Steve Schacher

quote:I just hope our troops leave sometime before I die.Wouldn't it be something if our troops left Iraq before the left Kosovo? You do realize that we still have troops in Germany since WWII, and that was 60 years ago. We still have troops in South Korea, and that was 50 years ago. Where's the outrage over that? Actually, we're talking about pulling our troops out of Germany now, and that's becoming the source of outrage. It turns out that Germany fears the loss to their economy of our 100,000 soldiers spending their incomes in German shops and restaurants. Go figure...

quote:Eliminiting the dividend tax - This only seriously benefitted Wall Street traders, & such, those who have large amounts invested.Many more people today have money invested in the market via their 401(k)'s and mutual funds. We discussed last year (or was it the year before) how the dividend tax is really double taxation. Perhaps a better approach is to eliminate the corporate tax and keep the dividend tax since corporations are really just collections of individual owners. Besides, the corporations just pass the tax onto the consumer anyway, resulting in higher prices. Drop the corporate income tax, keep the dividend tax, lower prices and everyone (investors and consumers) benefits. quote:Bush's tax cuts make the rich richer, while the middle and lower classes get poorer. I can't make it any simpler then this.There is the old saying that you never get hired by a poor person. If the rich get richer, what do they do with all those stockpiles of money? Do they buy 5 "family" SUVs and a personal 757 like John Kerry? No, the rich put that money back into the economy just like the poor do, only their money goes back in the form of capital investment, not consumer expense. Capital investment is converting one asset into another. Consumer expense is trading income for short-term consumables. Who's money better serves the macro-economy in the long run?

quote:Eliminiting the dividend tax - This only seriously benefitted Wall Street traders, & such, those who have large amounts invested.Many more people today have money invested in the market via their 401(k)'s and mutual funds. We discussed last year (or was it the year before) how the dividend tax is really double taxation. Perhaps a better approach is to eliminate the corporate tax and keep the dividend tax since corporations are really just collections of individual owners. Besides, the corporations just pass the tax onto the consumer anyway, resulting in higher prices. Drop the corporate income tax, keep the dividend tax, lower prices and everyone (investors and consumers) benefits. quote:Bush's tax cuts make the rich richer, while the middle and lower classes get poorer. I can't make it any simpler then this.There is the old saying that you never get hired by a poor person. If the rich get richer, what do they do with all those stockpiles of money? Do they buy 5 "family" SUVs and a personal 757 like John Kerry? No, the rich put that money back into the economy just like the poor do, only their money goes back in the form of capital investment, not consumer expense. Capital investment is converting one asset into another. Consumer expense is trading income for short-term consumables. Who's money better serves the macro-economy in the long run?

quote:Steve: Did they examine the sensor? see what it was transmitting to?It looks to be the typical motion sensor available at any Radio Shack. See the picture in the article: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/05/25/...ain619408.shtml

quote:Steve: Did they examine the sensor? see what it was transmitting to?It looks to be the typical motion sensor available at any Radio Shack. See the picture in the article: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/05/25/...ain619408.shtml

Just as a brief contrast, remember the story last month of an electronic device found on a Philadelphia train track? Remember that they determined that it was motion sensor? With that kind of information, what kind of security warning would you send out? BTW, do you know how that story turned out? It was placed by a graveyard shift railyard worker so that he could tell when the boss was approaching in order to take naps. With 20/20 hindsight, should a warning have not been issued?

Just as a brief contrast, remember the story last month of an electronic device found on a Philadelphia train track? Remember that they determined that it was motion sensor? With that kind of information, what kind of security warning would you send out? BTW, do you know how that story turned out? It was placed by a graveyard shift railyard worker so that he could tell when the boss was approaching in order to take naps. With 20/20 hindsight, should a warning have not been issued?

There is no such thing as a Derek Smart. It is really a sophisticated chatbot that was initially programmed to respond "RTFM," "Out the airlock with you", "It's done when it's done, and right now it ain't done," and various profanities about publishers, reviewers, and USENET critics, based on a random number generator seeded by the member number and number of posts by the poster. Somebody forgot to turn off the chatbot, and it seems to have grown beyond its original programming and has taken over this site. Occasionally it posts gibberish about release candidates and version control, but we just reboot the server and that seems to clear things up for a while. Since we can no longer do anything about it, we've all just learned to love it.

