I’m a bit surprised at the disagreement today between two of my best friends in the rightosphere. I usually admire their clear thinking, but both seem to miss an essential – indeed, the core -- point of their usual agreement, and mine with them. They're both correct, but too limited in their reflections.

Mark Tapscott, editorial page editor of the Examiner, recovers from “mulling a post asking if the time had come to declare the conservative enterprise a failure.” Mark credits, in large part, the turnback against the hastily drafted, swiss-cheese, forcedown immigration grand design, of excessive racial determination of school attendance, and of government interference in free airwaves to “that the Internet can change the course of public policy in America. Conservatives simply must understand and perfect this amazing tool.”

At CaptainsQuarters, Ed Morrissey counters that, “While Mark is correct to celebrate these events, with one exception they do not really represent victories for conservative governance as much as reprieves from the alternatives.” Ed argues, “None of them represent a victory for conservative policies, because conservative policies haven't been applied in most of the cases.”

Conservatism is not about transitory results or means. Conservatism is about process. As I wrote yesterday, conservatism requires that we “move forward based on solid evidence, means, plans, purpose, and competence.”

When one has that process, the results that merit survival will survive. That is essentially conservative governance. It entails more the avoidance of poor choices than, even, the making of good ones. It recognizes that grand designs are most often not so grand, as they fail to encompass the very diversity of legitimate means and ends of a democratic and free society, particularly one so large and vibrant as ours, and instead stifle individuals’ circumstances and, thus, the adaptation and ingenuity upon which continued personal and national success depends.

Mark is correct to point at the Internet as an embodiment of that civic discussion, serving to remind otherwise imperious legislators. Ed is correct to bemoan the extent of intrusion into our daily affairs by such legislators and seek their reversal.

Mark and Ed are invaluable resources in those struggles. Both, however, miss that it is process that matters more than results. Rich Lowry, of National Review, reminds us that, “Now, there is really no such thing as an "inside game" anymore, since bloggers make sure it gets "outside." Both the right and the left will take advantage of this, for good and ill policy ends. But it's clearly an enhancement of democracy.”

Conservatives, and America, can survive the openness of democracy, and rise with it even when disagreements or disappointments occur. We can’t survive the absence of democracy, which rests upon and is bereft without an informed and active citizenry and an open process. This past week was a triumph for democratic process, which is what is most beneficial to conservatives and which we should care most about.

The results may not always be consistent with a conservative's desires, but they will have been arrived at in a conservative way -- meaning respectful of true diversity as the well-spring of progress, compared to the stultification, and in totalitarian extremes the bloody repression, from imposition of self-serving and grand designs.

Update: Winfield Myers discussed this topic this afternoon with Mark Tapscott and host Ed Morrissey on the Captain's podcast radio talk show.

Timothy Furnish teaches Middle East history at Georgia Perimeter College in suburban Atlanta. When he went for an on-campus interview at a large state university, he experienced first-hand what empirical evidence shows: professors are very reluctant to hire conservative candidates.

But they're not normally so open to expressing the reasons for frowning on a candidate as they were in Tim's case: one committee member told him that he "appeared to be more conservative than others in my field."

Worse, he was told: "You sounded like Daniel Pipes!"

Horrors! Read about Tim's travails in today's Investor's Business Daily. (Tim's op-ed, with links inserted, is available at Campus Watch.)

The New York Times’ instant coverage of the downfall of the “take it, b----!” approach to governance by Senate Majority Leader Reid in collusion with President Bush has this corker of the bitterness bottle from Senator Bob Corker, R-Tenn.:

”Americans feel that they are losing their country ... to a government that has seemed to not have the competence or the ability to carry out the things that it says it will do.''

Senator Jim DeMint, R-SC, adds:

"It transcends anything about immigration. It has become a crisis of confidence."

That about sums it up, not only for the immigration grand design but also for other grand designs from Social Security to health care to Iraq.

For over a decade, we’ve been fed grand designs, poorly crafted, and full of obvious glaring holes, which have turned off the spectrum of citizens from liberal to conservative.

What’s been most lacking in all cases has been connection with Americans’ actual concerns, indeed even respect for them, because there’s been unwillingness by our politicians to honestly set out the stakes, the objectives, and the real costs, and to openly pursue them. Instead, we get platitudes, excuses, shadow dances, and transparent nonsense that increasingly is seen through by anyone with a modicum of common sense, of which the American people have much.

That’s allowed partisans to critique or snipe, often without much more to offer. Inertia carries us forward to the brinks of national impoverishment and international disgrace. Consequently, we’ve sunk deeper into mires of entitlement swamps we can’t afford or into half-way struggles against vicious enemies that chews up our servicepeople and credibility, and contradicts the recognized importance of the mission.

Most people see right through the shams, from all sides, and are thoroughly disgusted. We cannot be gulled or persuaded anymore by residual confidence in too many of our politicians, who have succeeded in almost utterly destroying it.

Some propose a third-party out from this status quo. That’s a pipe-dream, particularly since the leaders would come from the existing political class, there’s little enough resources, the existing political class have erected high barriers, and there’s no evident consensus among even the few brave ones with integrity.

“When in the course of human events” is again now, and the answer will have to come from below, not above. That’s what 2008 will tell us, whether there’s enough groundswell now evident for those who want to represent us to step forth and be honest, clear, and detailed, and have the track-record to be trusted.

In many races, most hopefully for the presidency, that will be what it takes.

This healthy skepticism is, essentially, conservative: Move forward based on solid evidence, means, plans, purpose, and competence. That is what Republicans will have to require of themselves, and most other Americans also require. We have a real opportunity ahead to save our American course of greatness, through greatness.

USA Today reports that Hispanic voters are fleeing the GOP because of perceived hostilities to immigration:

One big factor behind the flight from the GOP: a heated debate over immigration in which congressional Republicans' remarks on illegal immigrants have offended many Hispanic voters. The fallout from that battle, shifting Latino loyalties and a changing political calendar have scrambled political calculations made about Hispanics after the last presidential election — and raised the stakes for their role in choosing the Democratic nominee for the next one.

The article reports that Republican presidential candidates have foolishly declined to attend the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials (NALEO) convention this year citing "scheduling conflicts."

With Tony Blair gone from Number 10 Downing Street, and on his way to the Middle East, the Democracy Project asks who is Gordon Brown, the new British Prime Minister. This excellent piece from The Economist provides a short overview.

I'm a fan of Gomer Pyle and spent many a summer as a kid at my grandmother's house watching re-runs of the show. One of Gomer's most memorable catchphrases, was "Surprise, Surprise, Surprise," when he would learn of something that is naturally obvious to everybody else. So, when I learned that one of the freed Gitmo detainees was killed last night by Russian security forces for his Islamist terrorist activities in Chechnya, Gomer's good ol' catchphrase came to mind. The United States, does not lock up people in Gitmo for no reason. No, they are there because they are terrorists. But the true believers from the ACLU don't get it. They don't understand that man is fallen and that some folks just need to be locked up to protect the public.

Today's OpinionJournal has an inspirational interview with Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa about the state of Latin American politics. In an era when Hugo Chavez, the Castro brothers, and other left-leaning fascists seem to be retaking power in that region, Vargas Llosa's words are encouraging:

Mr. Vargas Llosa explains that he was propelled into politics when then-president Alan García [of Peru], at the time a socialist and a populist, attempted to nationalize the banks. Today he is running the country again, but "now, the same Alan García is the champion of capitalism in Peru!" Mr. Vargas Llosa laughs merrily. "It's funny, no?"

He is relatively upbeat about Latin America today: "I'm not as pessimistic as others who believe that Latin America has returned to the time of populism, leftism." The region has its problems, to be sure, one major one coming from Caracas in the form of Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez. But according to Mr. Vargas Llosa, perhaps what is most remarkable is what Mr. Chávez has not been able to do.

"We have a big problem with Chávez," Mr. Vargas Llosa admits. "He's a demagogue and a 19th century socialist. He is a destabilizing force for democracy in Latin America, but what he thought would be so easy hasn't been so easy. There has been a lot of resistance."

Take a look at the full interview -- it's worth a read.

When Hillary Clinton first proposed her nationalized healthcare scheme, many of the nation’s largest corporations were supporters, to get out of providing insurance to their workers and their self-created legacy burdens for retirees. After wide-spread opposition surfaced, these giant corporations backed off.

Now, they’re back with a new scheme, as complex, to shift their costs onto taxpayers. The Examiner has my op-ed on their latest veil for a taxpayer bailout of their failure to manage.

While the story of Iran's detention of Haleh Esfandiari, director of the Middle East Program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, has been covered extremely well by the mainstream media, I believe it appropriate that we encourage our readers to sign the petition calling for her release.

If you are interested in knowing how she is doing in prison, please read this recent interview with her husband in Foreign Policy magazine.

H.L Mencken said, “A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin.” I choose to look at the Gallup poll of the low and falling public repute of most of our public institutions as a “flower,” from which a better state of governance may grow.

Frank Newport of Gallup says, “It’s not an optimal situation, it seems to me, when such a low percentage of average Americans have confidence in this system.”

The Instapundit, Glenn Reynolds, adds,

How long can we have a free and successful nation with such an unpopular -- and deservedly so -- political class….You need a certain amount of confidence for a nation to operate as a nation. Worse yet, I think this low approval number is justified, which illustrates that we're being pretty badly governed. That's a problem, too.

My fellow flower-smeller, Mark Tapscott, reflects:

The root problem is a bipartisan inability - or refusal - to adopt policies supported by clear majorities of the American people.

Those policies for the most part involve a significantly lower level of government activism, whereas the political class for the most part seeks only a higher level because it benefits, financially and otherwise, from the higher taxes, greater federal spending and heightened importance of public institutions….

