole, or it would force pharmaceutical firms to slash research budgets. In other words, we've got our cholesterol-lowering drugs, so let's create a government price-fixing conspiracy that would deprive our children of similar innovations.

Last week this newspaper reported that biotechs invest a staggering $1.2 billion to invent each new cure. Nobody will gamble so much cash if government removes the hope of profits.

Tragically, Gov. Schwarzenegger blazed this trail with a law that uses Medi-Cal to impose prices on drug companies. All is not lost, however. The governor has convened a panel of experts to shape new policies due in January. Odds are good he will invoke his model that rescued California's dying workers' compensation system – reliance on objective medical standards and market forces to attack inefficiency and coax solutions from private insurers and health care providers.

As for Pelosi, here's a chance for Democrats to embrace market-based reforms. The GOP Congress failed to give individuals the same tax deductions for insurance premiums that companies receive. And Republicans abandoned a bill to let small businesses shop out of state for coverage.

Meanwhile, entrepreneurs are racing against the likes of Wal-Mart, Target and Home Depot to offer consumers low-cost medicines, walk-in clinics and health coverage. Pelosi says a government takeover would be more efficient. If she believes that, we have a bridge to nowhere to sell her.

A sample of the utter ignorance that passes for health care reform among those whose prescriptions are favored by most Democrats was on display in this major newspaper’s article on “New drug price tag: $1.2 billion.”

The Tufts University affiliated Center for the Study of Drug Development reports it costs “about $1.2 billion per new medicine” and takes 97.7 months “to get a complex biologic therapy through human testing and regulatory review,” after however many years it takes to invent the drug treatment.

The response by the health care policy director for the Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights, which seems to have never seen a health care need that couldn’t be better run by government bureaucrats, is that drug companies somehow don’t have to pay banks and investors for the funds and the 10+ years of risk to develop a drug.

Flanagan took exception to the report's $1.2 billion “average capitalized cost” per biotech product. The capitalized cost calculates both the cash spent by a biotech in developing a drug and the implicit cost to investors of having funds expended for years before there is a return.

In terms of real out-of-pocket cash spent by biotechs per approved new biotech drug, the figure was $559 million, according to the Tufts study.

“The data the drug industry produces for these studies is highly questionable,” Flanagan said. “And the capitalization of investment income is totally irrelevant to the cost of a drug; to count that with the cost of a drug is inexcusable.

This is the sort of illogic that drives the government-run health care zealots, and that will drive the rest of us into antiquated medical treatments, after a long rationed wait for a doctor or nurse who didn’t come from the cream of the crop as the financial rewards are limited to a government salary.

Cork the champagne and Pepto-Bismol, Democrats and Republicans, and stop trying to reach your back to pat, independents and moderates: The world is still turning in the same directions. We’d better pay attention, quick, and act responsibly, or there won’t be enough indigestions and blame to pass around.

Read the rest of my column, in today’s Washington Examiner.

My thanks to Tom Bevan of the invaluable RealClearPolitics for doing my post-election work for me by analyzing the results of the Democrats' "Fightin' Dems" effort. (Also see the details by Beltway Blogroll's Danny Glover.)

I first wrote about this cynical deception that at best it may influence some marginal votes, and continued to follow the story as this Howard Dean-Kos enterprise morphed through several incarnations to finally be lambasted by even FactCheck.org for its "completely erroneous and scurrilous attack" ads.

Here's my record:
The Democrats' '06 replay of veterans gambit

Dems Cynical Veterans Politics 2006

“Band of Brothers” Redux

Democrats’ 2006 National Security Strategy

Dem Vets Get No Respect

The Veterans Who Couldn't Shoot Straight

Tom Bevans answers, "how did the Fightin' Dems do?":

Was there any discernable benefit to the strategy of recruiting candidates with military service in their background?...the answer seems to be a pretty clear "no." ...

There's really no indication that the status of being a veteran helped any of the winners. Conversely, it's not at all clear in the races "Fightin' Dems" lost that another candidate without military service wouldn't have run equally as well or better....

There is one exception. I think you could make a persuasive argument that Jim Webb's status as a decorated war veteran made just enough of a difference in Virginia to prove decisive.

As we approach the true Veterans Day on November 11, it's good to note that neither are we veterans to be used or fools, nor are we to be treated as "Tommies."

For it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' "Chuck him out, the brute!"
But it's "Saviour of 'is country" when the guns begin to shoot;
An' it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' anything you please;
An' Tommy ain't a bloomin' fool — you bet that Tommy sees!
--Rudyard Kipling

As the official Veterans Day poster for 2006 says:

We aren't to be discarded, nor are strategies -- domestic or in war -- to treat lightly the impact on morale of our efforts being wasted or abandoned, under whatever smooth talk may be weaseled out over coming months.

PLEASE do your part, both in the coming debates, and in helping our brave men and women through the many charitable and support efforts you'll find at this page, Military Connection, and this current successful blog campaign.

In an effort to encourage the conservative base, Bruce Kesler managed to find the silver lining in the ominous cloud of Republican losses. His optimistic assessment of the midterm election outcomes managed to lift my spirits a bit.

I attended last night's victory party for State Senator Padavan (R-NY) stuffing my face with potato dumpling hors d'oeuvres and finger foods to try and quell my growing sense of depression. With his substantial campaign war chest, he could have at least thrown a better party for his massive army of volunteers. State legislative elections where the non-aggression zones are in effect guarantee an easy victory, which was the case for this 34 year incumbent running against an unknown young lawyer from Queens, NY. Fortuitously, Raquel Walker's timely letter dealing with this phenomenon was published in this morning’s New York Post:

Pataki should be blamed for not building his party and for not grooming a replacement Republican governor.... Formidable candidates John Spencer and John Faso were abandoned from the start. Nonaggression pacts kept party leaders off the streets and enthusiasm at an all-time low. The liberal press worked against them or ignored their qualifications altogether.

Yet, a group of Republicans and Conservatives from Queens did not turn their backs on the candidates, no matter what the odds. We campaigned for weeks, boosting support, because we agree with you - politicians should be tough on crime, concerned about national security and lowering taxes. The difference is that we did not jump ship.
Raquel Walker
Flushing

New York's "one-party system" that guarantees incumbency, is corrupt and unconscionable, but more about that later.

During this morning's commute to work, as I tuned to 1600AM WWRL the Morning Show, with Sam Greenfield and Armstrong Williams, I heard an interview with Charles Rangel who was gloating in victory as the new 2007 chairman of the House Ways and Means committee and calling for a pull out of our troops in Iraq in light of the so-called public referendum against Bush's "stay the course" policy in Iraq. I called in to speak to the Congressman. I missed the opportunity to speak to him directly but I was able to give the audience an earful about the ominous world that lies ahead should we prematurely pull out of Iraq.

Charles Rangel voted against all of the president’s tax cuts including the capital gains and dividend income tax cuts and wants to summarily overturn them. The only thing optimistic I can find in the impending state of affairs now that we’ve lost both the House and Senate majorities to a party of appeasers and socialists is the frustration and disappointment of Republicans who will hopefully wake up and get to work to build our party. This frustration should impel us to stand together now as Republicans of libertarian and conservative persuasion and find common ground in our shared core values. We have to mount the task of putting egos aside and stop splitting hairs. It’s a shame that there are two rival young Republican clubs in New York City both with the same name! It's an outrage that we have gerrymandered districts and non-agression pacts with Democrats. We have to come together to challenge the corruption of the party leadership and bluebloods that are holding our party down and keeping New York State government the most dysfunctional in the nation. We must do this for sake of our country and the greater good as I was discussing tonight with my young Republican friend Michael Solomon. We have our work cut out for us.

Scott Johnson, advisor to the Montagnard Foundation (scottj@mail2me.com.au) writes the following guest column.

THE GHOSTS OF DAK SON: AMERICA’S HONOUR DEMANDS THAT PRESIDENT BUSH “REMEMBER THE MONTAGNARDS”

The import of this column is not just about the American and world abandonment of the Montagnards. Iraqis who've sided with the U.S., or in opposition to jihadists, are also looking askance at the U.S. as so many here thinly veil their bug-out intentions. President Bush remembering the Montagnards next week will be seen as encouragement, also, to our allies or non-enemies in Iraq. Either the American word is worth something, or not, and those who pay the price can tell the difference.

This November 17, 2006 President Bush will visit Vietnam for the annual Asian Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit. To many this may seem another step forward to bury the past and an opportunity to expand trade and diplomatic ties between two old foes. However, the collective honour of the United States will be carried there with President Bush and America’s honour will either be sold on the chopping block or heralded as a force to champion humanity. This collective honour however, is not apparent to many as it has unfortunately been buried in the deceitful myths of the Vietnam War.

Few Americans, in fact few people anywhere in the world have ever heard of the Montagnards, the indigenous highland tribes of Vietnam’s Central Highlands. Fewer people still, know of their fate during the Vietnam War, let alone the persecution these peoples have suffered since the communist takeover of South Vietnam. One of the reasons is because the media historically never bothered reporting on the Montagnards. Another is that in 1975 the communist government sealed the Central Highlands off from international scrutiny. In fact Vietnam continues today in 2006 to impede international monitors from investigating human rights abuses committed against these people and media watchdogs such as Reporters Without Borders has identified Vietnam as one the most restrictive nations in the world concerning freedom of the press.