New York Times column by William Safire, The Zelikow Report: quote:WASHINGTON ÔÇö "Panel Finds No Qaeda-Iraq Tie" went the Times headline. "Al Qaeda-Hussein Link Is Dismissed" front-paged The Washington Post. The A.P. led with the thrilling words "Bluntly contradicting the Bush Administration, the commission. . . ." This understandably caused my editorial-page colleagues to draw the conclusion that "there was never any evidence of a link between Iraq and Al Qaeda. . . ." All wrong. The basis for the hoo-ha was not a judgment of the panel of commissioners appointed to investigate the 9/11 attacks. As reporters noted below the headlines, it was an interim report of the commission's runaway staff, headed by the ex-N.S.C. aide Philip Zelikow. After Vice President Dick Cheney's outraged objection, the staff's sweeping conclusion was soon disavowed by both commission chairman Tom Kean and vice chairman Lee Hamilton. "Were there contacts between Al Qaeda and Iraq?" Kean asked himself. "Yes . . . no question." Hamilton joined in: "The vice president is saying, I think, that there were connections . . . we don't disagree with that" ÔÇö just "no credible evidence" of Iraqi cooperation in the 9/11 attack. The Zelikow report was seized upon by John Kerry because it fuzzed up the distinction between evidence of decade-long dealings between agents of Saddam and bin Laden (which panel members know to be true) and evidence of Iraqi cooperation in the 9/11 attacks (which, as Hamilton said yesterday, modifying his earlier "no credible evidence" judgment, was "not proven one way or the other.") But the staff had twisted the two strands together to cast doubt on both the Qaeda-Iraq ties and the specific attacks of 9/11: "There have been reports that contacts between Iraq and Al Qaeda also occurred after bin Laden had returned to Afghanistan, but they do not appear to have resulted in a collaborative relationship." Zelikow & Co. dismissed the reports, citing the denials of Qaeda agents and what they decided was "no credible evidence" of cooperation on 9/11. That paragraph ÔÇö extending doubt on 9/11 to all previous contacts ÔÇö put the story on front pages. Here was a release on the official commission's letterhead not merely failing to find Saddam's hand in 9/11, which Bush does not claim. The news was in the apparent contradiction of what the president repeatedly asserted as a powerful reason for war: that Iraq had long been dangerously in cahoots with terrorists. Cheney's ire was misdirected. Don't blame the media for jumping on the politically charged Zelikow report. Blame the commission's leaders for ducking responsibility for its interim findings. Kean and Hamilton have allowed themselves to be jerked around by a manipulative staff. Yesterday, Governor Kean passed along this stunner about "no collaborative relationship" to ABC's George Stephanopoulos: "Members do not get involved in staff reports." Not involved? Another commission member tells me he did not see the Zelikow bombshell until the night before its release. Moreover, the White House, vetting the report for secrets, failed to raise an objection to a Democratic bonanza in the tricky paragraph leading to the misleading "no Qaeda-Iraq tie." What can the commission do now to regain its nonpartisan credibility? 1. Require every member to sign off on every word that the commission releases, or write and sign a minority report. No more "staff conclusions" without presenting supporting evidence, pro and con. 2. Set the record straight, in evidentiary detail, on every contact known between Iraq and terrorist groups, including Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's operations in Iraq. Include the basis for the Clinton-era "cooperating in weapons development" statement. 3. Despite the prejudgment announced yesterday by Kean and Democratic partisan Richard Ben-Veniste dismissing Mohammed Atta's reported meeting in Prague with an Iraqi spymaster, fairly spell out all the evidence that led to George Tenet's "not proven or disproven" testimony. (Start with www.edwardjayepstein.com.) 4. Show how the failure to retaliate after the attack on the U.S.S. Cole affected 9/11, how removing the director of central intelligence from running the C.I.A. would work, and how Congress's intelligence oversight failed abysmally. 5. Stop wasting time posturing on television and get involved writing a defensible commission report.