Until the advent of the Internet and tools like blogs for making it a convenient tool for mass communication, however, that public frustration had no positive outlet, other than Talk Radio. Now that blogs and other online news and commentary tools such as the Porkbusters and Sunlight Foundation approaches to public policy advocacy are developing at a rapid pace, the decline of the mainstream media as the crucial bridge between the public and policy-makers is evaporating.

When people have an affordable, effective alternative to a failed product or service, they will go to it. As things currently stand, however, there is no viable alternative to the two major parties that make up the heart of the American political class.

There is no guarantee for incumbents and beneficiaries of the two major parties that this state of affairs will last much longer.

However, as campaign law expert and critic, Bob Bauer, says, the electoral and third-party organizing deck’s been stacked by politicians who disregard the public’s views:

But self-interestedness is no help to the voters where, in the design of laws to shape political competition, the politicians serve themselves, making it harder for voters to participate and easier for themselves to win. For the good self-interest to work, the bad-self interest must be contained. An electoral process rigged to suit the politician is a triumph of self-interest, won at the expense of the voter whose judgment has been devalued. Accountability is sacrificed to security; and the security is achieved by using political power to perpetuate it.

Bauer, also, reflects on the difficulty of piercing this electoral veil Congress enacted in McCain-Feingold:

Election law is now so specialized and so complicated that voters are barely included in the dialogue, though much is typically said on their behalf, as the supposed beneficiaries of various positions. And voters don’t clamor for inclusion because some of what is contested is abstract in the extreme: how much “confidence” might be restored, or “cynicism” diminished, by campaign finance controls, or the shape of their Congressional districts.

All of former Federal Election Commission member Brad Smith’s comments should be read, but suffice it for him to say:

Why is it that politicians cannot give bills honest, logical names. They used to - they had things like the "Labor-Management Relations Act," which set rules for labor and management relations; or the "Voting Rights Act," a bill that took steps to guarantee the right to vote. Now every bill title is some Orwellian propaganda ploy. The the "Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act" was neither equitable nor fiscally responsible; the "Immigration Reform and Control Act" neither made basic reforms to immigration policy nor controlled immigration; the "Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act" was passed almost entirely on the backs of one political party, in the face of almost uniform opposition in the other.

With taxpayer financing of campaigns, the "reform" movement (there's another one) seems deathly afraid to call their proposals what they are - tax or government financing of campaigns. Instead they come up with slogan titles, such as "Clean Elections" or now "Fair Elections." So unpopular is the actual concept - using tax dollars to pay for campaigns - that tax financing truly is "the reform that dare not speak its name."

Congress, the presidency, the media, and others who’ve too long insulated themselves from the will of the people, or treated us as tractable and inconvenient outsiders to their machinations, have two choices: change their names in order to confuse a while longer, but as Gallup demonstrates the public sees through evasive scams, or change their way of doing the people’s business to put integrity, competence, and transparency above above their selfish self-interest in perpetuating their power for personal pelf.

Robert Novak's column today reveals that White House speech writer Bill McGurn suggested to President Bush that he ignore the protests of the political class and invite Hong Kong Cardinal Joseph Zen to the White House on May 31 as Zen was wrapping up a 14-city U.S. tour. For anyone who knows Bill, this isn't a surprise. A strong Catholic, he spent several years in Hong Kong with Dow Jones at the Far Eastern Economic Review and the Asian Wall Street Journal. Years before Margaret Thatcher, to her everlasting shame, handed over Hong Kong to the Chinese Communists, Bill penned a book, Perfidious Albion, to condemn the then-future deal.

The meeting also speaks well of the President, who proved again (as he has with his opposition to embryonic stem cell research) that his religious beliefs aren't up for compromise. His steadfastness came despite opposition from U.S. Ambassador to China Clark T. Randt, Jr., and advice from retired Washington Archbishop Theodore McCarrick, a churchman known to be enamored of Washington elites, to avoid Zen. The State Department, predictably, opposed Zen's visit.

The meeting wasn't announced and didn't appear on the White House schedule, which is to say, it wasn't a publicity stunt. Again Novak:

In a city abounding in leaks, I first learned on June 13 about the cardinal's visit to the White House via a circuitous route, from an American Catholic layman. That same day, Raymond Arroyo of the Eternal Word Television Network, acclaimed reporter of Catholic news, made public that the meeting took place.

Zen, who was made a cardinal by Pope Benedict XVI, has been a tireless advocate for greater freedom for his fellow Catholics in China. The Communists in Beijing relentlessly persecute those who refuse to join the state-sponsored Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association, whose habit of appointing bishops without Vatican approval is a source of constant friction with Rome, not to mention an egregious violation of religious freedom. No fewer than five bishops are imprisoned, and persecution of Protestants, especially small house-churches, continues apace.

Novak, himself a convert to Catholicism, ends his column:

The cardinal is reported by sources close to him to have left the White House energized and inspired. George W. Bush is at a low point among his fellow citizens, but he is still a major figure for Catholics in China who look to him as a clarion of freedom.

A fascinating new study published by Foreign Affairs concludes that future expansion of globalization (i.e. free trade and free borders) is being endangered because "real income growth has been extremely skewed, with relatively few high earners doing well while incomes for most workers have stagnated or, in many cases, fallen."

The study's authors note:

U.S. policy is becoming more protectionist because the American public is becoming more protectionist, and this shift in attitudes is a result of stagnant or falling incomes. Public support for engagement with the world economy is strongly linked to labor-market performance, and for most workers labor-market performance has been poor.

To stymie this rise in protectionism by the American electorate, the study proposes:

The best way to avert the rise in protectionism is by instituting a New Deal for globalization -- one that links engagement with the world economy to a substantial redistribution of income. In the United States, that would mean adopting a fundamentally more progressive federal tax system. The notion of more aggressively redistributing income may sound radical, but ensuring that most American workers are benefiting is the best way of saving globalization from a protectionist backlash.

Now whenever a conservative like myself hears the phrase "redistribution of income," I might be liable to toss the study aside. However, I was curious to see just how these "liberal" professors from Northeastern schools like Yale and Dartmouth would solve this little conundrum they described above. And what I found was shocking:

A New Deal for globalization would combine further trade and investment liberalization with eliminating the full payroll tax (The payroll tax contains a Social Security portion and a Medicare portion) for all workers earning below the national median. In 2005, the median total money earnings of all workers was $32,140, and there were about 67 million workers at or below this level. Assuming a mean labor income for this group of about $25,000, these 67 million workers would receive a tax cut of about $3,800 each. Because the economic burden of this tax falls largely on workers, this tax cut would be a direct gain in after-tax real income for them. With a total price tag of about $256 billion, the proposal could be paid for by raising the cap of $94,200, raising payroll tax rates (for progressivity, rates could escalate as they do with the income tax), or some combination of the two. This is, of course, only an outline of the needed policy reform, and there would be many implementation details to address. For example, rather than a single on-off point for this tax cut, a phase-in of it (like with the earned-income tax credit) would avoid incentive-distorting jumps in effective tax rates.

These Northeastern professors actually proposed a tax cut for the lower earners as a method to help promote globalization. The study finds that the United States has gained $500 billion annually from
trade and investment liberalization and that our nation's future economic prosperity hinges on "averting a protectionist backlash."

The Palm Beach Post this morning has a fascinating blog entry on how Castro's buddy, Hugo Chavez, stays in power by keeping track of individuals that sign petitions for recall elections. What happens is if you sign a petition asking for a recall election of Chavez, your national ID number is published on a website established by a Chavez crony named Luis Tascon. Here's how it works:

That is, you could enter the ID of any people you would know, co-worker, relative, friend, neighbor and you could figure out whether that person was for or against Chavez. Soon that list ballooned with the inclusion of people participating in Chavez social programs (pro Chavez) and people who manifested against Chavez in other activities (e.g. other referendum petitions of anti Chavez nature). That list was actively used by the government to discriminate against people that were perceived or assumed to oppose Chavez. Those people were fired from governmental jobs, denied promotions, and if they were not working for the government could be subjected to all sorts of abuses starting from passport denial.

Yesterday, a recuperating Fidel Castro penned an editorial titled, "You will never have Cuba," with the "you" being directed at U.S. President George W. Bush.

Also yesterday, current dictator Raul Castro's wife, Vilma Espín, died. Espína was a leader of the Cuban revolution who fought alongside the Castro brothers during the war against Fulgencio Batista and his loyalists.

We in Miami await the day that the Cuban people will be free from the ruthless Castro regime.

Law professor Maimon Schwarzschild and I were email reminiscing this morning about our 1950’s and 1960’s idealism of the United Nations’ mission and impressive building in New York.

Maimon wrote:

Weirdly, the UN architecture - the physical appearance of the UN buildings - always somehow evoked freedom and goodness for me: the optimism that I knew had been invested in the UN in the 1940s and 50s; even as I was horrified by what I actually saw going on there.

After nearly 25 years, I was back in the UN buildings for the first time for a conference a year or two during the summer. I wandered off on my own - to the Delegates Lounge, the conference building, the General Assembly hall: it was summer, security was light, I had at least a minimal pass, and of course I knew my way. The carpets - which were elegant in the late 60s and early 70s - looked frayed and tatty, the glass, which had gleamed, was smudged, and the whole scene looked dated. My only reaction was "They're having budget problems. Thank God for that at least."

I told Maimon that I was listening on the car radio to a speech by Donald Trump a few years ago, about the U.N.’s ripoff plans for reconstructing the U.N. building, and laughed so hard I almost crashed. It seems that Maimon wrote about the Trump speech and linked to its text and tape.

The Washington Times this month updated us on the U.N.’s building renovation. As Donald Trump would say, “You’re Fired!” Or, should be, and would be, if anyone else but at the U.N.

The proposed $2 billion renovation of the United Nations headquarters building in New York is proceeding with little outside oversight or control…

Sen. Tom Coburn, Oklahoma Republican, said cost estimates for the proposed five-year project have ballooned, while U.N. officials have yet to release basic audit, contracting and procurement data….