However, it is historic fact that at any one time during the Vietnam War an estimated 40,000 Montagnards served with the US military as allies in the fight against communism. It is also a historic fact that these ancient peoples had their world obliterated during the war resulting in an estimated 200,000 Montagnards being killed, roughly one quarter of their entire population. The perception of the Vietnam War would however, leave a dark stain on American foreign policy. The media bares much responsibility for this, showing a deadly ambivalence towards reporting human rights abuses committed by the communists. Instead America found itself under a microscope. Hence after the war the international community dared not question Vietnam’s human rights record, (i.e.: wasn’t Vietnam a victim of the American/Vietnam war?). It can be said the South Vietnamese, the Cambodians, the Lao, the Hmong, the Hoa Hao, the Cao Dai the Muslim Chams, the northern highland peoples and of course the Montagnards were generally ignored. The result was that little in-depth analysis of the Vietnam War would ever reach the masses and the myths of Vietnam’s history would give Hanoi a blank check to take its revenge against America’s former ally, the Montagnards for decades to come.

One of the worst ‘mass slaughters’ of civilians committed during the war involved the communists using flamethrowers to murder hundreds of woman and children at the village of Dak Son in 1967. Yes, Montagnard woman and children were burned alive by the Vietnamese communists (photo left). Overall the Vietnamese authorities since, have done little else for the Montagnard people.

Upon taking over South Vietnam the communists commenced the elimination of the Montagnard’s leaders. The Montagnard Senator Ksor Rot was publicly executed with a bullet in his head in 1975. The Minister of Ethnic Minorities, Nay Luett would die an agonizing death in a re-education camp some years later. Montagnard leaders and pastors were all executed or imprisoned, whereupon the communists unleashed a sophisticated form of revenge against the Montagnard population that reads like a blueprint for genocide.

The Hanoi government confiscated all the land of South Vietnam, including the ancestral lands, the lifeblood of its indigenous peoples. Montagnard villages were relocated to areas with extremely poor farmland and limited health services. Large scale internal migration policies were undertaken by the central government bringing thousands of ethnic Vietnamese from the coast and Northern Vietnam onto Montagnard lands. Allocated small plots to farm the Montagnards found themselves being driven into poverty and gerrymandered into insignificance. The forests were virtually logged to oblivion by logging companies controlled by the military. With the land, the Montagnard lifeblood taken away the Hanoi government then declared the Montagnard’s culture “backward” and enacted assimilation policies to eliminate their cultural identity. In the 1990s the authorities increased coercive birth control programs on the Montagnard population, using threats, fines and financial incentives to force their woman to get surgically sterilized. It is no wonder the Montagnards experienced a revival in Christianity amongst their population, a revival not unnoticed by the authorities. Having taken the Montagnard’s ancestral lands and their identity, the communists then took all that was left, their religion. This official policy was actually given a name, “Plan 184” and was originally exposed by Freedom House in the 1ate 1990s. Plan 184 involved the repression of Christianity with a vengeance, including forcing Montagnards to renounce their faith in official ceremonies, under threat of imprisonment and torture. The decades of Christian persecution in Vietnam had generally gone unnoticed by the international community but in 2004 the US State Department designated Vietnam as a “Country of Particular Concern” (CPC) a watch list of nations that are the worst violators of religious freedom. Vietnam to this day remains on the CPC watch list.

Today over 350 Montagnard prisoners remain in Vietnamese prisons, many convicted in secret one day trials on trumped up charges relating to protesting for human rights, for spreading Christianity or for attempting to flee to Cambodia. The horrors reported inside the prisons are appalling and only weeks ago on 30 August 2006 another Montagnard Christian named “Thup” died in Ha Nam prison from abuse and torture.

The Montagnard Foundation currently reports over recent weeks that security forces have surrounded hundreds of villages throughout the Central Highlands threatening to shoot those who disobey the lockdown. Police have also confiscated hundreds of mobile cells phones from Montagnards. Crackdowns like this have been a regular occurrence but this one has particular significance. President Bush is visiting Hanoi in mid November and the Vietnamese authorities fear a public demonstration may mar the event. Previously in 2001 and Easter 2004 tens of thousands of Montagnards converged on the highland towns protesting against government repression, whereupon the Vietnamese military used brutal force to crush their calls for freedom.

The repression perpetrated against the Montagnards has however, continued far too long now for the world to just sit back and ignore. Vietnam needs to change. The Montagnards, the indigenous highland peoples who fought, died and suffered for America deserve more and this is why President Bush needs to bring America’s honour to Hanoi with him and to speak out in defense of these people, to stand alongside America’s former ally. At the APEC summit the memory of the murdered woman and children of Dak Son will hang like ghosts over the President’s shoulder calling him to remember them, to remember the Montagnards. America’s honour demands that he answer their calls.

Last night’s election results do not leave me as discouraged as some Republicans and, indeed, on many counts I’m encouraged.

Whether one believes that Democrats will shoot themselves in the foot, their more extremist leadership re-educating marginal voters about the fire from the frying pan they’ve jumped America into, or Democrats acquire a new level of responsibility the country needs from Democrats that hasn’t been seen in decades, the result of the next two years will be good for Republicans and Americans, generally, who yearn for a more strongly unified country than a more partisanly divided one.

The 2006 election results aren’t outside the norm for a 6th year midterm. They are less of a turnover than might be expected from unease with a difficult war compounded by selfish self-enrichment and offensive self-centeredness by too many Republicans. Sure, Democrats similarly behave, but Republican voters are more values-oriented and more reactive to such abuses of trust and national duty.

I expect, despite the psychological effectiveness of negative campaigning, that we’ll see less, as the American people demand more from their politicians than personal invective. That’ll push issues more to the fore, more constructively discussed, from which our civic culture will benefit.

Last week I wrote that I “Look Forward to 2007.”

There’s a solid stability in core beliefs and attitudes. There’s dismay at the campaigns’ filth, the punches becoming boring, and the things of concern not being addressed. I haven’t a clue about the outcomes next Tuesday, but expect there’ll be much less change than the MSM is touting, if for no other reason than the Democrats haven’t delivered any message of hope, and the Republicans at least have a record of trying to deal with issues albeit poorly.

Kerry’s self-revealment clarifies the differences for those who care.

Regardless of the outcomes next Tuesday, we can look forward to a better 2007. Whether Republican or Democrat, this election will deliver this message that the American people demand more and better than they’re getting from their politicians. The revulsion against the tenor of this campaign will resound. Both parties will react to that, the one that does the best being amply rewarded in 2008.

On specific issues, here’s my – admittedly optimistic – forecasts:
· Iraqis will be more propelled to political resolutions, as the Baathists are now conceding to. It will be far from perfect, but our strategic objectives are accomplished with this, a more benign Iraq.
· Neighboring troublemakers – Syria and Iran – will have the same or less incentive to stir up trouble in Iraq, as it will spill over to them, and their rulers’ self-entrenchment is paramount to them.
· The Democrats will have to fulfill their promises to place greater emphasis on the GWOT both internationally and in homeland security, or be relegated to the backbenches again for a generation as after their Vietnam excesses.
· Judges are still proposed by the President, and will not be liberals. Democrat obstruction of qualified nominees will be even more evident.
· Republicans in the Senate will adopt the Democrat tactic of requiring 60-votes for passage of contentious measures, which will bottle the Democrat House (as the Republican House was), and disappoint those who only see results rather than cause as blame for do-nothingness.
· Southern Republicans will have to cede more to Republicans elsewhere and otherwise on the spectrum, and to values-conservative and libertarian independents, which will reinvigorate a more national party.
· Democrat leadership will overstep, and re-educate marginal voters for the next time.
· The potential Republican presidential candidates for 2008, especially Giuliani, will be strengthened, and the Democrats still only have Hillary to fall back on.

Be of stout heart, bravehearts.

UPDATE:
Mark Tapscott is less optimistic.
His arguments are so, if my optimism is proved wrong.

Since the photo of Penn president Amy Gutmann's appearance with a student dressed as a suicide bomber was broken by this blog and by Campus Watch, a flood of coverage has innundated the West Philadelphia campus of the University of Pennsylvania.

I posted some of the articles below; Bruce added the statement of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East.

Also today, Arutz Sheva Israel National News has a column by Jack Engelhard; the Harvard Crimson runs a story.

NRO's PhiBetaCons are also at work: Candace de Russy, Democracy Project's chairman, weighs in with postings--see especially this one and also this one; Carol Iannone has this insightful post.

Today's issue of the Daily Pennsylvanian, Penn's student paper, carries a page one story titled "One Blog Set off Coverage Avalanche." Along with the text, below, it featured a photo of Democracy Project's original feature of the photos from November 2. I'm not sure whether or not this is my big break, but this is a story that has to be told.

Here's the story:

What's bad publicity for Penn could turn out to be blogger Winfield Myers' big break.

On Thursday evening, Myers posted a photograph of Penn President Amy Gutmann posing with Engineering senior Saad Saadi - who dressed as a suicide bomber for Halloween - and criticized Gutmann over it.

As multiple Web logs linked to the post, the mainstream media took notice, ballooning the story into one that is garnering national attention.

By Friday, several news sources had picked up the story, among them The Associated Press, newsmagazine The Weekly Standard and local television stations CBS 3, ABC 6 and NBC 10. In the next few days, the story made The Philadelphia Inquirer, the Philadelphia Daily News and the Jerusalem Post.

The story also appeared on national television outlets like Fox News and CNN over the weekend.

