Iranian nukes may be the least of our worries

Biotechnology is becoming as accessible as computer technology

Computer technology emerged from pioneering efforts during World War II to automate code breaking. By the 1950s, programmable computers were becoming available to governments and large businesses. They were very expensive, complex to operate and difficult to program. I started my software career working on an IBM 1620, one of the smallest computers of the era. With an educational discount, the IBM 1620 cost $90,000 (in 1960 dollars, about $500,000 today). You created a computer program on punch cards. The computer operators would start the computer and feed in the operating system on a deck of cards. This was followed by the program that converted your program into machine language. Eventually they fed in your program and the 1620 punched out a deck of cards containing the machine language version of your program. They then fed that deck of cards back into the computer which executed your program. If you were lucky, and your program worked, it would punch out a new deck if cards representing your output. This deck of cards would then be taken to another machine that transferred the information to pyjama paper. The whole process consumed an acre of trees every week.

Today, things are a little different. You type your program directly into the computer. It checks syntax and gives you assistence at every step of the way. When you have the outlines of the program done you can click a button to test it. You can deal with typeset quality text, photo quality images, videos, and the internet with less effort than it took to place a few numbers on a punched card. The technology to so this costs less than $500.

In less than 50 years, the cost of an entry-level computer has decreased by a factor of 100 while performance has increased by a factor of 200,000. Interestingly, software developers from the 1960s could transition into using today's technology fairly easily. They already know how to deal with complexity and they could skip about three generations of technology that effecively dead-ended.

What has this got to do with biotechnology? Bruce Schneier links to a Technology review about developments in biotechnology and its appication to biological weapons. The key figure in the article is Serguei Popov, a former biological weapons scientist who worked in the Soviet Union's biological warfare research laborities in the 70s. They did some amazing and deadly work using relatively primitive technology, the biotechnology equivalent of the IBM 1620. Here's one example:

Into a relatively innocuous bacterium responsible for a low-mortality pneumonia, Legionella pneumophila, Popov and his researchers spliced mammalian DNA that expressed fragments of myelin protein, the electrically insulating fatty layer that sheathes our neurons. In test animals, the pneumonia infection came and went, but the myelin fragments borne by the recombinant Legionella goaded the animals' immune systems to read their own natural myelin as pathogenic and to attack it. Brain damage, paralysis, and nearly 100 percent mortality resulted: Popov had created a biological weapon that in effect triggered rapid multiple sclerosis. (Popov's claims can be corroborated: in recent years, scientists researching treatments for MS have employed similar methods on test animals with similar results.)

When I asked about the prospects for creating bioweapons through synthetic biology, Popov mentioned the polio virus synthesized in 2002. "Very prominent people like [Anthony] Fauci at the NIH said, "Now we know it can be done.'" Popov paused. "You know, that's...naïve. In 1981, I described how to carry out a project to synthesize small but biologically active viruses. Nobody at Biopreparat had even a little doubt it could be done. We had no DNA synthesizers then. I had 50 people doing DNA synthesis manually, step by step. One step was about three hours, where today, with the synthesizer, it could be a few minutes -- it could be less than a minute. Nevertheless, already the idea was that we would produce one virus a month."

Effectively, Popov said, Biopreparat had few restrictions on manpower. "If you wanted a hundred people involved, it was a hundred. If a thousand, a thousand." It is a startling picture: an industrial program that consumed tons of chemicals and marshalled large numbers of biologists to construct, over months, a few hundred bases of a gene that coded for a single protein.

Though some dismiss Biopreparat's pioneering efforts because the Russians relied on technology that is now antiquated, this is what makes them a good guide to what could be done today with cheap, widely available biotechnology. Splicing into pathogens synthesized mammalian genes coding for the short chains of amino acids called peptides (that is, genes just a few hundred bases long) was handily within reach of Biopreparat's DNA synthesis capabilities. Efforts on this scale are easily reproducible with today's tools.

Difficult as it may still be, garage-lab bioengineering is getting easier every year. In the vanguard of those who are calling attention to biotechnology's potential for abuse is George Church, Harvard Medical School Professor of Genetics. It was Church who announced in December 2004 that his research team had developed a new high-throughput synthesizer capable of constructing in one pass a DNA molecule 14,500 bases long.

Church says his DNA synthesizer could make vaccine and pharmaceutical production vastly more efficient. But it could also enable the manufacture of the genomes of all the viruses on the U.S. government's "select agents" list of bioweapons. Church fears that starting with only the constituent chemical reagents and the DNA sequence of one of the select agents, someone with sufficient knowledge might construct a lethal virus. The smallpox virus variola, for instance, is approximately 186,000 bases long -- just 13 smaller DNA molecules to be synthesized with Church's technology and bound together into one viral genome. To generate infectious particles, the synthetic variola would then need to be "booted" into operation in a host cell. None of this is trivial; nevertheless, with the requisite knowledge, it could be done.