"If they don't want transparency, then they have something to hide," he said.

First, Maimon:

Meantime, by way of comic relief, here is a transcript, and -- much better still -- the live audio of Donald Trump's testimony to the Senate International Security Subcommittee last July about renovating the UN Building in New York. It is vintage Trump: not an atom of humility. But he obviously took some trouble to look into what will be done at the UN Building, and how much it should cost. The short answer -- no surprise -- is that the UN is planning to spend billions more than ought to be spent.

Don't just read the Trump transcript. Listen to the audio. You'll laugh: at Trump. At first. Then -- even if ruefully -- you'll start laughing with him.

The UN aspect apart, you learn something about Trump from this performance (especially if you listen to the audio). What comes through is that the guy may be awful, but it's no accident that he's a gazillionaire. He knows his business: at least, he knows to the dollar what everything costs to build and renovate in New York, and how much he has spent, himself, on every aspect of every one of his projects. There's pleasure (guilty or otherwise) in listening to a guy, any guy, who knows his business.

Now, on to Trump: (long, hilarious speech and tape link, below the fold) As Trump concludes, "Congratulations. You've got yourself a mess on your hands."

Last night I watched this film, The Pursuit of Happyness, with Will Smith and his (actual) son surviving on hope, love, devotion, and the courage to persevere.

Some critics, probably who haven’t been or appreciative of struggling fathers, thought it saccharine. After getting my sons to sleep (finally) last night, I sat transfixed throughout, cringing and remembering scenes from my and my father’s life. The ending of the film is better than most struggling fathers experience, which is all the more reason to honor their selfless dedication to family.

For every father who has struggled, and for every wiseass who thinks it's funny to ridicule fathers, watching this film is a must. There are most fathers who give their all for their children, who deserve a hearty Happy Father’s Day.

Mike Benge (bio) is a tireless advocate for human rights and religious freedom in South East Asia. As a USAID worker in Vietnam assigned to the International Volunteer Service (IVS), he was captured and a POW of the North Vietnamese from 1968-1973.

[During the 1968 Tet Offensive,] his plan was to pick up the IVS "kids" and then go down to pick up some missionaries in the area.

Benge was captured a few miles from the Leprosarium at Ban Me Thuot. This center treated anyone with a need as well as those suffering from leprosy. It was at the Leprosarium that Rev. Archie Mitchell, Dr. Eleanor Vietti and Daniel Gerber had been taken prisoner in 1962. The Viet Cong regularly harassed and attacked the center in spite of its humanitarian objectives.

Column by Mike Benge in Washington Times, June 17, 2007

Last Tuesday, June 12, President Bush spoke at the dedication of the Victims of Communism Memorial that honors the memories of those killed in communist regimes. He said their deaths should remind the American public "evil is real and must be confronted." Ironically, this Friday, June 22, President Bush will honor the president of a tyrannical communist regime that murdered over a million Vietnamese and ethnic minorities with a White House visit during which he has the opportunity to confront that evil.

Recently, dozens of democracy activists, journalists, cyber-dissidents and Christian and other religious leaders were arrested and imprisoned by the Vietnamese communists. Congressional leaders and human-rights groups have charged Hanoi with "unbridled human-rights abuses," the "worst wave of oppression in 20 years." Those recently arrested are but a few of the hundreds of political and religious prisoners in Vietnam; some have been tried, while those less visible simply "disappeared." This mounting crackdown is a deliberate diplomatic slap in the face of the United States.

Hanoi brazenly aired on TV the kangaroo court trial of Thaddeus Nguyen Van Father Ly, who was muzzled during the proceedings. In Vietnamese, the colloquial phrase for censorship is "bit mieng" -- to cover the mouth. The picture of Father Ly's muzzling seems a literal enactment of an old cliche. Denied representation, Father Ly was sentenced to eight years imprisonment.

Mr. Bush's endorsement for Hanoi's admission into the World Trade Organization at last year's Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation meeting in Hanoi, the removal of Vietnam from listed as a Country of Particular Concern (CPC), and the granting of Permanent Normal Trade Relations (PNTR) were all predicated on the Communist Party substantially improving its human-rights record.

It should come as no surprise that after the granting of these privileges, the Vietnamese communists continued and intensified their repression.

Though Vietnam professes great strides in religious freedom, one must look under the veneer to seek the truth. For example, in 2006, the Vietnamese government claimed that "25 denominations" had received certificates to carry on religious activities, when in fact they were only individual house churches.

The price of these certificates is the surrender of religious freedom. The church must submit to the central Bureau of Religious Affairs (CBA) a list of the names and addresses of members, and only those approved by the CBA can attend services. All sermons must be approved by the CBA, and all sermons, including those of minorities, must be given in Vietnamese. Pastors and priests can neither deviate from the approved sermon nor proselytize, and the CBA police monitor all services.

Montagnards, Hmong and other Christians, Khmer Krom Monks, members of the Cao Dai faith, and Hoa Hao are still relentlessly persecuted. This is what Hanoi calls religious freedom, and the U.S. administration was naive enough to believe them and removed them from the Countries of Particular Concern (CPC) list of countries that suppress religious freedom.

Recently, the Vietnamese communist regime demanded of the U.N. Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues the cancellation of scheduled films to be screened at the May 22 forum. One film, "Hunted Like Animals," sponsored by the Hmong-Lao Human Rights Council depicted the genocide against the Hmong, and the other film depicted human-rights abuses against the Khmer Krom by the Vietnamese communists. It should come as no surprise that the United Nations acquiesced to the demands of the repressive Hanoi regime.

Reminiscent of the days of slavery in the "Old South," Montagnards who flee from repression in the Central Highlands are hunted down like wild animals. Vietnam pays bounties to Cambodian police for every Montagnard they catch and turn over to them. Vietnam considers refugees seeking asylum in another country to have violation its national security, punishable by imprisonment for up to 15 years.

Recently, three Montagnards were arrested by Cambodian police and charged with "human trafficking" for the so-called crime of aiding other Montagnards to flee the repression in Vietnam via the Montagnards' "underground railroad." Although Cambodia does little to stop the trafficking of children for prostitution, the communist regime is prosecuting these Montagnards on Vietnam's request in hopes it will convince the U.S. it is serious about trafficking. Vietnam pulls the strings of the marionette Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen.

Reports continue from behind the curtain of silence drawn around the Central Highlands of the torture and deaths of Montagnard Christians. During a February trip to Hanoi, Ellen Sauerbrey, assistant secretary of state for population, refugees and migration, told a press conference that the Vietnamese officials assured her that Montagnards can freely travel to the Embassy in Hanoi or the Consulate in Ho Chi Minh City to voice any grievances.

She said Montagnards should stay in Vietnam and not seek asylum in Cambodia. Given the Vietnamese communists history of repression and broken promises, how can Mrs. Sauerbrey be naive enough to believe Montagnards suffering persecution would ever to be allowed through the phalanx of Vietnamese police surrounding the U.S. Embassy and Consulate?

As predicted, Hanoi has announced the release of a few token high-profile political prisoners in an attempt to smooth the way for the arrival of Vietnam's President Triet, and in hopes of placating President Bush, the State Department and Congress. Can this administration be gullible enough to fall for yet another charade by the Vietnamese communists?

President Bush, keeping faith in the spirit of the Victims of Communism Memorial that "evil is real and must be confronted," should demand of Vietnam's president the release of all of the hundreds of political prisoners including those recently arrested and the more than 350 Christian Montagnards that seem to have been forgotten by this administration.

In this New York Times article, Trent Lott says, "Talk radio is running America. We have to deal with that problem.”

Lott's gaffe, is not the first of his career. Remember this one:

"When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We’re proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn’t have had all these problems over the years, either"

Lott is proud of Strom's support of racial segregation, despite the fact that Strom obviously was not practicing what he preached in his personal relations:

An attorney for the family of former U.S. Sen. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina confirmed Monday that in 1925, when he was 22, Thurmond fathered a child with a black teenage housekeeper.

It should not be surprising to find Lott in another gaffe because he is a hypocrite -- just like Strom Thurmond. The only exception is that I believe Thurmond actually repented from his racist views, however there is nothing to suggest to me that Lott has changed his narrow views. He obviously still believes that the views of the little people (especially those who listen to talk radio -- Gawd forbid) in America don't matter, despite the fact that it is just these people who sent him to Washington. And while I support, in large part, the immigration bill that Lott is seeking to pass, I don't believe his outright dismissal of the views of Americans on this issue is appropriate of a senior legislator in the United States Senate.

On the heels of my exploration into the minds of wise Czech presidents this past week, the Wall Street Journal today published an interview with Vaclav Havel which better articulates why I called his biography, To the Castle and Back, "strange" in my earlier post. Havel is disarminingly honest, in a manner that is rarely seen by few Western politicians. Additionally, I believe he finds himself uncomfortable self-identifying with any particular worldview, i.e. neoconservative versus realist or liberal versus conservative.

In his autobiography he gives wide praise to both Hillary Clinton and Madeleine Albright, telling Hillary to her face that he believes she would make a great president. Yet, Havel is widely identified as supporting the neoconservatives' push for global democracy as seen in his putting together the recent Democracy and Security Conference in Prague, where President Bush gave this remarkable and inspiring speech, akin to his Second Inaugural Address, about the importance of the United States being a beacon of hope for those persons living in totalitarian regimes.

One of the more interesting aspects of the interview came in Havel's belief that those living in totalitarian or despotic regimes must live in truth -- a notion that a citizen of such a state should refuse "to participate in the everyday lies that were the cornerstones of totalitarian rule: sham elections, hypocritical expressions of solidarity for the oppressed, patently fraudulent statistics on the economic progress of the socialist bloc, and so on."