And all the frenzy can be traced back to Myers' decision to post the photograph Thursday evening in his blogs, the right-leaning "Democracy Project" and "Campus Watch."

The Democracy Project is a group blog, co-founded by Myers, that focuses on higher education and foreign policy. Campus Watch is part of the non-profit Middle East Forum.

Myers said that soon after he posted the story, traffic to "The Democracy Project" increased by tens of thousands of visitors. He said this was a result of being linked to by prominent blogs such as the Minneapolis-based "Power Line," which was named Time magazine's blog of the year in 2004.

According to Syracuse journalism professor Joan Deppa - who specializes in journalism ethics - blogs like Myers' can have the power to make national stories out of events that might not otherwise be considered newsworthy.

In the case of the Gutmann photograph, "You've got something that's quite minor making it into the news stream because of the blogosphere," Deppa said. "Something that started out as rather unimportant can take on importance."

Deppa added that blogs are also prone to taking events out of context, sometimes due to their specific political leanings. When the mainstream media pick up on the events, they often don't bother to put them back into context, according to Deppa.

Although Myers said he could not reveal how he originally obtained the photographs, he said that, as soon as he saw them, he knew they would cause a stir.

"I'm not surprised that it's gotten the kind of attention that it has," he said.

Myers said he thinks Gutmann's decision to pose for a picture showed an implicit approval of Saadi's costume.

Though Myers said Saadi's costume was in poor taste, he added that he believes the blame lies with Gutmann because of the nature of her role as a university president.

"The story is not about him; it's about her," he said.

Gutmann has said she did not realize what Saadi was dressed as when the photo was taken.

According to Chris Beam - a co-editor of the "IvyGate" blog, which covers the Ivy League - one of the reasons this story might have been picked up by the mainstream media is the cachet of the Ivy League.

Beam said some journalists think they will get more readers "if they can put the phrase 'Ivy League' in the beginning."

For mainstream media outlets covering stories that originate from blogs, professionals say it's essential to confirm the facts.

"You need to back up yourself as a reporter," said Christine Olley, who covered the Gutmann controversy for the Daily News.

Still, Olley said blogs are becoming an increasingly important source for more traditional news organizations.

"We get our news from everywhere. … Why not explore" blogs? Olley said.

Though some say the story may have started out with a conservative agenda, for Olley, anything that creates controversy is worthy of news coverage.

"It had so many people talking about it, so many people saying, 'Wow,'" Olley said.

The Sacramento Union’s editorial reminds us of an earlier signal stand by the West:

One of the last vestiges of the Cold War will soon yield to progress. German authorities plan to close Tempelhof Airport, a name that may ring few bells today but was a household name during the Berlin Blockade and the Allied airlift that defiantly overcame it….

After nearly a year and an average of 600 relief flights a day, Moscow gave up trying to force the other occupying powers -- the United States, Britain and France -- to leave all of Berlin under Soviet control. Mainly because of the airlift, West Berlin became a symbol of freedom in the West, whose persistence paid off then and again many years later as Soviet forces left Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union dissolved and Berlin again became the capital of all of Germany.

Today’s Templehofs are similarly besieged…….from Darfur to Vietnam to China to Iraq and Iran. Their peoples eagerly look to Western resolve. Government and terrorist thugs, as usual, seek to keep the overwhelming majorities in repression.

The question among foreign policy academics and practitioners is, as in the past, how much attention and support should the West give to human rights versus so-called realpolitik big-power immediate interests?

Realpolitik rears its head whenever the going gets rough, or big business interests see their trade profits threatened by strong stands by the West. IBM profited from and was essential to Hitler’s final solution. (See, Edwin Black, IBM and the Holocaust) The New York Times looked the other way. (See, Laurel Leff, Buried by the Times: The Holocaust and America's Most Important Newspaper)

Still, what do we stand for anyway, what is worth fighting for, if not our way of life, freedom at its core and source of its benefits? Inextricably linked to our way of life is others’. From Hillel’s “if only for me, what am I” to the pleas of refugees from oppression to purple fingers voting, this is central to others’ view of the West and our view of ourselves.

A fellow blogger puckishly commented on my latest post about Vietnam that “Saving the world is out of fashion this year.” Only if caring about freedom, or about ones own soul, is out of fashion.

Vietnam is being welcomed into the World Trade Organization, from which its rulers, “new class” of profiteering lackeys, and big Western businesses profit. President Bush is only slightly and half-heartedly pressing Vietnam for respect to its human rights promises, being more concerned with a ploto-op during his visit to Hanoi this month.

Similar promises of reduced repression were heard from China, now running hundreds of billions of dollars of annual trade surpluses. Instead, China blatantly defies WTO and other conventions. Most of the world looks away, cheap Chinese labor being more important than fair trade or fair treatment of its citizens.

It seems that only denizens of the Internet care. But, today’s oppressed are tomorrow’s consumers and leaders. It’s a treacherous path to counterproductive long-term trade benefits by Western companies.

This time there was no hiding place. Countries accused of turning the internet into a tool of repression - and the companies accused of helping them do it - were confronted with the full force of international condemnation at a special United Nations conference in Athens last week.

Officials from China, Iran and other nations notorious for censoring websites and persecuting bloggers heard speakers at the inaugural Internet Governance Forum denounce restrictions on freedom of expression online. The IT corporations Google, Microsoft and Cisco Systems were made to defend their businesses in China. Microsoft admitted that it might have to consider quitting the country.

The otherwise sedate series of talking shops was electrified when Steve Ballinger of Amnesty told the conference: 'We're here because not only do we see the internet as a potentially powerful force for human rights, but also, one way or another, freedoms are under threat, not just from governments that are shutting down websites, blocking, filtering, locking people up for what they're saying online, but also from IT companies that have colluded with repressive countries, particularly in China.'

Fred Tipson, Microsoft's senior policy counsel, looked slightly taken aback. He responded: 'We are maximising access to information to users in governments that Amnesty is targeting for its criticism. It's those users we have to keep our focus on.'

Later, however, at a fringe workshop, Tipson admitted that China's tightening controls might force it to reconsider. 'Things are getting bad,' he said. 'Perhaps we have to look again at our presence there. We have to decide if the persecuting of bloggers reaches a point that it's unacceptable to do business. '

Before President Bush embarrasses the United States during his visit to Hanoi November 17, he needs to heed the call of the U.S. government’s commission tasked by Congress to protect human rights.

Mon Nov 6, 2006 7:19 PM ET
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A government panel on Monday urged the United States to keep Vietnam on a list of serious violators of religious freedom, saying the communist state's reform of policies on faith did not go far enough.

The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom said Vietnam should remain on the State Department's upcoming 2006 list of "countries of particular concern" despite Hanoi's relaxation of some curbs under an agreement with Washington last year.

"Severe restrictions on religious freedom and abuses continue in Vietnam in all of the areas cited by the State Department when Vietnam was designated a CPC (country of particular concern) in 2004," the commission said in a letter to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

The letter by Commission Chair Felice Gaer also urged Rice to "prominently discuss religious freedom concerns" when she visits Vietnam next week for an Asia-Pacific conference also to be attended by President George W. Bush.

The Commission said Vietnam continued to arrest religious leaders or keep them under house arrest and cited cases of forced renunciations of faith among ethnic minority Protestants and monks and nuns of the Unified Buddhist Church of Vietnam.

"Vietnam's new laws on religion are being used to restrict and control freedom rather than protect it," Gaer wrote.
The United States should keep Vietnam on the religious freedom watchlist to press further Vietnamese changes, the commission said. It recommended U.S. assistance programs to support legal reform, economic development for ethnic minorities, and to develop civil society.

The 2005 State Department report to the U.S. Congress named Vietnam, China, North Korea, Myanmar, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Sudan and Eritrea as severe violators of religious rights.

If human rights are passé, the United States is passé.

Scholars for Peace in the Middle East Statement on University of Pennsylvania President and "Suicide Bomber" Incident

By SPME Board of Directors November 6, 2006 Exclusive to SPME Faculty Forum

Scholars for Peace in the Middle East Statement
Amy Gutmann, University of Pennsylvania President, Poses for Photo with Student Costumed as Suicide Terrorist:
Scholars For Peace in the Middle East www.spme.net
Asks for University of Pennsylvania Sensitivity Training on Suicide Terrorism and Its Victims

On October 31, 2006, President Amy Gutmann held her annual Halloween party. The following events occurred:

**President Gutmann was allowing herself to have pictures taken with student guests at the party one by one.

**President Gutmann let her picture be taken with a senior student, Saad Saadi, who chose to dress as a suicide bomber with a toy rifle and replica of bombs around his torso.
** Mr. Saadi also posed with University Chaplain William Gipson

**Mr. Saadi and other guests enacted for a camera pictures of individuals kneeling on the ground with guns pointed to their heads in poses similar to execution photographs placed on the internet (3 photographs posted on web)

**Another photo was taken with a youngster aiming Mr. Saadi's gun at the camera-this was titled "Influencing a future Mujahideen."

** Mr. Saadi said when he approached President Gutmann for to the photo, she joked, "'How did they let you through security?

** Mr. Saadi added that while some party guests expressed disapproval at the costume, more people were complimentary.1

**All of the preceding photographs were taken at the President's home, during party she sponsored2

Engineering senior Saad Saadi came dressed as a suicide bomber, or, as he titled the costume, a "freedom martyr."3
In all fairness to President Gutmann, it was also reported that when she realized what his costume was portraying she declined another picture and told him that she thought his costume was deplorable.