I suggested to Church that someone with the requisite knowledge might not need his cutting-edge technology to do harm. A secondhand machine could be purchased from a website like eBay or LabX.com for around $5,000. Alternatively, the components -- mostly off-the-shelf electronics and plumbing -- could be assembled with a little more effort for a similar cost. Construction of a DNA synthesizer in this fashion would be undetectable by intelligence agencies.

In the public debate about how to defend ourselves against biological weapons, the advance of biotechnology has been little discussed. Instead, most biologists and security analysts have debated the merits and shortcomings of Project BioShield, the Bush administration's $5.6 billion plan to protect the U.S. population from biological, chemical, radiological, or nuclear attack. After last year's bioterrorism conference in DC, I called on Richard Ebright, whose Rutgers laboratory researches transcription initiation (the first step in gene expression), to hear why he so opposes the biodefense boom (in its current form) and why he doesn't worry about terrorists' synthesizing biological weapons.

"There are now more than 300 U.S. institutions with access to live bioweapons agents and 16,500 individuals approved to handle them," Ebright told me. While all of those people have undergone some form of background check -- to verify, for instance, that they aren't named on a terrorist watch list and aren't illegal aliens -- it's also true, Ebright noted, that "Mohammed Atta would have passed those tests without difficulty."

Furthermore, Ebright told me, at the time of our interview, 97 percent of the researchers receiving funds from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases to study bioweapon agents had never been funded for such work before. Few of them, therefore, had any prior experience handling these pathogens; multiple incidents of accidental release had occurred during the previous two years.

Slipshod handling of bioweapons-level pathogens is scary enough, I conceded. But isn't the proliferation of bioweaponeering expertise, I asked, more worrisome? After all, what reliable means do we have of determining whether somebody set out to be a molecular biologist with the aim of developing bioweapons?

"That's the most significant concern," Ebright agreed. "If al-Qaeda wished to carry out a bioweapons attack in the U.S., their simplest means of acquiring access to the materials and the knowledge would be to send individuals to train within programs involved in biodefense research." Ebright paused. "And today, every university and corporate press office is trumpeting its success in securing research funding as part of this biodefense expansion, describing exactly what's available and where."

For an insider's perspective, I contacted Jens Kuhn, the Harvard Medical School virologist. The German-born Kuhn has worked not only at Usamriid, and at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, but also -- uniquely for a Westerner -- at Vector.

Kuhn, like Ebright, is no fan of how the biodefense boom is unfolding. "When I was at Usamriid, it exemplified how a biodefense facility should be," he told me. "That's why I'm worried -- because the system worked, and the experts were concentrated at the right places, Fort Detrick and the CDC. Now this expertise gets diluted, which isn't smart."

Kuhn believes, nevertheless, that some kind of national biodefense program is needed. He just doesn't think we are preparing for the right things. "Everybody makes this connection with bioterrorism, anthrax attacks, and al-Qaeda. That's completely wrong." Kuhn recalled his time at Vector and that facility's grand scale. "When you look at what the Russians did, those kinds of huge state programs with billions of dollars flowing into very sophisticated research carried on over decades -- they're the problem. If nation-states start a Manhattan Project to build the perfect biological weapon, we're in deep shit."

Thu Mar 16, 2006

My biggest blogging problem

Using two unconnected computers

I multi-task at work. While I've got some useful stuff going on in the background, I surf the blogs in the foreground, or vice versa. Sometimes I find stuff in a corner of the blogosphere connected to some issue I want to blog about and I make a mental note to catch up on it when I get home. I always think it will be easy to back track to the page I want but 9 times out of 10 I have the devil's own job recreating the paths I took. I think the intervening 10 mile run joggles all the links out of my brain.

If I only used one computer I could easily go through the history and find those missing links. Maybe it's time to get a lap-top; the boss has threatened to inflict one on me.

OK, time for bed. I'll find that link tomorrow and email it to myself.

Posted by: Pat on Mar 16, 06 | 11:09 pm |
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Tue Mar 14, 2006

The New York Times double standard is showing

Fake Abu Ghraib story: Page 1; Correction: Buried

LGF and Mediacrity are on the case.

What is appalling is the low standards that the NYT used. Instead of checking with US authorities, the people who, you know, investigated the abuses and prosecuted the perpetrators, the NYT checks with "representatives of Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International". But then, they are, like the Times, Radical Islam's useful idiots.

But the low standards that the NYT use also applies to most MSM reporting on Iraq, as Ralph Peters reports:

But the foreign media have become a destructive factor, extrapolating daily crises from minor incidents. Part of this is ignorance. Some of it is willful. None of it is helpful.