And I suspect it is for this reason that Havel remains uncomfortable with the reasons why America and the Coalition went to War Against Iraq:

The argument for war based on Saddam's weapons of mass destruction "did not play well with me," he says. The rationale for war was "not well-articulated" and the "timing of the attack was questionable . . . you could ask why it wasn't done five years earlier or five years later." The absence of international support for the war was also problematic, he says. And he warns the U.S. -- with a nod to Sen. William Fulbright's book "The Arrogance of Power," an early favorite of his -- about the dangers of setting oneself up as the world's policeman.

Still, Mr. Havel defends what he calls "the idea that the world could not be indifferent forever to a murderer like Saddam Hussein." This, too, is a longstanding theme of his. Earlier in the day, he had warned the other dissidents at the conference that while "a big danger of our world today is obsession . . . an even bigger danger is indifference."

But perhaps most important is Havel's reiteration of the fact that: "It is not true that there are some places in the world where only authoritarianism is possible," he says. "We have people at this conference from China, from Iran, all these people who are connected by their desire to lead a dignified life. By democracy we can understand the conditions that respect this desire."

Which is why I am so puzzled at Havel's support for Hillary Clinton and Madeleine Albright, who seek an end to the War in Iraq, and pushback from the aggresive approach at combating terrorism that Bush has implemented. But maybe Havel knows something of their character that I don't. At least we can hope.

OK, it may be the prosecution’s job to put the best light on their charges, or worst on the defendant, but the prosecution of the Haditha Marines is again being exposed as lacking merit.

Yesterday, the San Diego Union-Tribune reports:

The Marine officer who will help decide whether Lance Cpl. Justin Sharratt should face trial expressed doubt yesterday about the prosecution's assertions that Sharratt killed defenseless Iraqis execution-style.

Lt. Col. Paul Ware said he was having “a great deal of difficulty understanding the prosecution's theory” that Sharratt and another Marine led four Iraqi men into a house, then executed them Nov. 19, 2005, in the city of Haditha. Ware is scheduled to make his recommendation on whether to court-martial Sharratt by the beginning of next month.

The prosecution's arguments aren't supported by forensic and other evidence, Ware said during the final day of Sharratt's preliminary hearing at Camp Pendleton.

Another local reporter at the hearing wrote:

Lt. Col. Paul Ware, who will recommend whether to send Sharratt to trial, challenged the prosecution, saying the government's theory of the case do not warrant the three counts of unpremeditated murder filed against Sharratt in December.

"The account you want me to believe does not support unpremeditated murder," Ware told the lead prosecutor, Maj. Daren Erickson. "Your theories don't match the reason you say we should go to trial."…

Ware also suggested he is inclined to believe Sharratt, who maintains the first two men he shot were pointing AK-47 rifles at him, and that the killings were carried out in self-defense.

"To me it seems the most important issue is whether the Marines perceived a hostile threat," Ware said. "It comes down to credibility to determine if this case should go to trial."

Prosecutors filed charges against Sharratt based on interviews with relatives of the slain men, who contended they did not have any weapons and were herded into the room and shot in rapid succession….

Prosecutors agreed Friday that the case centers solely on the competing versions of events. The discrepancy among accounts is enough to warrant the case going to trial, Erickson told Ware.

"The seminal issue in this case is did the Iraqis have AK-47s?" Erickson said. "The issues in this case are best resolved before a trier of fact."

Ware seemed disinclined to order a trial, however, questioning whether any Iraqis would be willing to come to the U.S. to testify at trial if one is ordered.

Even so, Ware said forensic evidence presented by agents from the Naval Criminal Investigative Service who found multiple bullet holes in the walls and curtains of the room does not suggest execution-style killings.

"What the evidence points to is that the version of the Iraqis isn't really supported," Ware said….

[Defense attorney] Culp also suggested that the prosecution of his client is colored by politics surrounding the civilian deaths in Haditha, which generated worldwide condemnation when first reported by Time magazine in March 2006. Until then, the Marine Corps maintained the civilians died when caught up in a bombing and in crossfire from a small-arms attack on the troops.

"This is a new kind of war, and this case is a result of the new kind of warfare," Culp said, referring to insurgents who do not wear uniforms and mix within the civilian population. "There's also politics involved here, and the politics of the war is tearing at this nation."…

"He charged into that room at great risk to his own safety and killed those men before they killed him. He deserves a medal," the attorney said.

The New York Times, having relied in earlier reporting on leaks from “near” the prosecution to undercut the Marines, now surfaces with another “leak” that it hadn’t formerly deemed fit to print:

In sworn statements provided to The New York Times though they have not yet been made public, Corporal Sharratt said that he and Sergeant Wuterich pursued the men into the house after observing them “turkey peeking” at their squad’s convoy from behind a wall nearby.

Inside the home, Corporal Sharratt said in the statements, he saw one man near a bedroom doorway point an AK-47 at him, and shot the man in the face with his 9-millimeter pistol. As he entered the bedroom, he said, he shot a second man holding another AK-47 at waist level, from about two feet away. He then shot a third man whom he perceived as moving toward him, and a fourth man in the room, he said.

“I could not tell while I was shooting if they were armed or not,” Corporal Sharratt said in a sworn statement, dated March 19, 2006, “but I felt threatened because the first two individuals had rifles and I assumed they had some sort of weapon.”

“I believe I did not get shot by the first Iraqi because I think he had a malfunction of either his weapon or round,” the statement continued. “While clearing the weapons, they all had a round in their chambers and were ready to fire with what appear to be full magazines.”

Corporal Sharratt said that he had fired all the bullets in his handgun and that Sergeant Wuterich, who had been behind him, had entered the room and shot five to seven rounds into the “bodies on the ground to make sure that none were capable of grabbing a weapon and firing back at us.”

Dr. Rouse said that none of the bullet wounds to the four bodies, which had all been shot in the head, appeared to come from shots fired closer than two feet away. Her testimony supported defense arguments that Corporal Sharratt had shot the men in a cramped, darkened bedroom in self-defense and not execution style.

But Special Agent Maloney, in a forensic report last year, concluded from blood spatter and bullet trajectories that two Iraqi men were shot “while crouched or sitting” — one against a wall, the other inside a closed closet.

In his testimony here Thursday, he reasserted those conclusions under questioning by a military prosecutor. But minutes later, pressed by a lawyer for Corporal Sharratt, Special Agent Maloney conceded that it was just as possible that at least one of the men had been moving in Corporal Sharratt’s general direction, or diving toward a closet that may have contained a gun, when he was fatally shot in the head.

But whether the men were armed when they were shot remains an open question. The two AK-47s, which Iraqi witnesses said they saw marines carry out of the home after the shootings, were not kept in a secure locker at the nearby Marine base, and cannot be found.

Meanwhile, the family of Lance Corporal Sharratt reflects:

“The military justice system is a slow-moving animal,” [father] Darryl Sharratt said before Friday’s hearing, “and it could be days, it could be weeks or months until we truly find out the disposition of this case.”…

“You have to stay positive in it no matter what,” [sister] Jaclyn Sharratt, 25, said, “and our attorneys are doing so wonderful.”

To the rue, and embarrassment that should be wider broadcast and publicly apologized for, of the prosecution and the New York Times.

See here and here for earlier Haditha posts, to catch up on the "show" trials.

The waters in the English channel are apparently warming with the new French president Nicolas Sarkozy pushing Tony Blair as the first permanent European Union president.

According to the Financial Times, the Europeans are currently in negotiations on a "new treaty, which aims to establish an EU president and foreign minister in 2009. The new role of president of the European Council – representing the bloc’s 27 member states – would be a permanent replacement for the six-monthly rotating presidency of the EU." While the position holds "few formal powers" it would give Blair the bully pulpit to mark out the EU's "strategic leadership and represent the bloc on the world stage on issues such as climate change, bilateral relations and development in conjunction with the new foreign minister."

Sarkozy says of Blair, "Why not? He is qualified for it. We want a politically strong Europe. We want a president who is credible.”

And credible he is, despite the whinings of the European electorate who in recent polls are decidedly against Blair taking on this new role. Nevertheless, this may not make much of a difference, as the EU's elites have considerably more power than its elected representatives, and Blair's nomination to this position by none other than the French president is a sign that the bureaucrats in Brussels approve.

On another note, it is refreshing to have a mature adult sitting in the top post in France. Sarkozy obviously takes the Atlantic Alliance seriously, and his nation no doubt will be the stronger for it in coming years.

Glenn Reynolds links to Mark Steyn’s comment on Senator Trent Lott:

JUNE 15, 2007 MARK STEYN ON TRENT LOTT: "I have no serious expectations of Senators these days, but I would like them at the very least to try and sound a little less like the plump complacent emirs of the one-party-state of Incumbistan. Trent Lott fails even that test." Indeed. posted at 01:31 PM by Glenn Reynolds

As Hugh Hewitt said today, “the senators especially don't like the new media's ability to inform, inspire and direct public opinion. The end result of Senator Lott's blasts (another one here) is to of course further motivate the base…”

Here’s one blogger who has been posting about Trent Lott’s abuse of his position.
Below are two earlier posts.

In follow-up to them, it seems that Lott’s cronies also feel above the law.

October 11, 2006

Flood Insurance for Dummies, and Trent Lott

The New York Times reports that Senator Trent Lott is suing his insurer for refusing to pay up for his Gulf Coast Mississippi house flooding during Katrina, although flood damage is excluded from his policy and the Senator recognized that by taking out a federal flood policy from which he collected $350,000. To collect more, Senator Lott has threatened the insurance industry with punitive legislation.
Senator Lott, if he weren’t so self-involved and self-important, might have taken the time to read Sebastian Mallaby’s column in the Washington Post, “Flood Insurance for Dummies,” and might begin to act like a Senator instead of a rapacious dummy.