In a form letter sent to Dr. Ed Beck, a Penn graduate and President of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East (SPME), as well as to others seeking an explanation of what happened. Ms Gutmann indicated she seemed to think that the issue raised was about freedom of expression, and she defended the student's right to wear the costume, even though she said she found it deplorable.

We believe that this freedom of expression is not the issue. We were impressed with Ms. Gutmann's inaugural address in which she said:

"The higher education community must take the higher road. We need to fix our moral compass, fuel our will, and fire our imaginations by what unites rather than divides. Let us extend the example of Muslim and Jewish students at Penn who pursued dialogue and fellowship after the tragedy of 9/11."

SPME is not contesting the freedom of a student to dress up as a "freedom martyr" as Mr. Saadi called himself, or a "suicide terrorist" as others prefer to label it. But democracies thrive not only when anyone can say anything, but when members of the public have the good sense to distance themselves from the morally grotesque statements that some people will inevitably make when given that freedom. And among such moral depravities, SPME would definitely include the notion that blowing oneself up amidst "enemy" civilians with home-made cluster bombs constitutes an honorable act to be rewarded by entry into heaven.

Nothing is more divisive than such sentiments; nothing makes dialogue more impossible than glorifying such depravity. Nothing could be more imperative for a leader like President Gutmann than to stand by her call to unite, than to manifest the courage to distance herself publically from such acts of "free speech."
Responding effectively to the abuse of freedom is a fundamental part of the exercise of freedom, and a necessary way to set the moral compass on which freedom and democracy depend.

SPME regrets that the President Gutmann has focused on the question of freedom of speech that appears to justify the student's choice. We suggest an alternative response. Because this event has been so highly publicized, President Gutmann now has an ideal opportunity to show leadership, a strong moral compass, and perhaps to influence future events, by taking a well-thought-out and principled stand denouncing the murder of civilians and the romanticization of such murder.

Scholars for Peace in the Middle East therefore urges President Gutmann to take the lead sponsoring and establishing at the University of Pennsylvania a well publicized sensitivity training program in which students can experience what terrorism feels like to its Israeli, Iraqi, Jordanian, Spanish, British, Australian, and other civilian victims. We urge President Gutmann to take the lead as well in establishing an educational program about teaching children hate, in which students can learn about how vulnerable young people are taught hate and then exploited, deceived, and sometimes forced into acts of violence.
SPME is a worldwide grassroots not-for-profit educational community of scholars with over 7300 faculty members seeking to address issues of anti-Israelism and anti-Semitism as it manifests on college and university campuses. SPME seeks to have a safe and secure Israeli at peace with her neighbors able to recognize their legitimate peaceful aspirations.
We await with anticipation President Gutmann's leadership.
Edward S. Beck,
Walden University, Alvernia College, Susquehanna Institute
President
Judith Jacobson,
Columbia University
Vice President
Ruth Contreras
University of Vienna
Secretary
Rev. India E. Garnett
United Church of Christ
Treasurer
Board of Directors
Jonathan Adelman, University of Denver
Steven Albert,University of Pittsburgh
Leila Beckwith, UCLA
Phyllis Chesler,City University of New York
John R. Cohn MD,Thomas Jefferson University
Donna Robinson Divine,Smith College
Stanley Dubinsky, University of South Carolina
Rabbi Peter J. Haas, Case Western Reserve University
Efraim Karsh,Kings College University of London
Richard Landes,Boston University
Robert Mirin, Esq. Harrisburg, PA
G. S. Don Morris, California Polytechnic Institute and Wingate Inst.
Philip Carl Salzman, McGill University
Gerald Steinberg, Bar-Ilan University
Ernest Sternberg, University of Buffalo

End Notes
1. "Controversy erupts over student in terror garb"
http://www.dailypennsylvanian.com/media/storage/paper882/news/2006 .
2. Democracy Projecthttp://www.democracy-project.com/archives/002893.html
3. Gutmann's Halloween bash is 'Wicked' www.dailypennsylvanian.com

Wonder why the info you get about conditions in Iraq is so unrelievedly negative? So does Iraq’s prime minister from Kurdistan. Part of the explanation is the dearth of embedded reporters and the reliance on frequently suspect stringers.

CNS reports that Iraq’s Kurdistan Prime Minister Barzani told a group of visiting American parents who’d lost sons there that during his recent visit to the U.S.:

CNN International and [Arabic television network] al-Jazeera are equally bad in their coverage of the situation in Iraq…When I was in the United States recently and read the negative news in the Washington Post, New York Times and in the network TV broadcasts, I even wondered if things had gotten so bad since I had left that I shouldn't return.

As straight-talking Sig Christenson, critical in his reporting of the situation in Iraq, who serves as president of Military Reporters & Editors, and military reporter for the San Antonio Express-News, comments in his MRE president’s report:

I've been talking with people on both sides of the fence this week and found that many of us agree things must be fixed. The reason, we know, is that the number of embedded reporters in Iraq since the fall of Baghdad has tumbled precipitously, and the quantity and quality of the reporting from the war zone has gone down with it.
That clearly hurts everyone.
We get less news out of Iraq and more of it focuses on the bombing of the day -- especially from the broadcast spectrum where mass media have such influence over American perceptions and opinion.

Another CNS report decries that U.S. media:

…relying on local "stringers" for information can leave reporters open to hearsay or propaganda presented to them as confirmed facts.

During a press conference in Washington, D.C. earlier this year, J. D. Johannes, a Marine sergeant who served as both a soldier and a reporter in Iraq, spoke about a minor battle that lasted only 30 minutes but was reported as a major conflict that caused high coalition casualties.

The general who was involved in the fighting later said that he and his forces had been victorious on the ground, but the terrorists "had won it on CNN," Johannes noted.

See my Editor & Publisher column on this matter here, and more about this here. Also, see my post here, why the situation needs investigating.

An alert reader called my attention to this press release on Penn president Amy Gutmann's official web site:

Penn President Named to National Advisory Board to FBI September 21, 2005

PHILADELPHIA -- Amy Gutmann, president of the University of Pennsylvania, is one of 16 U.S. higher-education leaders named to the National Security Higher Education Board, advisor to the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

The board is charged with fostering outreach, promoting understanding and strengthening relations between higher-education institutions and the FBI.

The FBI will look to the board for advice on the culture of education, including the traditions of openness, academic freedom and international collaboration. Foreign students, international visitors, technology and intellectual-property export issues will also be addressed.

The board also will establish educational initiatives between universities and national security organizations, including research, degree programs, internships and consulting opportunities for faculty.

Yet, given Gutmann's nonchalant, even jocular attitude toward having her photo made with a student dressed as a suicide bomber, her commitment to nourishing an atmosphere in which security issues and the war on terrorism are taken seriously is dubious.

Moreover, the story of Gutmann's attempt to scapegoat Saad Saadi, something I pointed out Saturday, and that the Jerusalem Post pointed out yesterday, surely demonstrates her lack of fundamental honesty and fairness toward her charges. Rather than apologize, as she should have done immediately when the photos made their way around the web, she sought to pass the blame on to Saadi.

More...

This continues in her latest statement, issued yesterday, in which she apologies "for the offense this photo has caused." But this follows a second attempt to scapegoat Saadi--see the bolded text below in this full text of her "Letter to the University Community," issued yesterday:

As many of you have heard or seen by now, there was a photograph from our annual Halloween party that has taken flight over the Internet. The photograph is embarrassing for the University and me alike. I posted a formal response on our website last week. However, I wanted to provide more context.

Following a long standing Penn tradition, I host an annual Halloween party at the President's House. Hundreds of students show up dressed in every imaginable costume -- witches and warlocks, Jasons and Michael Myers, ax murderers and Frankensteins. In keeping with the spirit of the event, I appeared as Glinda, the Good Witch of the North. In this context, it's hard to imagine that someone could create an actually offensive costume, but at least one of our students did [emphasis added].

Part of the Halloween party tradition is the opportunity to be photographed with the President. This year, one student holding a toy gun was photographed with me before it was obvious to me that he was dressed as a suicide bomber [emphasis added]. As soon as I realized the full extent of his costume, I refused his request for additional photographs.

Some have mistakenly interpreted the photograph as my support for terrorism. Nothing could be further from the truth. I abhor terrorism, suicide bombers and everything they do. My record is unabashedly clear on this point.

The student has since apologized, and I accept his apology. I too apologize for the offense this photo has caused. Some images are too horrific even for Halloween.

In this, Gutmann fails to even address the contradiction between her version of the story and Saadi's. Indeed, she repeats her original claim that the photo was made before she even realized what was going on. Saadi begs to differ, although he hasn't yet made an issue of it.

A lack of commitment to the war on Islamism, and an unwillingness to take responsibility for her own actions leads me to conclude that Gutmann's appointment to the National Security Higher Education Board, and an advisor to the FBI, is mere window dressing. As a country, we're going to have to do better than this if national security issues are to be addressed on our elite campuses.

Update: A professor friend writes about Gutmann's statement that she accepts the student's apology:

"The student didn't apologize to her, but to anyone who took offense."

Exactly. She not only scapegoats him, but acts as if this is a dialogue between the two of them--all the while ignoring the contradictions between their renditions of the event.

Oh, how I’d love to see President Bush on Wednesday morning smilingly holding up a copy of the New York Times, or better all the news clippings (he’d have to be brawnier than the young Schwarzenegger), smugly touting the Democrat sweep of the 2006 elections.