The dangerous nature of journalism in Iraq has created a new phenomenon, the all-powerful local stringer. Unwilling to stray too far from secure facilities and their bodyguards, reporters rely heavily on Iraqi assistance in gathering news. And Iraqi stringers, some of whom have their own political agendas, long ago figured out that Americans prefer bad news to good news. The Iraqi leg-men earn blood money for unbalanced, often-hysterical claims, while the Journalism 101 rule of seeking confirmation from a second source has been discarded in the pathetic race for headlines.

To enhance their own indispensability, Iraqi stringers exaggerate the danger to Western journalists (which is real enough, but need not paralyze a determined reporter). Dependence on the unverified reports of local hires has become the dirty secret of semi-celebrity journalism in Iraq as Western journalists succumb to a version of Stockholm Syndrome in which they convince themselves that their Iraqi sources and stringers are exceptions to every failing and foible in the Middle East. The mindset resembles the old colonialist conviction that, while other "boys" might lie and steal, our house-boy's a faithful servant.

The result is that we're being told what Iraqi stringers know they can sell and what distant editors crave, not what's actually happening.

Patriotic bloggers distrust the MSM in general and the NYT in particular. One of our jobs is to highlight the MSM's failures, biases and lies. I'd start taking the NYT more seriously when they start printing their corrections on the same page as their original mistakes.

Posted by: Pat on Mar 14, 06 | 10:48 pm |
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Mon Mar 13, 2006

Saddam's WMD strategy revisited again

The NYT largely confirms what I wrote on 6/26/2003

Almost three years ago, I wrote:

In 1998 Saddam kicked out the UN inspectors and started to ramp up his WMD programs again. When 9/11 happened, and GWB called Iraq a founding member of the Axis of Evil, Saddam knew that having WMD would be very dangerous to his regime. However, he wanted to maintain the ability to reconstitute his WMD programs once the pressure of inspections, sanctions and GWB's war on terror abated. So he buried as much as could, destroyed what he couldn't hide, and threatened his scientists with death if they revealed anything.

Saddam also realized that his military was relatively weak, so he still needed WMD to deter his internal enemies, the Kurds in the North, the Shiite's in the South, as well as Iran and Israel, which both had unfinished business with Iraq. He maintained the threat of WMD by letting his enemies believe he still had them. Perhaps some of the evidence that Powell described, such as radio intercepts, were part of a campaign of deception by Saddam. The US military certainly believed he had chemical weapons at a minimum.

At the same time, the failure of the UN inspectors to find any WMD allowed Saddam to plausibly deny their existence, making it difficult for the US to make its case to the world and assemble a coalition against him. But Saddam was too smart by half.

Saddam nearly got away with it. The inspectors were finding nothing significant, the French and Russians were placing roadblocks in the way of the US, and "peace" protests erupted around the world supporting Iraq. Meanwhile, his propaganda machine was telling the world that sanctions were killing thousands of Iraqi children, so there was mounting pressure for sanctions to be lifted.

Thanks to GWB, Saddam's double-game on WMD failed.

If my musings are correct, the coalition will find a lot of hidden components of a WMD program but not much in the way of actual weapons.

What we are seeing now is his fall-back strategy. His loyalists are fighting a guerilla war against the US with the hope that the US will eventually turn tail and go home, just like they did in "Black Hawk Down." With the US gone, he and his thugs would be able to claw their way back into power.

One more thought. There is no doubt that Saddam knows/knew about Iran's nuclear weapons program and that the mad Mullahs would be dreaming of payback time. That is one more reason why he would be planning to reconstitute his nuclear weapons program. I think we'll find more evidence that he planned to do just that.

Here are the key WMD related quotes from the NYT report by Michael R. Gordon and Bernard E. Trainor:

The Iraqi dictator was so secretive and kept information so compartmentalized that his top military leaders were stunned when he told them three months before the war that he had no weapons of mass destruction, and they were demoralized because they had counted on hidden stocks of poison gas or germ weapons for the nation's defense.

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Mr. Hussein was also worried about his neighbor to the east. Like the Bush administration, Mr. Hussein suspected Iran of developing nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction. Each year the Iraqi military conducted an exercise code-named Golden Falcon that focused on defense of the Iraq-Iran border.

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In December 2002, he told his top commanders that Iraq did not possess unconventional arms, like nuclear, biological or chemical weapons, according to the Iraq Survey Group, a task force established by the C.I.A. to investigate what happened to Iraq's weapons programs. Mr. Hussein wanted his officers to know they could not rely on poison gas or germ weapons if war broke out. The disclosure that the cupboard was bare, Mr. Aziz said, sent morale plummeting.