The federal flood insurance program uses taxpayers' money to subsidize houses that are prone to flooding…The program is supposed to discourage building in areas that flood more than once per decade. But in 1995 there were almost 75,000 insured properties that had flooded at least twice in 10 years. Far from discouraging this sort of building, the program appears to encourage it: Ten years on, the feds now insure 134,000 two-floods-per-decade homes. Over the past decade, these houses have generated insurance claims worth $5.7 billion while paying less than $1 billion back in premiums.
…
The insurance industry, which has billions of dollars on the table, cannot afford this sort of nonsense. It is focused on understanding climate patterns and devising rational responses. But government central planners are blind to the usefulness of price signals. So thousands of Americans build dream houses by the waters, oblivious to the risks and costs -- to themselves and to the rest of us.

Irresponsible building in flood zones is subsidized by everyone else, and everyone else is supposed to be shocked and pay after every flood to maintain the homeowners’ irresponsible choice to have a luxury water view.

Senator Lott, you’re all wet.
— Bruce Kesler | Oct. 11, 2006 | 11:57 PM

February 23, 2007

Trent Lott’s Flood Abuse

Last October, I wrote about Senator Trent Lott’s threats to the insurance industry of punitive legislation as pressure to pay him off for the uninsured loss of his beachfront house to Hurricane Katrina.
Irresponsible building in flood zones is subsidized by everyone else, and everyone else is supposed to be shocked and pay after every flood to maintain the homeowners’ irresponsible choice to have a luxury water view.

Today’s Wall Street Journal recounts the crusade by Senator Lott to introduce punitive legislation. He, also, rounded up fellow Mississippi lawyers and politicians to launch lawsuits. State Farm caved to political extortion, and will pay off Trent Lott.
The result, for those Mississippians without Trent Lott’s position and friends:

Lost among all the politicians' war-whooping over the State Farm capitulation, is the effect this extortion has had on the private insurance industry. In recent weeks companies from State Farm to AllState have stopped writing policies in parts of Mississippi, which will result in consumers having fewer insurance choices, if they can find insurance at all.

Ah, but never fear: Washington has a solution for that, too. In the face of insurers exiting his state (in no small part because of the actions of politicians), Mr. Taylor [an ally of Lott’s] earlier this month introduced yet another piece of insurance legislation. This one would expand the national flood insurance program to cover other hurricane-related damage. In other words, the Mississippian wants to create a new federal disaster insurance program that will put taxpayers--rather than private insurers--on the hook next time a storm hits. Revenge is a scary thing.

The federal flood insurance program has already paid out six times as much as collected in premiums. Lott and buddies want taxpayers without a view to see many billions more of their taxes go into their pockets and those of wealthy or irresponsible others who knowingly build in known danger zones.

This goes beyond "pork" to sheer personal pigging out at the public's expense.
— Bruce Kesler | Feb. 23, 2007 | 1:16 AM

Rachel Ehrenfeld is one tough lady, a scholar of illicit fund flows whom the Saudi Mahfouz will rue he took on.

Rachel's guest column for Democracy-Project is below.

The High Cost of Free Speech

By Dr. Rachel Ehrenfeld

On June 8, 2007, seven months after hearing arguments in my suit against Saudi billionaire Khaled bin Mahfouz--Ehrenfeld vs. bin Mahfouz--the U.S. Second Circuit Court of Appeals established an important legal precedent, henceforward affecting all American writers and publishers.

This “case is one of the most important First Amendment cases of the past 25 years,” says prominent civil rights attorney and 30-year American Civil Liberties Union board member, Harvey Silverglate. Ironically, the potential of many foreigners suing U.S. reporters and publishers for libel “to do grave damage to free press” is “not yet readily recognized,” he adds.

The case concerns my countersuit against the Saudi who sued me for libel in the U.K. because my book Funding Evil includes details of his financial support to al-Qaeda and Hamas. In November 2004, bin Mahfouz -- a Saudi citizen, not British --sued me for libel for reporting these and other “inconvenient” facts.

Bin Mahfouz would enjoy no success were he to sue me for libel in U.S. courts. My facts are based on official documents, and thereby establish that through his "Muwafaq Foundation," managed by U.S.-designated terrorist Yassin al-Qadi, bin Mahfouz financed Hamas, al-Qaeda, and other Islamic terror organizations. Indeed, the alleged terrorist financier is also a defendant in all federal lawsuits filed by the 9/11 victims.

But British libel laws, based on the Libel Act of 1819, do not encourage free speech. These draconian statutes include clauses prohibiting “blasphemous libel.” They also place the burden of proof on the defendant--who need not have been malicious. Reporters and publishers must prove the accuracy of their work--and defense witnesses must produce primary evidence. In my case, even if U.S. officials would testify for me, they’d need to produce classified documents available only to those with U.S. national security clearance.

Intended to be democratic, Britain’s libel laws are exploited almost exclusively by wealthy individuals. In Britain’s High Court, bin Mahfouz’ success in a libel case against me was all but preordained.

After all, bin Mahfouz has a long history of successful “libel tourisim.” He sought and received default judgments, fines, apologies and retractions from more than 30 other writers and publishers--including major U.S. newspapers such as the Wall Street Journal, New York Times and Washington Post, none of which have reported on this case or the enormous significance of last week’s Appellate Court decision.

I refused to acknowledge the lawsuit: British libel laws stand American principle on its head. Thus, British High Court Justice Eady, who granted bin Mahfouz many other default judgments, awarded another one to the Saudi, in my case. In September 2005, he ordered me to pay £114,386.52, in fines and expenses, which at today’s exchange rate is $225,913.37 plus interest. He ordered my books physically destroyed; they were published only in the U.S. -- the 23 copies sold in Britain were purchased online or by special order.

Since the 1965 Uniform Foreign Money-Judgment Recognition Act allows the enforcement of foreign monitory judgments in the U.S., bin Mahfouz intends to act. One of his agents appeared late one evening at my door, advising me to “You had better respond. Sheikh bin Mahfouz is a very important person and you ought to take very good care of yourself.”

I countersued him in N.Y., asking the Federal Court to declare the default judgment against me and my book obtained by bin Mahfouz in England's High Court as unenforceable in the U.S., and contrary to the free speech protections Americans enjoy.

It is especially significant, therefore, that the Second Circuit Court of Appeals overruled the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, in requesting that the state’s highest court determine whether bin Mahfouz should personally be subject to New York jurisdiction.

The Second Circuit’s decision went further, ruling that my claim is “ripe,” and therefore can be brought before a U.S. court. Thus, every American writer and publisher, finding themselves in a similar situation, can now seek a U.S. court decision.

When and if the New York Supreme Court decides that there is jurisdiction over bin Mahfouz, my case would proceed on its merits. This would allow me to take pre-trial “discovery” of bin Mahfouz’s financial activities to further confirm the accuracy of my reporting on him in Funding Evil. Stay tuned.
---
Dr. Rachel Ehrenfeld is director of the New York based American Center for Democracy www.acdemocracy.org. Your contributions to help Rachel defend us all are gratefully appreciated.

In 2004, I visited Vienna – a marvelous city, rivaling Paris’ beauty – where I saw this sculpture in the large plaza in front of the opera house. I got into conversation with two well-dressed, middle-aged Austrian men about it, who pointed out the nearby sign, which included this description:

After 12 May 1938, Jewish citizens of Vienna were forced to scrub the streets that had been smeared with slogans. The bronze rendering of a kneeling street-washing Jew is a reminder of the degradation and humiliation that preceded merciless persecution.

We chatted, they taking pride in the plaza and its sculptures. I then pointed at a building’s balcony about a block away, from which Hitler addressed over a million cheering Austrians after the Anschluss (political union of Germany and Austria in 1938). They replied, “We don’t discuss that.”

Neither did the rest of the world, for decades after World War II, and universal knowledge of the Holocaust.

In the emerging Cold War’s scrabble for position, as the New York Times’ obituary of former U.N. Secretary General and former President of Austria, Kurt Waldheim, says:

With the end of World War II, the Allies designated Austria as a nation invaded by the Nazis rather than Germany’s willing partner. The country’s new status helped assuage the fears of thousands of Austrian combatants like Mr. Waldheim. Moreover, Austria remained neutral in the growing cold war between East and West.

Kurt Waldheim’s record of direct involvement in Nazi slaughter of Jews and of others who resisted or were deemed threats in the Balkans was ignored by both the Russians and the United States, who both had evidence in their possession immediately after the war. Even:

By early 1948, the United Nations War Crimes Commission listed him as a suspected war criminal subject to trial. Yet no government pressed to bring Mr. Waldheim to account or even to disclose his history.

It was not until these and additional records were revealed in 1985, first by rival politicians in Austria and then further investigated and publicized by the World Jewish Congress, that the world woke up. But, “On June 8, 1986, in a two-round election, Mr. Waldheim won the runoff for Austria’s presidency with 53.9 percent of the 4.7 million votes cast. “

Waldheim maintained that he served in order to avoid persecution by the Nazis for his anti-Nazi father. However, as the scholar who investigated him said in his 1988 tome: “The fact that Waldheim played a significant role in military units that unquestionably committed war crimes makes him at the very least morally complicit in those crimes.” Going further, Richard Fisk, (Wikipedia bio) a British reporter known for his unflinching published opposition to any person, event or country he deems deficient of respect for human rights (though to extremes of heavy criticism of Israel and being an interviewing chum of Osama bin Laden), says:

Waldheim - how his friends would prefer that they didn't read these words this morning - was based at a town called Banja Luka, a market town where Serbs and Jews and communist Croatians were murdered en masse, hanged like thrushes from mass gallows or raped to death in the nearby Jasenovac extermination camp. Waldheim would have us believe that he knew nothing of all this, that he was a mere intelligence officer for Army Group E of the Wehrmacht, whose commander, Löhr, just happened to be tried for war crimes after the Second World War….