I may get my wish, as the latest polls reverse course on their previous direction, based on including tilted samples, non-voters, and the disinterested, to focus more on those who will vote and they focusing more on the stakes.

The editorial in today’s Examiner says,

The result is Americans know too little of what Democrats will do should Tuesday’s voting return them to majority status in either or both chambers of Congress. In making Bush the focus of the campaign, however, Reid, Pelosi and company still cannot avoid this stark fact: America is under attack here at home and abroad by Islamic facists who killed thousands of us on Sept. 11 and who intend the deaths of millions more of us in the future.

But that’s not really true among voters. Certainly, those who vote know, and probably most who don’t vote know, that a Democrat victory will mean a hasty truncating of our presence in Iraq.

The truth is that about half of the voters, and over half the electorate doesn’t care. The other truth is that from among the ranks of those who do care come those who actually sacrifice, at least more than crocodile tears for lost soldiers they would never shake hands with during effete liberals’ unreal daily existences. Those who will fight will, ultimately, win over those who will surrender or run.

Strategy Page has the report of “American Soldiers Again Serving in Vietnam,” to “help to upgrade the combat capabilities of the Vietnamese forces.”

Do we really need to aid Vietnam's abilities to further repress its people?

The rapidly growing economy of Vietnam (“Asia's second-fastest-growing economy, with 8.4 percent growth last year that trailed only China's.”) lures Western businesses eager to profit from an even cheaper source of young labor than China’s.

And now, after more than a decade of talks, trade negotiators are preparing to polish off an agreement, possibly by tomorrow, for Vietnam to join the World Trade Organization. President Bush, Chinese President Hu Jintao, Russian President Vladimir Putin and other heads of state plan to travel to Hanoi in mid-November for an Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit.

But, as with China, it’s largely a one-way street of trade, which the Vietnamese rulers hope to double for their further enrichment.

Vietnam exported $5.56 billion in goods to the United States in the first eight months of this year while importing $625.9 million.

President Bush has pushed hard for Congress to agree to preferred trade status for Vietnam, so it can enter the WTO. A few southern Senators slowed it up by insisting on, and getting, some protection for textiles. Now, all that’s holding up Congress is the fate of an American citizen held in Vietnam (“A US Senator from Florida, Republican Mel Martinez, has taken up the case of Foshee and placed a hold on voting on a crucial bill that would permanently normalise US-Vietnam trade relations, unless she is released.”), who Secretary of State Rice may spring to smooth the way for President Bush’s photo-op in Hanoi.

Amnesty International, in late October, issued a report, “Socialist Republic of Viet Nam: A tightening net: Web-based repression and censorship” that further reveals the state of affairs in repressive Vietnam, whose rulers will be further entrenched by more U.S. military aid and by more U.S. dollars. Excerpts:

In practice, authorities have continued arbitrarily to limit the enjoyment of these human rights, a fact that is reflected in both the text of the growing body of Internet-related legislation and the manner in which it is being enforced.

In a country where most political dissent is kept away from the public eye, arrests, harassment and interrogations of high-profile, well-known dissidents appear to be carried out quite deliberately without the authorities trying to hide their activities. Such incidents are often reported by overseas media, whose stories permeate through the filtering and spread inside Viet Nam in what some describe as a strategy by the authorities to reinforce self-censorship.

Amnesty International’s 2006 report on Vietnam provides further details:

Freedom of expression, association and religious practice continued to be restricted by the authorities. Despite sizeable prisoner amnesties, political dissidents remained in prison. The human rights situation in the Central Highlands and limited access to the area continued to cause concern. More than 180 ethnic minority Montagnards continued to be imprisoned throughout 2005 and at least 45 faced unfair trials. At least 65 death sentences and 21 executions were reported….

In March the Prime Minister signed a Decree on Public Order tightly restricting public gatherings and specifying the authorization required. In July additional regulations were issued in an attempt to further control access to the Internet. New legislation was adopted by the National Assembly, including a new Civil Code in May and laws on National Security and Prevention and Control of Corruption in November.

In May the US Department of State and Viet Nam came to an agreement on enhancing religious freedom. The first Prime Ministerial visit to the USA since the end of the Viet Nam war in 1975 took place in June.

Viet Nam continued to deny access to independent human rights monitors.

If China were a threat, which is not imminent, Vietnam would hardly be much of a counter, nor would it be expected to exert itself on our behalf. China is a bigger trade partner of Vietnam’s than the U.S. In international forums, Vietnam consistently takes an anti-American position. The U.S. is being played like a harmonica by Vietnam, and the U.S. is dancing to the tune like a fool.

There is literally no good reason for this travesty of U.S. concessions and, indeed, aid to a repressive regime to continue, except for the interests of certain Western profiteers (like Intel and Nike), and those politicians of both parties receiving fat contributions or relieving their ‘60’s angst.

Perhaps embarrassed by allowing themselves to be so used by Democrat smear operatives, and so many among the MSM actively collaborating, pre-election mea culpas are appearing in some MSM quarters. Or, perhaps, with their Dem sweep less probable, they are just coweringly covering their bets (and butts) a bit.

The George Soros-financed CREW organization has effectively focused particularly on spreading unproven allegations and ancient nitpicks, to be headlined against Republican candidates. The Arizona Republic’s article, “Inquiry on Renzi: Real deal or campaign trickery?” described how such attacks work:

The scenario is a familiar one to state and federal prosecutors during election season:

As the day for casting ballots draws near, a political operative files a complaint alleging criminal misconduct by the opposing candidate. Investigators, with a responsibility to determine whether the allegations have merit, open an inquiry.

The operative then tips off journalists that the candidate is the target of a criminal inquiry.

And, finally, reporters find a law enforcement official, usually anonymous, who confirms that the candidate is under investigation.

However, as the Arizona Republic article points out,

A Justice Department official in Washington, D.C., confirmed a "preliminary inquiry" of allegations about Renzi. The official also cautioned Wednesday that initial media reports contained significant inaccuracies. The official said the Justice Department contacted at least two newspapers Wednesday about "chunks of stuff in their stories that's wrong."

But, the political damage is done, as smear artists intended.

Today’s weasely ombudsman columns from the New York Times and the Washington Post admit to their papers’ coverage slants.

The Times’ Byron Calame (pronounced, “calamity” of an ombudsman) confesses:

Getting both sides of a story and sorting them out for readers is the basic job of newspaper reporters and editors. This is a key to creating a newspaper that is fair — both to readers and to the people and institutions that are the subjects of stories.

Seeking comment from those written about, especially when they are put in an unfavorable light, is a particularly important aspect of fair coverage. It helps ensure that readers get the most complete and accurate view possible of a newsworthy development. Unfortunately, The Times has had too many cases recently where subjects weren’t given a chance to comment, or the attempt to reach them was insufficient.

The WP’s Deborah Howell admits:

Allen supporters think he can't catch a break; I sympathize. The macaca coverage went on too long, and a profile of Allen was relentlessly negative without balancing coverage of what made him a popular governor and senator.

Calame and Howell introduce a number of important mitigations, of the slammed party not cooperating as the paper would like, sometimes in the late evening (!) not being reachable immediately, which speaks to the 24/7 news cycle. But, as Calame points out, his paper could have without harming its story line, excluded the one-sided part. Further, Calame and Howell might have mentioned that both leading papers, like most of their ilk, have been unrelievedly hostile, reducing candidates’ ease at confiding quickly to reporters’ calls in the mid of night with loaded questions.

There’ll be much more investigations coming in the next few months, not only from grandstanding saboteurs of national security among possible House Democrat committee chairs, but from serious scholars of journalism.

Brooks Jackson, of FactCheck.org, reviews the “Whoppers of 2006,” not mentioning his organization’s disproportionate picking on Republicans, and concludes:

Our system of government leaves it to voters to sort out the truth from what they see and hear, with whatever help they can get from a free press.

That help from the “free press” we have in the MSM, however, is like being handed a greased pole for vaulting over the bar of smears.

For the record, yesterday's edition of Penn's student newspaper, the Daily Pennsylvanian, reports that the student who came to Gutmann's party dressed as a suicide bomber, Saad Saadi, says President Gutmann did in fact notice his costume and laughed:

Saadi told The Daily Pennsylvanian that Gutmann did not seem to take his costume too seriously. He said when he approached her [emphasis added] for to the photo, she joked, "'How did they let you through security?'"

This doesn't square with Gutmann's statement, released around noon yesterday, in which she claims not to have noticed what Saadi was wearing until after she posed with him for a photo.

This year, one student who had a toy gun in hand had his picture taken with me before it was obvious to me that he was dressed as a suicide bomber.

Is there a witness to this conversation who can clear up these conflicting statements?

UPDATE:
The conflicting statements have spread distrust of Ms. Gutmann's inadequate explanation, as the Jerusalem Post notes:
Student doubts UPenn president's account of bomber photo

MICHAEL FREUND, Jerusalem Post correspondent, THE JERUSALEM POST Nov. 5, 2006

After provoking widespread outrage for posing for a photograph with an undergraduate dressed up as a suicide bomber, the president of a major American university now faces a slew of new questions after her account of the incident was contradicted by the student involved, The Jerusalem Post has learned.

As the Post reported on Sunday morning, University of Pennsylvania president Dr. Amy Gutmann was photographed last week standing alongside Syrian-born engineering student Saad Saadi at the annual Halloween costume party held at the president's home.