Editorial from New Hampshire's The Union Leader, Iraq and al-Qaida: Connections, maybe even to 9/11: quote:SO, the 9/11 Commission found multiple direct links between al-Qaida and Iraq, right? Actually, yes. But you might not know that if you just scanned the headlines last week. Newspapers from The New York Times to The Union Leader ran misleading headlines based on a misleading report. New York Times columnist William Safire pointed out yesterday that the commissionÔÇÖs staff put out the preliminary report with little if any involvement from the commission members themselves. Safire reported that the commissionÔÇÖs chairman, Tom Kean, told ABCÔÇÖs ÔÇ£This WeekÔÇØ that commission ÔÇ£members do not get involved in staff reports.ÔÇØ So in reality, not only was there no official conclusion that Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida never crossed paths (as some headlines suggested), but what little information has been presented under the commissionÔÇÖs name does not represent the views of the commission members themselves. Richard Miniter, author of ÔÇ£Losing bin Laden,ÔÇØ has interviewed some of the commissionÔÇÖs staff. He has concluded, as he wrote in the New York Post last Thursday: ÔÇ£Yesterday, the commission announced there was ÔÇÿno credible evidenceÔÇÖ linking Iraq and al Qaeda. In reality there is a wealth of evidence that the august panel has ignored.ÔÇØ Some of that evidence is making headlines this week, even though it is old news. The misleading report from the staff of the 9/11 Commission has made old stories of Iraq-al-Qaida ties into news again. The Iraq-al-Qaida ties reported by Miniter include:ÔÇ£Abdul Rahman Yasin, a member of the al Qaeda cell that detonated the 1993 World Trade Center bomb, fled to Iraq. U.S. forces recently discovered a cache of documents in Tikrit, SaddamÔÇÖs hometown, that show that Iraq gave Yasin both a home and a salary. ÔÇ£An al Qaeda operative now held by the U.S. confessed that in the mid-1990s, bin Laden had forged an agreement with SaddamÔÇÖs men to cease all terrorist activities against the Iraqi dictator. ÔÇ£In October 2000, another Iraqi intelligence operative, Salah Suleiman, was arrested by Pakistani authorities. Suleiman was shuttling between Iraqi intelligence and Ayman al Zawahiri, al QaedaÔÇÖs No. 2. ÔÇ£An Iraqi defector to Turkey, known by his cover name as ÔÇÿAbu Mohammed,ÔÇÖ told the Sunday Times of London that he saw bin LadenÔÇÖs fighters in Iraq in 1997. At the time, Mohammed was a colonel in SaddamÔÇÖs Fedayeen. He described an encounter at Salman Pak, the training facility southeast of Baghdad, where militants trained to hijack planes with knives ÔÇö on a full-size Boeing 707. ÔÇ£In 1998, Abbas al-Janabi, a longtime aide to SaddamÔÇÖs son Uday, defected to the West. At the time, he repeatedly told reporters that there was a direct connection between Iraq and al Qaeda.ÔÇØ The vice chairman of the 9/11 Commission, Richard Hamilton, has said that the Iraq-911 tie was ÔÇ£not proven one way or the other.ÔÇØ ThatÔÇÖs a far cry from saying there was no tie. All we can say for sure is that the jury is still out.