I even visited his interrogation office, next to an execution pit wherein Serbs and Jews were massacred daily. Did the rifle shots not disturb Kurt Waldheim's concentration? Oh, what it must have been to have the peace and quiet of the UN headquarters on the East River. …

In 1987, King Hussein took Waldheim to the heights of Um Queiss to overlook the Israeli-occupied West Bank and awarded him the Hussein bin Ali medal - named after Hussein's grandfather. The Plucky Little King praised Waldheim for his patriotism, integrity, wisdom and "noble human values". General Löhr, I should add - Waldheim's superior officer in Yugoslavia - was hanged as a war criminal.

Whether a war criminal or a willing accomplice of war criminals, Waldheim skated away from judgement for 40-years, with the complicity of and support from those who found him useful to their immediate ends.

His death shouldn’t be allowed to pass without reflecting on other and current complicities by those who would sacrifice millions of innocents to murderous tyrants and terrorists, for immediate ease or avoidance of admitting or consciousness of the consequences.

Having spent much of last night awake -- reading Vaclev Havel's strange, yet brilliant autobiography of his presidential years titled To the Castle and Back, I shouldn't have been surprised to read another Czech president's sage advice in today's Financial Times, but I am. Vaclav Klaus writes:

The author Michael Crichton stated it clearly: “the greatest challenge facing mankind is the challenge of distinguishing reality from fantasy, truth from propaganda”. I feel the same way, because global warming hysteria has become a prime example of the truth versus propaganda problem. It requires courage to oppose the “established” truth, although a lot of people – including top-class scientists – see the issue of climate change entirely differently. They protest against the arrogance of those who advocate the global warming hypothesis and relate it to human activities.

As someone who lived under communism for most of his life, I feel obliged to say that I see the biggest threat to freedom, democracy, the market economy and prosperity now in ambitious environmentalism, not in communism. This ideology wants to replace the free and spontaneous evolution of mankind by a sort of central (now global) planning.

The environmentalists ask for immediate political action because they do not believe in the long-term positive impact of economic growth and ignore both the technological progress that future generations will undoubtedly enjoy, and the proven fact that the higher the wealth of society, the higher is the quality of the environment. They are Malthusian pessimists.

In my latest column at the Washington Examiner, I take a look at Omid Safi, associate professor of religious studies at UNC-Chapel Hill. Safi employs the language of postmodernism, which peddles nihilism via academic jargon, to excuse the actions of radical Muslims.

Yesterday, June 12, marked the twentieth anniversary of President Reagan's extraordinary "Tear Down this Wall" speech in Berlin. I remember that speech well, as much for the derision it elicited from my then-fellow graduate students at Michigan as for the speech itself. How, I thought, could anyone, liberal or conservative, not wish for the Wall to fall? I was naive, of course: hyper-educated white collar towns like Ann Arbor were (are) chock-full of elites filled with contempt for America, her people, and her freedoms. And Ronald Reagan, the Hollywood cowboy? The man who was, in the words of the disgraced Clark Clifford, an amiable dunce? We're supposed to take him seriously, they sneered?

When the Wall fell but two years later, the shouts of joy in Central Europe were met in parts of Ann Arbor with silence and horror. Nowhere was this more evident than in Michigan's German department, where lamentations for the the GDR (German Democratic Republic, DDR in German, or East Germany) were almost ubiquitous.

I was during those days privileged to teach in the Great Books program of Michigan's Honors College. For one year only, the director substituted a few modern works for the list of classical Greek and Roman works that we normally assigned students. Among the works we read in lieu of timeless classics was the East German author Christa Wolf's mediocre novel Cassandra, in which Achilles was a rapist--think of it as a dumbed-down feminist interpretation of one of Western culture's seminal works.

To lecture on this book, a professor from the German department whose name I have long since forgotten--I've looked at their web site and don't see her photograph--was brought in. She droned on for several days about the brilliance of Wolf, a pampered, hypocritical intellectual who spent as much time in Berkeley as the East, and who, a connected friend then told me, had a laptop--an unimaginable luxury in East Germany. That is, she enjoyed the fruits and freedoms of the West, all while attacking it from the perspective of an "advanced" writer in the East. She was seen by her champions in the West as a rebuke to Western ideas of individualism and liberty. If you see neither intellectual integrity nor philosophical consistency in this, you're vision is spot-on.

The most memorable part of that semester of wasted time came when she told the class that the fall of the Wall was to be lamented, for it meant that (and her words are burned into my brain) "we will never know the potential of the GDR."

This was, of course, a lie. We knew the potential very well, for it was realized every day of that artificial prison-country's life: death, oppression, the Gulag, torture, distrust among neighbors, dissension within families, the state as all-powerful, perverse parent whose evil knew no end.

Last summer, I visited the Stasi Museum in Berlin. It was a remarkable place, not for the clever eaves-dropping devices under the glass counters, but for bringing home to visitors the degree of malice exercised by the state against everyone. Vulnerable young men were turned against their wives or lovers; children made to report their parents for activities against the state; thought itself made a crime.

Two pieces on the web today deserve our attention. The first is by my friend and sometime Democracy Project blogger, Laurie Morrow. Her essay, "Tear Down What Wall?," appears at Minding the Campus, the new blog sponsored by the Manhattan Institute. Laurie argues persuasively that Marxism on campus is not dead, decades-old obituaries notwithstanding. She's correct, I'm afraid; such a heresy cannot die so quickly. Laurie lauds the Victims of Communism Memorial, dedicated yesterday.

The second is the speech that President Bush delivered at that dedication. I've reprinted the text below.

*****

THE PRESIDENT: Thank you all for coming. Please be seated. Dr. Edwards, thanks for your kind words. Congressman Lantos -- no better friend to freedom, by the way; Congressman Rohrabacher, the same. Members of the Czech and Hungarian parliaments; ambassadors; distinguished guests; and more importantly, the survivors of Communist oppression, I'm honored to join you on this historic day. (Applause.)

And here in the company of men and women who resisted evil and helped bring down an empire, I proudly accept the Victims of Communism Memorial on behalf of the American people. (Applause.)

The 20th century will be remembered as the deadliest century in human history. And the record of this brutal era is commemorated in memorials across this city. Yet, until now, our Nation's Capital had no monument to the victims of imperial Communism, an ideology that took the lives of an estimated 100 million innocent men, women and children. So it's fitting that we gather to remember those who perished at Communism's hands, and dedicate this memorial that will enshrine their suffering and sacrifice in the conscience of the world.

Building this memorial took more than a decade of effort, and its presence in our capital is a testament to the passion and determination of two distinguished Americans: Lev Dobriansky, whose daughter Paula is here -- (applause) -- give your dad our best. And Dr. Lee Edwards. (Applause.) They faced setbacks and challenges along the way, yet they never gave up, because in their hearts, they heard the voices of the fallen crying out: "Remember us."

These voices cry out to all, and they're legion. The sheer numbers of those killed in Communism's name are staggering, so large that a precise count is impossible. According to the best scholarly estimate, Communism took the lives of tens of millions of people in China and the Soviet Union, and millions more in North Korea, Cambodia, Africa, Afghanistan, Vietnam, Eastern Europe, and other parts of the globe.

Behind these numbers are human stories of individuals with families and dreams whose lives were cut short by men in pursuit of totalitarian power. Some of Communism's victims are well-known. They include a Swedish diplomat named Raoul Wallenberg, who saved 100,000 Jews from the Nazis, only to be arrested on Stalin's orders and sent to Moscow's Lubyanka Prison, where he disappeared without a trace. They include a Polish priest named Father Popieluszko, who made his Warsaw church a sanctuary for the Solidarity underground, and was kidnaped, and beaten, and drowned in the Vitsula by the secret police.

The sacrifices of these individuals haunt history -- and behind them are millions more who were killed in anonymity by Communism's brutal hand. They include innocent Ukrainians starved to death in Stalin's Great Famine; or Russians killed in Stalin's purges; Lithuanians and Latvians and Estonians loaded onto cattle cars and deported to Arctic death camps of Soviet Communism. They include Chinese killed in the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution; Cambodians slain in Pol Pot's Killing Fields; East Germans shot attempting to scale the Berlin Wall in order to make it to freedom; Poles massacred in the Katyn Forest; and Ethiopians slaughtered in the "Red Terror"; Miskito Indians murdered by Nicaragua's Sandinista dictatorship; and Cuban balseros who drowned escaping tyranny. We'll never know the names of all who perished, but at this sacred place, Communism's unknown victims will be consecrated to history and remembered forever.

We dedicate this memorial because we have an obligation to those who died, to acknowledge their lives and honor their memory. The Czech writer Milan Kundera once described the struggle against Communism as "the struggle of memory against forgetting." Communist regimes did more than take their victims' lives; they sought to steal their humanity and erase their memory. With this memorial, we restore their humanity and we reclaim their memory. With this memorial, we say of Communism's innocent and anonymous victims, these men and women lived and they shall not be forgotten. (Applause.)

We dedicate this memorial because we have an obligation to future generations to record the crimes of the 20th century and ensure they're never repeated. In this hallowed place we recall the great lessons of the Cold War: that freedom is precious and cannot be taken for granted; that evil is real and must be confronted; and that given the chance, men commanded by harsh and hateful ideologies will commit unspeakable crimes and take the lives of millions.

It's important that we recall these lessons because the evil and hatred that inspired the death of tens of millions of people in the 20th century is still at work in the world. We saw its face on September the 11th, 2001. Like the Communists, the terrorists and radicals who attacked our nation are followers of a murderous ideology that despises freedom, crushes all dissent, has expansionist ambitions and pursues totalitarian aims. Like the Communists, our new enemies believe the innocent can be murdered to serve a radical vision. Like the Communists, our new enemies are dismissive of free peoples, claiming that those of us who live in liberty are weak and lack the resolve to defend our free way of life. And like the Communists, the followers of violent Islamic radicalism are doomed to fail. (Applause.) By remaining steadfast in freedom's cause, we will ensure that a future American President does not have to stand in a place like this and dedicate a memorial to the millions killed by the radicals and extremists of the 21st century.