In the photo, a copy of which was obtained by the Post, Saadi is seen with a keffiyeh around his head, a toy Kalashnikov rifle in hand and six plastic sticks of dynamite strapped to his chest. A smiling Gutmann stood next to him, dressed as Glinda, the Good Witch of the North, a character from L. Frank Baum's novel The Wizard of Oz.

In a statement released by her office on Friday, Gutmann sought to distance herself from the incident by portraying it as an innocent mistake on her part. She asserted that some 700 students attend her annual Halloween costume party, and "they all crowd around to have their picture taken with me in costume."

"This year," Gutmann said, "one student who had a toy gun in hand had his picture taken with me before it was obvious to me that he was dressed as a suicide bomber."

But the Post found that in an interview on Friday with the campus newspaper, The Daily Pennsylvanian, Saadi offered an account that varied sharply from the one provided by Gutmann.

According to the paper, Saadi said that Gutmann "did not seem to take his costume too seriously." He added that when he approached her for the photo, Gutmann joked with him about it, telling him, "How did they let you through security?", implying that the president did in fact realize what Saadi's costume signified before being photographed with him.

Saadi later apologized for his choice of costume, and removed the photographs from his personal website. In her statement, Gutmann noted that, "The costume is clearly offensive and I was offended by it," but she refused to apologize over the affair.

The incident at Gutmann's party, which was first revealed by Winfield Myers of the DemocracyProject.org website, has sparked indignation both on and off the university campus.

Hillel's student executive committee issued a statement saying, "While some may dismiss these actions as straightforward Halloween amusement, many perceive this student to have displayed a disturbing disregard for the sensitivities of others. We join with the student leaders of other Penn constituencies in expressing offense at the regrettable incident."

Shira Goldberg, a pro-Israel student activist at the university contacted by the Post said via email, "I am personally offended and deeply hurt by the lack of sensitivity that occurred on our campus this past week. Many students, both Jews and non-Jews, are upset and concerned that such an event would occur at The University of Pennsylvania."

The Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) also weighed in on the issue, releasing a statement that was strongly critical of Gutmann.

In a letter addressed to the university president, the ZOA wrote, "we are frankly shocked and appalled by your gross error of judgment. How is it possible that you tolerated the presence at your party of someone dressed as a suicide bomber and lend credibility to this symbol of the radical Islamic terror war against the West by happily posing with him?

"Would you have done the same if he had come dressed as the Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan?", the letter said.

Today brings with it several stories on the story of Penn president Amy Gutmann's photo-op with a student dressed as a suicide bomber.

I'm proud to say that this blog broke the story in this post. Since then, I've added regular updates, including at this post, and, last night, at this one.

I've also covered this unfolding tale on my other blog at Campus Watch: this post actually broke it; this later post contains an essay on what this tells us about Middle East studies. Indeed, it was in my capacity as director of Campus Watch that I was made aware of the sources for this story.

Below I'm posting the text of the three most important stories to date, from the Philadelphia Inquirer, where it's a page one story featuring the infamous photo; next week's issue of the Weekly Standard, in which it's the first item in the Srapbook; and today's New York Post, which wins the award for creative headline-writing.

To save space, I'm foregoing placing the text in block quotes.

First, today's Philly Inquirer from November 4, 2006:

Blogs abuzz over Penn

By Joseph A. Slobodzian
Inquirer Staff Writer

University of Pennsylvania president Amy Gutmann has at least this consolation: It's not a video on YouTube.

Three days after Halloween, the Penn president's annual costume party lived on yesterday, courtesy of the Internet and student Saad Saadi, whose photograph - with him dressed as a suicide bomber and her as Glinda, the good witch in The Wizard of Oz - was launched into the blogosphere. There, many questioned the whether it was appropriate for the leader of the Ivy League university to pose with someone seemingly making light of Middle East terrorism.

And yesterday, Gutmann was on defense, Saadi had apologized, and bloggers were arguing the insensitivity-outrage-political correctness-humor-stupidity-openness-tastelessness and ludicrousness of it all.

Gutmann released a statement yesterday describing Saadi as one of 700 students who attended the annual Halloween party at Gutmann's house.

"They all crowd around to have their picture taken with me in costume," Gutmann said. "This year, one student who had a toy gun in hand had his picture taken with me before it was obvious to me that he was dressed as a suicide bomber."

Gutmann, a noted political scientist and philosopher who became Penn's president in 2004, said, "The costume is clearly offensive and I was offended by it. As soon as I realized what his costume was, I refused to take any more pictures with him, as he requested. The student had the right to wear the costume, just as I, and others, have a right to criticize his wearing of it."

Saadi, a senior engineering student who is also a photographer for the student newspaper, the Daily Pennsylvanian, could not be reached for comment.

Saadi posted the photo of himself and Gutmann on his Web site, www.saadsaadi.com, along with numerous others from the party, including some in which he staged mock executions of costumed students.

Faster than one could say gigabyte, Saadi's handiwork was picked up by Winfield Myers and re-posted on his Democracy-Project and Campus Watch Web sites.

"An obvious question: would Gutmann have posed with a guest - or even allowed him into her house - if he'd dressed as Adolf Hitler or a Nazi SS officer? A KKK member?" Myers asked in his blog posting.

"But in modern liberal circles, posing as a Palestinian suicide bomber (see his kefiya) is just fine. After all, he mainly tries to kill innocent Jews," Myers added. A kaffiyeh, also called a kefiya, is an Arab headdress.

And thus, the cyber starter pistol was fired.

On the Daily Pennsylvanian's Web site, the comments started at 6:01 a.m. with "D. Sullivan [Alumnus]" writing that he had met Saadi and Gutmann and "I can vouch for the fact that neither one of them had any of the politically charged intent that some have suggested they possessed."

"Let's return to reality," D. Sullivan posted. "This was Halloween on a college campus. A student dressed up as a terrorist, as I'm sure thousands if not millions of other Flag waving Americans did also."

"Is there nothing more important going on at Penn?" wrote "Get a Life."

"I am a father considering, along with my son, what university he should attend," wrote "brian Schneider." "The University of Pennsylvania now off the list."

"It's okay, he probably wouldn't get in anyway," shot back "Law Student."

Early yesterday Saadi posted an apology on his site in which he said, "My friend, Jason, and I express our condolences and sympathy to all offended by our costumes. We wish to make it clear that we do not support terrorism, violence, or anything that is against society. There is no agenda or statement associated with our behavior shown in these pictures. The costumes are meant to portray scary characters much like many other costumes on Halloween... . "

By 3 p.m., all of Saadi's Halloween photos were gone from his site.

But not forgotten.

By last night, more than 100 comments about the photos had been posted on the Daily Pennsylvanian's Web site with no sign the debate was about to subside.

Contact staff writer Joseph A. Slobodzian at 215-854-2985 or jslobodzian@phillynews.com. Inquirer staff writer Kera Ritter contributed to this article.

********

From the November 11, 2006, Weekly Standard's Scrapbook section:

President Amy's Halloween Party

The president of the University of Pennsylvania, Amy Gutmann, hosted a Halloween party at her home last week. One of the revelers dressed up as an Arab suicide-bomber and posed for a picture with her. The student posted the photo, along with a number of other photos from the festivities (including mock executions of fellow students), on his Facebook page. There they were noticed by Winfield Myers, who drew attention to them on his blog at democracy-project.com. "An obvious question" occurred to Myers: "Would Gutmann have posed with a guest--or even allowed him into her house--if he'd dressed as Adolf Hitler or a Nazi SS officer? A KKK member?" No, he concluded. "But in modern liberal circles, posing as a Palestinian suicide bomber . . . is just fine."

A lively discussion ensued on other websites. Libertarian law professor Eugene Volokh of UCLA took the much-ado-about-not-much view:

For Pete's sake, this is a Halloween party, with a bunch of college kids trying to be creative, including trying to be creative with a theme of "dressing as scary evil things." Suicide bombers are scary evil things. Maybe they're too scary evil, or scary evil in the wrong way, or who knows what. But there's no rule book that he should have consulted on the subject; it's a matter of taste and judgment on which reasonable people can differ. Cut him some slack. . . . Even if he went over the fuzzy line, how much public outrage does it merit?

Many of the commenters at volokh.com were of like mind, arguing that this was just harmless mockery, a student poking fun at terrorists. The student himself later posted a statement expressing "condolences and sympathy to all affected by our costumes. We wish to make it clear that we do not support terrorism, violence, or anything that is against society. There is no agenda or statement associated with our behavior shown in these pictures."

No agenda? Among the captions written by the student himself for his photos were "Another hostage shot," "Influencing future Mujahideen," and "freedom fighter . . . pose[s] for a picture." We're picking up a vibe here, and it's not Charlie Chaplin dropping a banana peel in front of a goosestepping Hitler.

The images are, in fact, disturbingly familiar: Sympathizers of suicide-bombers in the Middle East routinely show solidarity with their "freedom fighters" by dressing children up in the same type of costumes, complete with plastic dynamite and fake AK-47s.

Amy Gutmann, for her part, is smart enough to recognize a bad career move when she finds herself in the middle of one. She released a statement on the Penn website:

Each year, the president hosts a Halloween party for Penn students. More than 700 students attend. They all crowd around to have their picture taken with me in costume. This year, one student who had a toy gun in hand had his picture taken with me before it was obvious to me that he was dressed as a suicide bomber. He posted the photo on a website and it was picked up on several other websites.