From Gray Lady spikes Karzai story at WorldNetDaily: quote:Perception verses reality ÔÇô it's a point that needs to be made until the cows come home. Did you know that on Tuesday of this week Hamid Karzai, the president of Afghanistan, addressed a joint session of Congress? Did you know that not one word of that address, nor even any mention that the event even occurred, appeared in the following day's national edition of the New York Times? Aide from a photograph of President Bush and Mr. Karzai on its front page, and a caption mentioning that the two had a news conference in the Rose Garden, the June 16 edition of the New York Times contains not a single word about what Mr. Karzai said to Congress, to Bush or to the American people. Why the cover up? Here is the text of Mr. Karzai's address to Congress. If you actually click on that link, you'll find that you must pay a subscription fee to read the full text of the speech. That link, by the way, was only one of three links on Google News regarding Karzai's appearance before Congress. The other two were this abbreviated AP wire story and this pitiful UPI wire story. [Editor's note: Karzai's speech in full is posted at Foxnews.com.] I could not find any coverage in print of the long list of issues President Karzai took special care to raise about the progress in Afghanistan ÔÇô 30 percent growth in the Afghan economy, dramatic progress in the country's infrastructure, schools, health-care system and most important, in Karzai's view, the outstanding progress the country has made in restoring basic civil rights to women. How did I learn all of this? I just happened to catch Fox News's live coverage of the president's press conference; otherwise, I would never have known about Karzai's address to Congress. And I consider myself a news junky! The New York Times' treatment of Karzai's visit is not the tip of the iceberg ÔÇô it's the larger part of the iceberg, the part beneath the water that the public never gets to see. Also lying beneath the surface, virtually unseen, is one of the greatest economic booms we've seen in 30 years. But a recent poll shows just how that reality has diverged from public perception of reality. According to a recent survey sponsored by the Associated Press, 57 percent of the public believe the nation has lost jobs in the last six months. That's the perception. What's the reality? Exactly the opposite! During the last six months, the economy generated nearly 1.2 million new jobs. How could the American people be so misinformed? The Times typically relegates good economic news to the inside of its business section, almost always using a wire story, rarely assigning any of its own reporters. They made an exception when the extraordinarily strong May payroll numbers came in: The story appeared on the front page, but only under a one-column headline. Compare that to the four-column headline appearing Thursday, "Panel Finds No Qaida-Iraq Tie," a story which is being widely criticized as a complete distortion of the facts. The Bush administration never claimed that Iraq was directly involved in the 9-11 attacks, but there were "clear ties" ÔÇô not "no ties" ÔÇô between al-Qaida and Iraq before we took military action against Saddam Hussein. The Times reported the exact opposite of the truth in its banner headline. How could the American people be so misinformed? It's a question that the New York Times and editorial boards across this country have a responsibility to ask themselves. Where is Times's public editor, Daniel Okrent, when you need him?

Read this transcript of an interview of VP Cheney and CNBC's Capital Report. He makes the point that there is no proven link between Iraq and Al Qaeda on 9/11, but that there are many links between Iraq and Al Qaeda generally. Furthermore, several 9/11 Commission members are annoyed with the New York Times in the way that they are distorting what the 9/11 Commission actually said. The Commissioners said that they were only charged with looking for a 9/11 connection, not a general working connection between Iraq and Al Qaeda. They make no authoritive statements about the latter, only the former.

Probably a bad join in some offshore programmer's query.

quote:Jump in the wayback machine and take a closer look at all the wars the US has prosecuted from 1812 forward. If one observes these events and the players behind them from the point of view of a bunch of rich and powerful drug smugglers, you will come to the same conclusion I have; It's business as usual.My problem with this statement is that the United States wasn't a power until WWII, and then only after that. I don't know how you'd go back to 1812 as proof of a secret "Illuminati" power base controlling things.

quote:While no one is disputing that Saddam's rule was in many respects both harsh and venal, the fact is that Iraq as a whole was in many ways the most advanced, and even the most progressive (especially with regard to women's legal status) regime in the region. Honesty demands that we look at this whole picture.That's like saying "At least Hitler kept the trains running on time." quote:Sanctions alone are believed to have been responsible for the premature deaths of almost 1.5 million Iraqis in a 12 year period ÔÇô a third of them children ÔÇô from malnutrition, medical neglect, and disease.Can we say "UN Oil For Food" program? quote:380 Iraqi soldiers who had surrendered to US forces were given food by one US Army unit that then left, whereupon another Army mechanized platoon appeared on the scene and machine-gunned the unarmed and clearly marked POWs to death. Does anyone think that this incident was forgotten 12 years later, or that the kin of these murdered troops were looking forward to being likewise liberated? The Army's 24th Mechanized Infantry Division, commanded by General Barry McCaffrey, who would later go on to become Bill Clinton's ÔÇ£drug tsar,ÔÇØ violated a declared cease fire and moved his division forward of the cease fire line south of Basra...Without being flippant, War Is Hell. The above clip was from the 1991 section, but as we've also seen in Tora Bora, and in Fallujah, the guerrillas use cease-fires to entrench and to escape. Someone on the news recently said "You can tell when the insurgents are losing because they call for a cease-fire. You can tell when the politicians are running things because they accept them." Fast-forward to 2003, and what the article glosses over is how the insurgents assassinated all the most likely leaders who would have emerged to form the new government. We're dealing with the "second-string," and even they are slowly being picked off by their "fellow countrymen."