We can have confidence in the power of freedom because we've seen freedom overcome tyranny and terror before. Dr. Edwards said President Reagan went to Berlin. He was clear in his statement. He said, "tear down the wall," and two years later the wall fell. And millions across Central and Eastern Europe were liberated from unspeakable oppression. It's appropriate that on the anniversary of that speech, that we dedicate a monument that reflects our confidence in freedom's power.

The men and women who designed this memorial could have chosen an image of repression for this space, a replica of the wall that once divided Berlin, or the frozen barracks of the Gulag, or a killing field littered with skulls. Instead, they chose an image of hope -- a woman holding a lamp of liberty. She reminds us of the victims of Communism, and also of the power that overcame Communism.

Like our Statue of Liberty, she reminds us that the flame for freedom burns in every human heart, and that it is a light that cannot be extinguished by the brutality of terrorists or tyrants. And she reminds us that when an ideology kills tens of millions of people, and still ends up being vanquished, it is contending with a power greater than death. (Applause.) She reminds us that freedom is the gift of our Creator, freedom is the birthright of all humanity, and in the end, freedom will prevail. (Applause.)

I thank each of you who made this memorial possible for your service in freedom's cause. I thank you for your devotion to the memory of those who lost their lives to Communist terror. May the victims of Communism rest in peace. May those who continue to suffer under Communism find their freedom. And may the God who gave us liberty bless this great memorial and all who come to visit her.

God bless. (Applause.)

The news coverage of yesterday’s Article 32 hearing at Camp Pendleton of Marine Lance Corporal Justin Sharratt exhibits the different treatment of facts between the New York Times, San Diego’s Union-Tribune and North County Times, and in Haditha.

Sharratt’s grand jury-type hearing is the first of the enlisted men charged with murder in the killings at Haditha on November 19, 2005.

The New York Times’ report, dateline Camp Pendleton (meaning its reporter was there), is headlined “U.S. Inquiry Hampered by Iraq Violence, Investigators Say.” The entire content is about the dangerous conditions in Haditha when Naval investigators tried to get testimony from locals, a theme in line with the New York Times’ emphasis on hopeless violence in Iraq. One of the investigators said,

Because of time and security concerns, she said, she had interviewed six family members at once, gathering testimony that would form the case against Corporal Sharratt.

The defense pointed out:

James D. Culp, a civilian lawyer defending Corporal Sharratt, suggested that group interviews had been “contradictory to everything you have been taught.” Ms. Mannle said she did not have time to conduct separate interviews or review her notes before the marines said it was time to leave.

She did not record the interview, she said, because she could not find a recorder, but when pressed by Mr. Culp, she said she never sought to buy one from the post exchange.

An N.C.I.S. spokesman, Ed Buice, said in an e-mail message that no federal law enforcement agency regularly taped interviews.

The New York Times report had no comment about the inability to check locals’ stories against each other, a common practice.

The North County Times, near Camp Pendleton, adds vital information from the hearing that the New York Times didn’t find fit to print.

A lance corporal charged with murder in the shooting deaths of three Iraqi brothers in 2005 passed a polygraph examination in which he said the first man he shot was holding an AK-47 assault rifle, according to testimony heard in a base courtroom Tuesday.

The test, administered in Iraq in April 2006, showed there was no apparent deception in an account provided by Lance Cpl. Justin Sharratt, Naval Criminal Investigative Service Special Agent Nayda Mannle testified.

Also:

Sharratt's attorneys strived Tuesday to show inconsistencies in the government's investigation, focusing many of their questions on why agents did not pursue full background reports on the men who died inside the fourth home, particularly one man who worked on the Jordanian border and may have had several Jordanian passports in his possession.

Mannle, who is a civilian agent, said such checks probably should have been done and agreed that agents can still try to piece that information together. But she also said that none of the 24 victims who died in Haditha had any known ties to the insurgency.

"We ran them through the database and all came up as negative for insurgents," she said during telephonic testimony from an office in the Pentagon.

[ed:The highly incomplete "database" versus the Marines there!]

The defense also is trying to show that forensic evidence from where the Iraqi men died is inconsistent with an account given by their surviving family members, who told investigators the men were herded into a room and executed in rapid succession. Sharratt has disputed that account.

Instead, the forensics from the government investigation show that one of the slain men was apparently hiding inside a closet and bullet holes are scattered on a wall throughout that room. The defense contends that dispels the allegation of an execution-style slaying.

The San Diego Union-Tribune’s coverage described the Naval investigator’s acceptance of the colluded stories of Haditha family members over that of the Marines.

Mannle said the Ahmed family members' accounts seemed consistent and truthful.

The San Diego Union-Tribune, also, managed to cover testimony that the New York Times didn’t see worthy of print:

Sharratt's attorneys hammered at what they viewed as omissions and shortcomings by the naval investigators. During cross-examination, Mannle acknowledged that Sharratt had passed a polygraph exam concerning whether any of the Ahmed brothers pointed a rifle at him.

She also said time constraints prompted by the extreme danger to foreigners in Haditha prevented her from separating the Ahmed family members before questioning them, which is standard procedure in crime investigations.

In addition, Mannle confirmed that Marines seized several AK-47 rifles and a suitcase allegedly containing Jordanian passports from the Ahmed compound the day of the killings. She said her agency wasn't able to track down these items, which might have linked the Ahmed brothers to insurgent activity.

Neither the New York nor San Diego reporting on Haditha mentions the dramatic change in Haditha since the “surge.” I recalled a May 2007 report in the Los Angeles Times, which failed to show up in a Google search “Haditha.” After some additional searching, I did find a single reference to it in a Seattle Times reprint:

Please don't go, Haditha mayor tells U.S. Marines
HADITHA, Iraq -- The weather was desert hot. But the Pepsi was nicely cold. After acting the role of the gracious host, the mayor here made his point.
"The people of Germany and Japan would not have made progress without the Americans," Mayor Abdul Hakim M. Rasheed told the U.S. Marine officers who recently came to his heavily guarded home. "The people of Iraq deserve the same."

The Marines, including three generals, assured Rasheed that they had no plans to abandon him and his city. Don't be distracted by the political debate in Washington, they urged Rasheed, who listened and nodded….

Marine commanders say their success in reducing insurgent violence in Haditha and other areas of al-Anbar is an indication that a "surge" of troops, like that being tried by the Army in Baghdad, can succeed. But they note that a surge is a beginning, not an end.

Rasheed indicated that he remains concerned that the Americans, in their haste to leave, might leave behind a City Council whose members are insurgents in disguise, waiting for the U.S. to depart.

Note, at another Article 32 hearing last week of Lt. Col. Jeffrey Chessani, distinguished battalion commander of the force in Haditha, charged with failing to report upwards all he knew of the events of that day, much was made of the testimony of Maj. Gen. Richard Huck that,

[Huck] didn’t become aware until this week that the Haditha town council met with Chessani eight days after the killings and presented a formal letter, written in English, contending a war crime had been committed….If that document was presented, (that) needs to be reported and the commander should be thinking ‘Perhaps I should get an investigation started,’ “ Huck said.

Quick, stop the war, a known treacherous Haditha town council should be taken more seriously than all Americans at the scene of an enemy attack, and in the midst of heavy ongoing fighting in Anbar during November 2005 the on-scene commander should place his priorities elsewhere, and his Marines should fail to adequately defend themselves!

Oh, the only other recent item on improved conditions in Haditha that I found in my Google search was in local coverage in Alaska’s Kodiak Daily Mirror: Marine Lance Cpl. Bryan Gilbert graduated from Kodiak High School in 2005 and shortly after joined the U.S. Marine Corps.

Gilbert went to Haditha, Iraq. Haditha is where a lot of bloodshed has taken place, but it is now more stabilized.

It was in Haditha just before Gilbert arrived that Marines were killed by an IED, and later both enemy and civilians were killed in an onslaught that resulted in controversy and charges over the action.

This was also where insurgents gathered members of the Iraqi police, took them to a soccer field and shot them.

“There are Marines still there. We established order. Now there is a small-town government, an elected mayor and the Iraqi police are in force,” Gilbert said.

“The last two months there, not a single shot was fired at us. Haditha is stable today."

Hadithans are more appreciative of the Marines than the New York Times.

UPDATE From mother of a Marine:
Thank you so much for this article. It is the best depiction of the insanity of the NCIS. It is a complete moral and intellectual outrage that these young heroes are being treated as terrorists. My son was in the same battalion when this incident happened and has returned to Iraq on a second deployment while his brother Marines face this. I cannot tell you the affect that this is having on them and how many lives may be lost as they have now to add to their contemplation if they will face arrest upon their return. I would rather have my son in a jail cell than a pine box.

Thank you,

Denise Lewis

As Congress considers methods and approaches to deal with the 12 million illegal immigrants living in the United States and the thousands more coming across the border annually, these facts from Linda Chavez of the Center for Equal Opportunity from a recent Wall Street Journal article should be noted:

. . .the children of Hispanic immigrants are graduating from high school. The high school completion rate for young, U.S.-born Hispanics is 86%, only slightly lower than the 92% of non-Hispanic whites. Hispanic immigrant children who do enroll in school after they come here are as likely as American-born Hispanics to earn a high school diploma (although half of Mexican immigrants 15-17 years-old do not enroll in school).

Hispanics are more likely than either whites or blacks to continue their education at two-year institutions; in 2000 they represented 14% of all students enrolled in two-year institutions. Only 12% of U.S.-born Hispanics earn four-year degrees compared with 26% of non-Hispanic whites. Nonetheless, the economic returns on education are substantial for Hispanics.