The costume is clearly offensive and I was offended by it. As soon as I realized what his costume was, I refused to take any more pictures with him, as he requested. The student had the right to wear the costume [!?!] just as I, and others, have a right to criticize his wearing of it.

A SCRAPBOOK friend notes, "This may clinch her appointment as the next president of Harvard University."

********

From the New York Post, page 3, November 4, 2006:

DITZY IVY PREXY'S H'WEEN BALL BOMBS

By DAVID ANDREATTA

November 4, 2006 -- The president of an Ivy League school found herself in hot water yesterday after a snapshot surfaced showing her posing gleefully with a student masquerading as a suicide bomber.

The University of Pennsylvania's Amy Gutmann said in a lengthy statement that she noticed the toy machine gun held by engineering student Saad Saadi - and not the red phony dynamite strapped to his body - only when she mugged for the camera by his side.

She characterized the controversial photo as one taken on whim amid the commotion of an annual Halloween bash that drew more than 700 students in costume to her campus home. Gutmann dressed as Glinda the Good Witch from "The Wizard of Oz."

"They all crowd around to have their picture taken with me in costume," Gutmann said. "This year, one student who had a toy gun in his hand had his picture taken with me before it was obvious to me that he was dressed as a suicide bomber."

She later added, "The costume is clearly offensive and I was offended by it. As soon as I realized what his costume was, I refused to take any more pictures with him, as he requested."

Gutmann was not the only university official to pose with Saadi. The university's chaplain, William Gipson, was also photographed with him.

Saadi did not return a message left for him at the campus lab where he works. But he told the student-run newspaper that Gutmann got a kick out of his getup, which included camouflage pants and a keffiyeh headband - a symbol of Palestinian nationalism.

"How did they let you through security?" the university president jokingly told him at her party, Saadi told The Daily Pennsylvanian.

Saadi posted his photo with Gutmann on his Facebook.com profile in an album that included pictures of him and another friend masquerading as a "freedom fighter" preparing to execute victims as the other recites verses from the Koran.

A posting on Saadi's profile yesterday apologized for the costumes, saying they were meant to "portray scary characters much like many other costumes on Halloween."

"We wish to make it clear that we do not support terrorism, violence or anything that is against society," the posting said. "There is no agenda or statement associated with our behavior shown in these pictures."

The photos showed up on watchdog Web sites democracy-project.com and ivygateblog.com, drawing the attention of the campus media as well as irate alumni, students and parents of prospective students.

"How much more offensive can you get before someone in the administration will disown glorifying homicide bombers?" one person identified as "Philly Alum" wrote on The Daily Pennsylvanian blog, which received scores of responses to the story.

Some called for Gutmann's resignation.

One post said, "What a despicable picture! Gutmann should apologize, and the trustees should start looking for a new president."

Someone claiming to be the father of a prospective student wrote the newspaper that "the University of Pennsylvania is now off the list. The leadership's lack of moral clarity . . . is telling."

But for all the outrage, there was also indifference.

"Over a Halloween costume? Are you kidding me? Is there nothing more important going on at Penn?" wrote one person.

Another wrote simply: "Mountain. Molehill."

The university's Hillel organization released a statement saying student leaders met with an aide to Gutmann and the chaplain and that the group is "satisfied" that the officials understand why the pictures were offensive to many on campus.

david.andreatta@nypost.com

While driving around Arizona, I was captivated by the campaign signs, “Say No to Hogwash" to vote no on Proposition 204. This sounded like the most honest political sign I’d ever seen.

On checking it out, it’s about whether hogs raised for slaughter should have enough room to turn around and stand straight. The opponents say that conditions are clean, safe from predators and each other’s bites, and disease free, plus producing more affordable pork. I don’t have a pig in this race (being Jewish). Most supporters are the usual suspects (Democrats) but many establishment Republicans are in favor as well. The images in my head of farm animals penned in a way that makes me cringe leads me toward their arguments. Torturing small animals is one of the markers of childhoods leading to adult sadism. This isn’t like that but it still indicates our human and humane regard for life to provide slightly more comfortable positions for the hogs. If I were a pork eater, that’s worth a cent or two more a pound. Brit Hume’s Grapevine comment:

While Iraq and the economy appear to be the big issues driving the elections around the country — in Arizona there is an issue that has sparked passion, big money campaigning and big name endorsements — what to do about pregnant pigs. Proposition 204 would require bigger, more comfortable pens for pregnant pigs.

Groups on both sides of the issue have spent about a million dollars each. Proponents are airing undercover video showing cramped conditions. And they have recruited legendary Sheriff Joe Arpaio and equally legendary radio personality Paul Harvey to their cause.

Opponents have their own video — and a study that disputes a claim that pregnant sows in cramped pens produce piglets that exhibit higher levels of stress. Billboards by opponents call the referendum "hogwash."

While on the subject of what isn’t hogwash, my friend the good doctor Bird Dog of Maggies Farm blog, weighs in on today’s report on the imminent demise of ocean fish stocks. Maggies Farm serves up delicious cheesecake, with humor that you wish your wife had, along with strong New England common sense. Bird Dog says it’s ”Not wacko enviros.”

The crisis of depleted fish stocks in the north Atlantic has been slowly evolving for 100 years. The vast schools of "groundfish" - cod, hake, and haddock -are gone; the redfish are gone; the swordfish and big bluefin tuna are in a fight for survival….

It's the tragedy of the commons. And these commons" aren't really all that large. Most of the Atlantic is very thin in fish. They congregate, during their migrations, on the banks, like George's Bank, Stellwagen, and the Grand Banks, where their food is plentiful.
Government made it worse; federal subsidies for giant trawlers made it possible for fishermen to eradicate entire populations. And the significant commercial fishing lobby in Maine and Massachusetts - with their senatorial allies in John Kerry and Olympia Snow - adopted a "get it while you can" approach, and local politicians take the bait.…

The Bush administration, interestingly, has made some real progress towards unwinding some of the anti-conservation regulations in the Atlantic fisheries, but New England politics remains a factor: commercial fishing is "a way of life," despite the fact that it is now dominated by what you might call "Big Fishing." Bush has been a staunch conservationist about fishing in general, also here, most recently. This summer, he signed a bill creating the world's largest marine preserve.

I always have hoped that fish farming would ge a good solution. It's been successful in some ways in some areas - salmon, for instance, oysters and mussels. But problems with disease transmission sunk the cod farming attempts in Canada….

It may be far too late to rebuild the Atlantic fishing stocks. There is a tipping point at which restoration cannot occur. And it is a damn shame, because for us at Maggie's Farm, we care not only on conservation and stewardship grounds - we love to eat fish, and we love to go fishin'. We gain hope from the story of the Striped Bass, which is having a real resurgence since commercial fishing for them has been controlled.

I just finished a book, The Doryman's Reflection: A Fisherman's Life, by Paul Molyneaux. It's not a great book, but it gives a good flavor of what is going on from a guy who has seen the transition from the old to the new ways of fishing, and who understands the regulations, and the science too.

The concern about our fish is not wacky greenie hysteria, it's not crying wolf. It is as real as what happened to the Passenger Pigeon and the Buffalo. There is a role for government here (is that not shocking to hear from us libertarian-minded folks?), and it shouldn't cost the taxpayer a penny.

But, if done right, it will not hurt the brave fishermen who daily risk their lives in the rugged and most dangerous occupation in the US. Sad, but necessary: these are not guys who could switch to an office job.

(Cross-posted at Campus Watch)

A bit of research turns up this Wednesday article from the Daily Pennsylvanian, the student paper at the University of Pennsylvania.

It reveals two pieces of information that those of you following this story may find interesting. The first is that Saad Saadi's costume was mentioned yesterday morning, before I broke the story of Penn president Amy Gutmann's stunning photograph with Saadi dressed as a suicide bomber. But no photo accompanied the story, and within the Penn community, no one objected--at least not sufficiently to draw any attention to the story.

Engineering senior Saad Saadi came dressed as a suicide bomber, or, as he alternately titled the costume, a "freedom martyr."

Secondly, Saadi wasn't the only person there sporting a costume that most people would consider utterly inappropriate, even vulgar:

Some more infamous figures were also in attendance.

There was, for instance, an impersonator of Scott Ward, the ex-Wharton professor who is awaiting trial for importing child pornography earlier this year. The costume was complete with a fake boy whose head was at the level of the impersonator's crotch.

Pedophiles, suicide bombers--that was some party, eh? This further illustrates the "anything goes" atmosphere that prevailed at the president's house Tuesday night. No boundaries, no adult supervision, and, apparently, no sense of shame.

I'd asked earlier at Campus Watch what the reaction would have been if anyone had shown up costumed as a rapist. I have a feeling we now know: there would have been no reaction. Until outside pressure was applied via this blog and some news organizations that picked up the story, nothing happened.

Kudos to the three major networks' Philadelphia affiliates, all of whom covered the story in their local evening broadcasts this evening. KYW, the CBS affiliate, even sent a reporter to Penn's campus to check out local reaction.

Earlier posts: breaking the story; morning developments with afternoon updates.

See also posts at Campus Watch, of which I'm director and to which the original photos were sent. The first post, with photos; this post contains an essay with a more philosophical bent.