You don't bid on the news, and especially news in public places. At most, the government would require a pool feed from a single source, if they were trying to maintain the sanctity of the event. The pool feed would then go out to all the news sources that wanted it. As I said in another post, CNN is refocusing themselves as a worldwide news provider, considering that there are billions of them and only 300 million of us. Perhaps some of the worldwide opinion is seeping into their domestic decision-making?

It's not China's nuclear science ability, it's its capability to launch them on missiles that were the legacy of the Clinton administration. That's what the Loral missile technology scandal was all about, moving the authorization of technology transfer from Defense to Commerce However, on the nuclear science front, that is also what the nuclear labs scandal was about, including how Energy Secretary Hazel O'Leary reduced the lab security requirements (eliminating IDs that indicated citizens from foreigners under the guise of Political Correctness), halved the security contracting force (boosting profits for the security contractor), allowed foreign scientists to roam uncontrolled through the labs, and then resigned from the Energy Department to take a Board position at the security company whose profits she boosted.

From The Sound of Silence: Iraq's WMDs Found: (lots of links in the source) quote: May 28, 2004 by Joe Mariani After spending more than a year attacking the Bush administration daily for their supposed failure to produce the WMDs that everyone -- including the United Nations, as well as most leading Democrats -- believed Saddam had hidden, the Left has suddenly gone strangely silent on the subject. The "mainstream" media has been tiptoeing around the discovery of a 155-mm mortar shell containing Sarin gas in Iraq, the contents of which have been confirmed. The shell was used as part of an improvised explosive device (IED) on a road near the Baghdad International Airport, and exploded as it was being disarmed. The shell contained three liters of Sarin -- nearly a gallon. It was a type of shell designed to mix chemical components during flight, which was why the explosion didn't kill anyone (though two soldiers were treated for exposure). Three liters of Sarin is enough, if the components are mixed properly, to realistically kill hundreds, and potentially thousands. A concentration of 100 milligrams of Sarin per cubic meter of air is enough to constitute a lethal dose for half the people breathing it within one minute. This type of chemical warfare shell had never been declared by Iraq -- it was not even known that Iraq had ever made them. The 1999 UNSCOM report on Iraq reported that thirty binary/Sarin shells were known to exist, and stated that all had been accounted for. According to UNSCOM, "Iraq developed a crude type of binary munition, whereby the final mixing of the two precursors to the agent was done inside the munition just before delivery." Someone actually had to physically pour the components of the Sarin (or other type of G-series nerve agent) into the shells before they could be fired. At least, that's how the ones we knew about worked. So, a previously-unknown type of artillery shell is found in Iraq, containing an actual, verifiable chemical weapon. This is front page news, right? Should we expect apologies from formerly doubting Liberals? Newspapers filled with retractions from prominent Democrats? Conciliatory visits to President Bush from Jaques Chirac and Gerhardt Schroeder? Not so fast. Remember: it's an election year. Liberals, Democrats, terrorists and appeasers all want President Bush to lose the election so everyone can get back to business as usual. Terrorists want to get back to their implacable war against Western civilisation, and the others want to get back to trying to placate them. The media, as long as we let them get away with it, will only run stories that attack President Bush and undermine support for him. In fact, Liberals already have their spin on this Sarin find ready to go. The vast majority of them -- when you can get them to admit that the Sarin and the shell are real -- argue that it doesn't matter for one of four "reasons." A. The shell is old, from before the 1991 Gulf War, so it's not what we were looking for. Since the cease-fire that suspended the Gulf War depended on Saddam's handing over to the UN "[a]ll chemical and biological weapons and all stocks of agents and all related subsystems and components and all research, development, support and manufacturing facilities", this shell is precisely what we were looking for, especially if it predates 1991. This shell and others like it is why the UN passed 17 resolutions demanding that Saddam disarm. No matter how old it was, it was still lethal. There is no statute of limitations on weapons of mass destruction. B. There is only one shell, not a stockpile, so it doesn't mean anything. This one shell contained enough WMD material to potentially kill as many people as died on 9/11, all by itself. Is it logical to assume that this is the only one in existence -- or just wishful thinking? The fact is that we still don't know how much Sarin Iraq actually produced. "At first, Iraq told UNSCOM that it had produced an estimated 250 tons of tabun and 812 tons of sarin. In 1995, Iraq changed its estimates and reported it had produced only 210 tons of tabun and 790 tons of sarin." (Yes, that's tons.) At the very least, it tells us that we haven't nearly finished looking for the WMDs that Saddam was supposed to surrender, and didn't. Besides... a shell containing mustard gas was also found. Well, maybe there were only two WMD shells in all of Iraq. C. Just because Saddam had WMDs after all, it doesn't mean Bush didn't lie about them. As ridiculous as it sounds, this appears to be the instinctive, defensive reaction of many Liberals to this news. They so badly need to believe that President Bush lied in order to legitimise their hatred of him that they're capable of this sort of twisted reasoning. The rationale seems to be that WMDs don't count if they aren't exactly where the CIA told us they were, as if they couldn't be moved. D. The terrorists didn't even know it was a chemical shell. Well, they do now. And they know where they found it, too. We need to redouble our efforts to stop the terrorists and find Saddam's WMDs, before they're used to derail the new Iraqi government's formation. The media's refusal to give this news the coverage it deserves can only be due to a calculated attempt to reduce American support for our efforts in Iraq, including that of tracking down Saddam's banned weapons. The Left's deliberate silence on this subject for the purpose of influencing our election only helps our enemies.