[]

English proficiency is, of course, essential if Hispanics are to fully assimilate into the mainstream, and one issue many Americans have expressed great concern over. But despite anxiety that Hispanics aren't learning English and will soon insist that the U.S. become bilingual, the evidence suggests otherwise. . .But if Hispanic immigrants have been slow to learn English, their American-born progeny have quickly adapted. English is the preferred language of virtually all U.S.-born Hispanics; according to a study by the Pew Hispanic Center, indeed, 78% of third-generation Hispanics cannot speak Spanish at all. Even in Southern California, an area with the largest population of Spanish speakers in the nation, 96% of third-generation Mexican Americans prefer to speak English at home, according to a recent study by sociologists Ruben Rumbaut, Douglas Massey and Frank Bean.

The typical congressman or senator’s failure to engage constituents using the Internet may explain why many senators and commentators are shocked that the Senate’s attempt at an immigration bill was so out of sync with polls that overwhelmingly showed sympathy toward immigration but expect firm enforcement measure first to avoid repeating the influx problem.

Chief deputy Republican whip in the House, Eric Cantor, for example, has taken the lead in developing a personal blog, which he calls an “interactive town hall.” Cantor says,

"If you're not going to engage in the debate of the day," he said, "then what are you doing here for your constituents?"...

"It's like a force multiplier" when a politician teaches and empowers constituents and gets them to inform others, said Carol Darr, director of the Institute for Politics, Democracy & the Internet at George Washington University.

What’s shockingly different about Cantor’s attitude?:

According to the nonprofit Congressional Management Foundation, nine senators and 23 House members offered blogs from their government Web sites last summer. The study did not examine campaign Web site blogs.

According to the Congressional Management Foundation:

Congress received four times more communications in 2004 than 1995—all of the increase from Internet-based communications.[1] Congress received 200,388,993 communications in 2004: the House received 10,400,000 communications by post and 99,053,399 via the Internet; the Senate received 7,935,594 by post and 83,000,000 via the Internet. During this decade, the staffing levels of Members’ personal offices have not changed.

Recommendations:

There is a new communications environment to which Congress will need to adapt. The Internet has gone far beyond simply providing new tools to perform old tasks. In order to adapt to the new environment that the Internet has created, Congress must adopt an entirely new communications paradigm.

Congress must improve online communications. Members of Congress should improve the timeliness of their responses, reach out to grassroots organizations to help identify better means for communicating, and answer e-mail with e-mail.

Managing in the new environment may require new capabilities and new thinking. Congress should consider: providing Members with additional staff and resources to manage the rapidly growing volume of constituent communications; expanding the use of technology; adopting new management policies and/or establishing a task force to identify solutions to the growing communications challenges.

The new environment provides benefits that Members of Congress and their staffs have not yet fully appreciated. By embracing new communications tools, each Member could: connect to thousands more constituents; better connect to politically active citizens; save money; improve their image; and learn to better operate in the Information Age.

The Congressional Management Foundation’s broader 2006 survey of congressional websites found almost all “disappointing”:

"Given the increasing number of Americans using the Internet to get information from or communicate with their government, it is disappointing that the most common grade earned was a D," said Beverly Bell, executive director of CMF, a non-profit, non-partisan organization founded 30 years ago to promote a more effective Congress. "Congress has just not kept up with the demands of an increasingly Internet-savvy public."…

The Foundation’s criticisms:

Almost half (49.1%) do not give sufficient information on contacting the office regarding a problem with a federal agency.

Only 26.4% offered guidance on the best ways to communicate with their offices.

Only 11.4% of House and 5% of Senate Web sites posted their office hours.

32.0% do not have links to sponsored or co-sponsored legislation. Of the ones that do, 13.7% did not reference the most current session of Congress.

Congressmen and senators have a personal stake in improving their web presence:

There is a relationship between Web site grade and 2006 election margin. Members who received less than 50% of the vote had the highest percentage of sites that scored an "F" – 21.1%. In addition, those who received more than 55% of the vote had the highest percentage of "D"s.

That’s, of course, if they care about what serves their constituents and being re-elected, more than being spoon-fed from special interests and prominent news media what they’d like to happen in Congress.

Don’t be fooled by the con game played by scholarly Islamic radicals who wish to portray Islam as a religion of peace and tolerance. A recent Pew Research poll reported in the New York Post the disturbing statistics that 26% of Muslims under the age of 30 in America find suicide bombing in defense of Islam acceptable. While 5% of U.S. Muslims have a favorable opinion of al Queda, this figure jumps to 13% for British Muslims, where a previous poll found that this considerable minority supports Osama bin Laden. Candace de Russy recently wrote about the University of Maryland World Public Opinion findings that 2/3 of mainstream Muslims worldwide from Morocco to Indonesia favor the re-establishment of an Islamic Caliphate.

Armed with such statistics, is it any wonder that I should be skeptical of an Islamic scholar from Dubai who invites me to join her and other international scholars in a quest to “project a peaceful image of Islam” to people of all faiths. Professor Atiya Khalil Arab, former chair of Arabic department, KU, writes:

As a scholar and intellectual I am deeply disturbed at the state of the world today, of hatred between people everywhere, of violence and terrorism, whether “religious” or “state” branded. All the same, the 80% poor masses of the world are suffering. At 72 years of age, I cannot do much except with my Islamic and Arabic background I can at least team up with other scholars and project a PEACEFUL image of Islam to Muslims and brothers and sisters of other religions alike.

Furthermore she is seeking the support of such noted scholars as Dr Yusuf al-Qaradawi to join their activities to “bring safety, peace and prosperity to the poor and rich alike in this world” and asked if I would help to contact this prominent Islamic scholar, since she found a link to my Democracy Project blogs when she performed a Web search for his contact details.

Yet as a Wikipedia search reveals, Dr. YAQ is a controversial figure at best. An Egyptian Muslim scholar and writer who hosts a wildly popular al Jezeera program, “Sharia and Life,” he is considered a moderate Islamic visionary who supports democratic principles and rights for women in the heart of the Islamic world. He also condemned the 9-11 attacks as a grave sin against innocent human lives and denounced the violent riots in response to the Danish cartoons as well.

However, he is also a staunch defender of Palestinian suicide bombing arguing that they are a legitimate form of resistance and that multitudes of Islamic scholars hold similar views. He defended martyrdom operations against Israeli citizens on BBC News:

An Israeli woman is not like women in our societies, because she is a soldier...I consider this type of martyrdom operation as an evidence of God's justice...Allah Almighty is just; through his infinite wisdom he has given the weak a weapon the strong do not have and that is their ability to turn their bodies into bombs as Palestinians do.

He also issued various fatwas condemning the U.S. invasion of Iraq proclaiming Muslims who fight U.S. soldiers will achieve martyrdom. He issued the following fatwa as reported by MEMRI: "...all of the Americans in Iraq are combatants, there is no difference between civilians and soldiers, and one should fight them, since the American civilians came to Iraq in order to serve the occupation”.

I replied as follows to Dr. Atiya Khalil Arab over a week ago:

I regret that I have no further information on Dr. al-Qaradawi. I don't know how I became linked in his contact details since I have never written about him. Nor do I wish to have any association in support of him or his well known views praising anti-Israeli martyrdom operations. I find it rather disturbing that someone who wishes to portray Islam as a religion of peace would support such a man who proposes terror as a legitimate form of resistance against Israel.

I have not as yet received a reply, neither have I heard anything contradicting the radical stance of Dr. YAQ. Unless I hear otherwise, I will conclude that the information on Wikipedia is correct and Dr. YAQ is no moderate Muslim, rather a wolf in sheep’s clothing. While he preaches democracy and an Islam of tolerance and peace, this man is an Islamic radical who incites terrorism and hatred against America and Israel.

The Associated Press reports that according to the attorney for Captain Randy Stone, legal officer for the 3rd Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment, charged with failing to report or investigate the deaths at Haditha, the investigating officer, Major Thomas McCann, for the Article 32 hearings (military-type grand jury) is recommending to 1st Marine Division commander Lt. Gen. James Mattis that the charges be dismissed.

At Stone's preliminary hearing last month at Camp Pendleton, he argued that he never ordered an investigation into the killings because he believed the deaths resulted from lawful combat.
''I have never lied and have worked at all times to assist as best I could to shed light on what I knew and when I knew it,'' Stone, from Dunkirk, Md., said at his hearing.

My first post on Haditha, last June 1, 2006, when the charges first surfaced to worldwide opprobrium heaped upon the Marines and the United States, was titled “Haditha: Who, What, When, Where, Why.” I said,

Who. What. When. Where. Why. These are the fundamental questions of good reporting. Apply them to what is being presented by the major media about Haditha, and see how very thin factually is the reporting. Speculation, instead, leads, with comments by those with no special information, surrounding small snippets of leaks from those on the periphery of actual involvement or investigation, any cautions quickly passed over or relegated to the end of the “story.”
Regardless of where the truth ultimately is, at this point the major media’s treatment of Haditha is little more than a literate lynch mob in a rush to judgment.

There’s still more cases to be heard, but so far the best the prosecution has shown is 20-20 hindsight and hind-covering by some and lots of speculation by some who weren't there about the kindler-gentler way to take on insurgents hiding among civilians, the civilians actually knowing in advance about the attack on the Marines.

Justice may be catching up for the Marines, but their careers and pockets are already ruined, and the United States mission in Iraq and support for it undermined.

Keep tuned for the media apologies. Suuuure to come, right?

For those who want to refresh their memories, or to be sickened by the course of the Haditha charges:

I recently wrote about the weakness of the Haditha prosecution’s case here and here.

Last year, when the charges first broke, I continued to write about and document their weakness here, and here.

Since, I added posts about the unfair treatment of the Marines here, here, here, and here.