Updates: See Bottom of Post

The post below on photos of University of Pennsylvania president Amy Gutmann posing with a student dressed as a suicide bomber, all made at her residence during her annual Halloween costume party, has created a blog firestorm, with virtually every big blog linking to Democracy Project. To all of you who linked or emailed your thoughts, my sincere thanks. I'll be posting some of those emails soon.

Glenn Reynolds has exchanged posts with Eugene Volokh, and here are Glenn's thoughts:

UPDATE: Eugene Volokh thinks the suicide-bomber costume is no big deal: It's Halloween, after all. Hmm. Would a university President really pose for photos with someone in a Klan outfit, or wearing blackface? I find that hard to imagine. And if not, why is the suicide bomber outfit OK?

The Nazi analogy is, I think, a poor one. Nazis are a vanquished former enemy. Suicide bombers are a current enemy. Could that be a relevant difference?

ANOTHER UPDATE: Eugene responds: "I would likewise defend someone who came to a party as a Klansman. Same theory -- Klansmen are scary; Halloween is about scary costumes; Halloween is not about endorsing the characters you're dressing as."

I remain skeptical that a Klansman costume would be received in the same fashion, or that an Ivy League university President would be comfortable being photographed with someone wearing a Klan costume.

I come down solidly with Glenn on this one. Volokh argues that it's not the place of the university president to notice costumes and make spot judgments on whether or not they're appropriate, or whether to have her photo made with a costumer.

But this isn't a matter of taste, as his comment implies: it's a matter of morality, of ethical judgment, and of political correctness at work. The repulsion that one would feel at seeing a costumer dressed as a Nazi or a Klansman is indeed an apt analogy here, because that repulsion stems from historically sound reasons--mass murderers and racists aren't funny. And, pace Volokh, I can't imagine any university president anywhere agreeing to pose with someone wearing a white sheet, because anyone to whom a prestigious institution could be entrusted would immediately recognize such a costume as so morally objectionable that he would refuse. Indeed, I strongly suspect that a scandal would ensue in which the student was upbraided if not hauled before a student or administrative tribunal.

But suicide bombers are often treated in the press as being either morally equivalent to the Israelis they seek to kill, or at least as carrying out an understandable response to "Israeli agression." Reuters even famously refuses to call them "terrorists," and many left-wing publications, from CounterPunch to the Nation, regularly treat Israelis as the aggressors and Palestinians as the victims. So do many professors of Middle East studies throughout North America.

In academe, in particular, there does not exist a widely-held position that would banish such displays, or react with outrage when they occur. Hence, President Gutmann's willingness to pose with this student, dressed as a suicide bomber, is most likely not the result of any desire on her part to get the photo taken and mingle, as Volokh says. Rather, it evinces a lack of moral opprobrium at such actions, and pertaining to this particular issue, among many of America's academic elite.

Update: Amy Gutmann has posted a statement at Penn's website:

Each year, the president hosts a Halloween party for Penn students. More than 700 students attend. They all crowd around to have their picture taken with me in costume. This year, one student who had a toy gun in hand had his picture taken with me before it was obvious to me that he was dressed as a suicide bomber. He posted the photo on a website and it was picked up on several other websites.

The costume is clearly offensive and I was offended by it. As soon as I realized what his costume was, I refused to take any more pictures with him, as he requested. The student had the right to wear the costume just as I, and others, have a right to criticize his wearing of it.

I've just posted some additional thoughts on her statement (which I see as a moral dodge), especially for what this story tells us about Middle East studies, at Campus Watch.

Update II: Philadelphia KYW TV carried a story on the controversy earlier today.

There’ll be no one remaining at the United Nations if its undersecretary for management has his way. As the AP reports:

A day after a senior U.N. official was indicted on bribery charges, the United Nations management chief said Thursday an investigation into corruption was "at full throttle" and he urged anyone with relevant information to cooperate.

"The dominoes are beginning to fall," undersecretary-general for management Christopher Burnham told the Associated Press. "Anyone with information about corruption anywhere in the U.N. needs to come forward now before the dominoes reach them," he added.

Little wonder, Burnham is an American, supported by U.S. Ambassador Bolton:

U.S. Ambassador John Bolton on Thursday praised Burnham, an American, for being the driving force in the creation of the Procurement Task Force which assisted in the case against Bahel and is playing an important role in uncovering U.N. fraud.

The U.S. can save its waste of money sooner, by reducing funding to the U.N. corruptionists.

I just did a news.Google search for “Republican scandal”, getting 116 articles, while “Democrat scandal” got 7. Similar proportional results from search term “corruption.” This reflects the alliance of MSM coverage emphasis with the Soros-financed CREW mud-slinging to damage Republican candidates.

But, Friday’s New York Times is kind enough to remind us that, “Ethics Questions Haunt Democrats’ Races, Too.”

The NYT’s and its ilk are blameless for the effect on the electorate of their own focus, as the article makes it appear as if spontaneous or just the result of Democrat communications effectiveness:

In broad terms, the analysts say, the Democratic effort nationally to paint a systematic and more deeply rooted corruption label on Republicans this year seems to be working, blunting individual controversies that might be devastating to the Democrats at some other moment. Some polls back up that point. Thirty-five percent of the voters surveyed for a New York Times/CBS News poll completed this week said the Republican Party had the most corrupt politicians, while 15 percent said the Democratic Party did.

Of course, that’s to be expected, if most voters rely upon the NYT’s and other major media. As said in the 2004 election, MSM bias is worth 15%.

Updates Below

University of Pennsylvania president Amy Gutmann threw her annual Halloween costume party at her home Tuesday night. Among the guests was Saad Saadi, who came dressed as a suicide bomber, complete with plastic dynamite strapped to his chest and a toy automatic rifle. Worse, Gutmann posed with Saadi!

An obvious question: would Gutmann have posed with a guest--or even allowed him into her house--if he'd dressed as Adolf Hitler or a Nazi SS officer? A KKK member?

But in modern liberal circles, posing as a Palestinian suicide bomber (see his kefiya) is just fine. After all, he mainly tries to kill innocent Jews.

Addendum: Moreover, suicide bombers worldwide kill not only Jews, nor do they strike only in Israel. They maim and kill US and allied servicemen and Marines in Iraq and Afghanistan, Iraqi Arabs and Kurds, Afghan civilians, Pakistanis, Arabs in Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank, Sri Lankans, Indonesians, and countless others.

In the photo below, Saadi pretends to execute a "hostage." Would a guest get away with pretending to lynch someone?

The original caption to the photo below: "Influencing a future Mujahideen."

In the next photo, the original caption read: "Freedom fighter and freedom statue pose for a picture." Saadi must be a fan of Reuters.

Original caption for this photo: "Another take down...more prayer verses were read." Remember: this isn't a frat house or a cabin in the woods. These photos were taken at a party thrown by Penn's president at her home.

Original caption for this one: "Another hostage shot. This is my favorite one."

(Note: As of Friday night, Nov. 3, Saadi had removed all of the Halloween party photos from his web site, along with the apology quoted below.)

Update: Saad Saadi has a web site, at which he has posted many photographs along with the apology posted below.

My friend, Jason, and I express our condolences and sympathy to all affected by our costumes. We wish to make it clear that we do not support terrorism, violence, or anything that is against society. There is no agenda or statement associated with our behavior shown in these pictures. The costumes are meant to portray scary characters much like many other costumes on Halloween. Additionally, we strive for all societies to instill healthy and non-violent values.

Update II: I came about these photos because I'm the director of Campus Watch, a project of the Middle East Forum. We monitor Middle East studies in North America, critique them, and do our best to bring attention what's going on in the discipline--all with an eye toward improving the study and teaching of the Middle East. Our site has a huge archive of articles on all manner of Middle East studies, including many that we commissioned. I also maintain a blog at CW, and these photos and commentary are posted there. If this story intests you, so will Campus Watch.

SEE UPDATE here.

Just returned from 10-days vacation, 2000 miles circle around Arizona’s national monuments, parks, and Indian ruins, with 1 and 6-year old boys in back of car. Avoided newspapers, TV, and Internet. Slightly brain-dead, but energized enough to scan first few pages of newspapers and about 3000 emails piled up; like speed-reading War and Peace, something about Russia.

The news is that names and dates change, but the news remains the same.

Except, what sticks out is that there is no clear theme in this 2006 election, but three.

First, the MSM has the only clear theme: beat Bush by electing Democrats to Congress.

Second, the Soros financed CREW organization is more effective than his expenditures were in 2004, by dredging up anything it can to discredit Republican candidates. The charges don’t have to be serious, documented or proven; the mud sticks, and the press does its best to headline them so they do have their effect on the election.

Third, this is the dirtiest campaign that I recall, memory going back to the '50's. Issues are ignored. Personalities and slams predominate.

What to make of this?

I met people from all over the country during this trip, young, old, families, native-born and immigrants. There’s a solid stability in core beliefs and attitudes. There’s dismay at the campaigns’ filth, the punches becoming boring, and the things of concern not being addressed. I haven’t a clue about the outcomes next Tuesday, but expect there’ll be much less change than the MSM is touting, if for no other reason than the Democrats haven’t delivered any message of hope, and the Republicans at least have a record of trying to deal with issues albeit poorly.

Kerry’s self-revealment clarifies the differences for those who care.

Regardless of the outcomes next Tuesday, we can look forward to a better 2007. Whether Republican or Democrat, this election will deliver this message that the American people demand more and better than they’re getting from their politicians. The revulsion against the tenor of this campaign will resound. Both parties will react to that, the one that does the best being amply rewarded in 2008.