quote:The white house admits, that this threat is continuous and has not changed, but just want to be safe; because, of all the big events coming up. I've always thought that the 5-point threat system was mis-used. The problem was with initially setting the threat at level 3. With level 3 as the default, you can only go to level 4 before declaring an all-out assault (level 5, I suppose). What Tom Ridge should have done was set us at level 2, with level 1 being peace. This way, they have two levels to move through (3 and 4) before declaring maximum threat. That way, they could have moved us to level 3 now if they wanted to heighten awareness, and still have level 4 available to warn us further. As it is now, they only have one level to increase before going all the way to the top. The first two levels remain unused, and will remain so forever, unless they realign the system in the future.

More... The Connection. Two page excerpt, but good. Saddam Hussein's Philanthropy of Terror. A PDF from a think tank.

quote:how about a weapon of MASS destruction, as opposed to a couple of U.N. banned 25 mile range shells.... Yes, those TWO shells PROVE, that which we always knew: There were some gas shells in the old regieme's "OLD arsenal"The particular shell was a dual chamber shell, where the components get mixed in the air as the shell spins to its destination. There was a gallon of sarin in that shell. If the shell were opened and the chemicals removed, you'd have enough dosage to kill thousands, if not tens of thousands. The fact that this was used as an improvised roadside bomb meant that the sarin chemicals didn't get the chance to mix properly. Then there are those who claim that the dual chamber shell was a more recent innovation than what was available during the 1991 war. quote:These shells are NOT what is referred to as "WMD". Not unless the definition has had radical overhaul, in the last 6 months.I disagree. That definition was meant to cover a variety of things, including nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons. The point being that it was meant to include something larger than the suicide bomber or manure bomber. Obviously, a nuclear detonation will instantly kill 100,000 in the blast zone, and irradiate millions more with the fallout. A biological weapon will infect those in the immediate area and start an epidemic and ensuing panic. A chemical weapon will kill those within its effective range within minutes before dissipating. We've already found chemicals including cyanide and now sarin, we've found biological cultures in scientists own refrigerators, the jury's still out on uranium. quote:I would contend, those old out-dated, and mis-placed shells would NEVER have become an issue, if we had not tore the shit out of that country. The interesting question is: how many times does one use the excuse that a "found" weapon is a holdover from the prior war before we begin to question the effects of the UN weapons inspectors who should have found the stuff. If they said they couldn't find them, and they now show up in ones and twos, do we start asking what else the UN weapons inspectors failed to find that might still be out there? quote:Yeah RIGHT!!! So, by their definition, I have WMDs stored in my shed, and out in my BARN!!!Like I said in an earlier post, in order to use the dual use argument, you have to show evidence of the intended use. I have no doubt that the stuff in your garage is used to kill the weeds in your garden, but show me the industry and agriculture in Iraq for which these chemicals were intended, otherwise I will surmise that they were for the "other" use.

quote:Please do not give up your right to think for yourself just because Fox Network does not want you to do that.This was the Wall Street Journal.

From the Wall Street Journal: Saddam's Files - New evidence of a link between Iraq and al Qaeda quote:Thursday, May 27, 2004 12:01 a.m. EDT One thing we've learned about Iraq since the fall of Saddam Hussein is that the former dictator was a diligent record keeper. Coalition forces have found--literally--millions of documents. These papers are still being sorted, translated and absorbed, but they are already turning up new facts about Saddam's links to terrorism. We realize that even raising this subject now is politically incorrect. It is an article of faith among war opponents that there were no links whatsoever--that "secular" Saddam and fundamentalist Islamic terrorists didn't mix. But John Ashcroft's press conference yesterday reminds us that the terror threat remains, and it seems especially irresponsible for journalists not to be open to new evidence. If the CIA was wrong about WMD, couldn't it have also missed Saddam's terror links? One striking bit of new evidence is that the name Ahmed Hikmat Shakir appears on three captured rosters of officers in Saddam Fedayeen, the elite paramilitary group run by Saddam's son Uday and entrusted with doing much of the regime's dirty work. Our government sources, who have seen translations of the documents, say Shakir is listed with the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel. This matters because if Shakir was an officer in the Fedayeen, it would establish a direct link between Iraq and the al Qaeda operatives who planned 9/11. Shakir was present at the January 2000 al Qaeda "summit" in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, at which the 9/11 attacks were planned. The U.S. has never been sure whether he was there on behalf of the Iraqi regime or whether he was an Iraqi Islamicist who hooked up with al Qaeda on his own. It is possible that the Ahmed Hikmat Shakir listed on the Fedayeen rosters is a different man from the Iraqi of the same name with the proven al Qaeda connections. His identity awaits confirmation by al Qaeda operatives in U.S. custody or perhaps by other captured documents. But our sources tell us there is no questioning the authenticity of the three Fedayeen rosters. The chain of control is impeccable. The documents were captured by the U.S. military and have been in U.S. hands ever since. As others have reported, at the time of the summit Shakir was working at the Kuala Lumpur airport, having obtained the job through an Iraqi intelligence agent at the Iraqi embassy. The four-day al Qaeda meeting was attended by Khalid al Midhar and Nawaz al Hamzi, who were at the controls of American Airlines Flight 77 when it crashed into the Pentagon. Also on hand were Ramzi bin al Shibh, the operational planner of the 9/11 attacks, and Tawfiz al Atash, a high-ranking Osama bin Laden lieutenant and mastermind of the USS Cole bombing. Shakir left Malaysia on January 13, four days after the summit concluded. That's not the only connection between Shakir and al Qaeda. The Iraqi next turned up in Qatar, where he was arrested on September 17, 2001, six days after the attacks in the U.S. A search of his pockets and apartment uncovered such information as the phone numbers of the 1993 World Trade Center bombers' safe houses and contacts. Also found was information pertaining to a 1995 al Qaeda plot to blow up a dozen commercial airliners over the Pacific. After a brief detention, our friends the Qataris inexplicably released Shakir, and on October 21 he flew to Amman, Jordan. The Jordanians promptly arrested him, but under pressure from the Iraqis (and Amnesty International, which questioned his detention) and with the acquiescence of the CIA, they let him go after three months. He was last seen heading home to Baghdad. One of the mysteries of postwar Iraq is why the Bush Administration and our $40-billion-a-year intelligence services haven't devoted more resources to probing the links between Saddam's regime and al Qaeda. In his new book, "The Connection," Stephen Hayes of The Weekly Standard puts together all of the many strands of intriguing evidence that the two did do business together. There's no single "smoking gun," but there sure is a lot of smoke. The reason to care goes beyond the prewar justification for toppling Saddam and relates directly to our current security. U.S. officials believe that American civilian Nicholas Berg was beheaded in Iraq recently by Abu Musab al-Zarkawi, who is closely linked to al Qaeda and was given high-level medical treatment and sanctuary by Saddam's government. The Baathists killing U.S. soldiers are clearly working with al Qaeda now; Saddam's files might show us how they linked up in the first place.

Here's a very interesting survey by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press. It got minimal press, just like the previous study from 1995 that found similar results. Bottom-Line Pressures Now Hurting Coverage, Say Journalists: Press Going Too Easy on Bush It is well worth the read. Examine the numbers in the charts carefully, especially the comparisons of opinions by the media vs. opinions of the general public. Don't miss the links at the bottom of the page to navigate the entire report.

More... The Wedding Party 3