To ensure that Iraq would pass scrutiny by United Nations arms inspectors, Mr. Hussein ordered that they be given the access that they wanted. And he ordered a crash effort to scrub the country so the inspectors would not discover any vestiges of old unconventional weapons, no small concern in a nation that had once amassed an arsenal of chemical weapons, biological agents and Scud missiles, the Iraq survey group report said.

Mr. Hussein's compliance was not complete, though. Iraq's declarations to the United Nations covering what stocks of illicit weapons it had possessed and how it had disposed of them were old and had gaps. And Mr. Hussein would not allow his weapons scientists to leave the country, where United Nations officials could interview them outside the government's control.

Seeking to deter Iran and even enemies at home, the Iraqi dictator's goal was to cooperate with the inspectors while preserving some ambiguity about its unconventional weapons — a strategy General Hamdani, the Republican Guard commander, later dubbed in a television interview "deterrence by doubt."

That strategy led to mutual misperception. When Secretary of State Colin L. Powell addressed the Security Council in February 2003, he offered evidence from photographs and intercepted communications that the Iraqis were rushing to sanitize suspected weapons sites. Mr. Hussein's efforts to remove any residue from old unconventional weapons programs were viewed by the Americans as efforts to hide the weapons. The very steps the Iraqi government was taking to reduce the prospect of war were used against it, increasing the odds of a military confrontation.

Seems that it wasn't Bush that lied about Saddam's WMD but Saddam himself.

Credit: Bill O'Reilly pointed out the NYT article.

Posted by: Pat on Mar 13, 06 | 9:16 pm |
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The killers of Tom Fox were following historical precedent

US citizens rank with Jews in the Radical Islamic mind

Tom Fox was tortured before being shot. His non-American fellow captives live, for now. Never mind that Tom Fox thought himself on the side of his captors. Never mind that he stood with Palestinians against Israeli "oppression". Never mind that he opposed the War in Iraq. He was an American and for that he was slaughtered.

He joins Laurence Foley, Nicholas Berg, Robert Dean Stethem and many other Americans killed for little more than being Americans.

The lesson to all non-Muslim Americans is simple: if you fall into the hands of Islamic terrorists they will kill you, even if you didn't vote for George Bush. You might not believe that you are at war with them but they certainly believe they are at war with all Americans.

They will separate Americans from other nationalities just as the Nazis separated Jewish POWs from their fellow GIs for special treatment.

Posted by: Pat on Mar 13, 06 | 2:07 pm |
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Fri Mar 10, 2006

The Senate is short-changing the country

Elected to serve the people, they serve instead themselves

Exhibit 1.

Confirmation of Judicial appointments.

The Republican Senators seemed more interested in working with the Democrats instead of vetting and approving the President's picks, as had been the usual practice for the last century or so. The Democrats had threatened the unprecedented use of a filibuster to block judicial appointments and the Republicans slithered away from the fight. They ignored precedent and stood aside from principle in their retreat. Their abject failure to support a President who had been reelected with an increased majority left him forced to nominate candidates who would get past the unelected Gang-of-14 (unelected in the sense that the American people did not vote to give these few Senators veto power over the President's constitutional right to appoint judges). It was in that environment that Bush nominated Harriet Miers.

Exhibit 2.

Meddling in vital Intelligence issues

We already know that Senators cannot be trusted to keep their traps shut. Republican Senator Richard Shelby leaked the news that Osama bin Ladin's Satellite phone was being tapped. Senators Jay Rockefeller and Ron Wyden played a part in exposing the Pentagon's covert satellite program. That sure would have come in handy while we're trying to figure out where Iran has hidden all its nuclear weapons facilities. Currently, the Iranians know when our satellites are overhead and act accordingly. This year-old Newsmax report lists some of the congressional leaks that have damaged our country's security. A J Strata and Mac Ranger are right on top of the role of Senators Rockeller (again) and Durbin in the leaking of information about the NSA program to monitor Al Qaeda communications.

The consequence of the media misrepresentation of the program as "Domestic Wiretapping" is that politicians have been inserting themselves into oversight of intelligence gathering. Net result: more dangerous leaks as self-serving politicians try to make the news.

Exhibit 3.

The DPW ports deal

It sounded bad. The Bush administration was selling control of US ports to an Arab country with Al Qaeda connections. Anyone who looked at the deal, at the security arrangements in place, and at our military relationships with UAE would see nothing bad about the deal. But the media got the facts wrong, the public swallowed the media lies, and opportunists on the left and right piled on. Our worthy senators asked for more time to examine the deal and then kyboshed it just a few days into the 45-day cooling off period. Democrat senators saw it as a perfect opportunity to bash Bush yet again and Republican senators folded again, more concerned with daily fluctuations in the polls than actually standing up for an Arab ally.

Will the UAE do a Turkey when we need to take action against Iran? Will Emirates Air drop Boeing in favor of Airbus? They sure spend a lot of money on aircraft:

At Dubai 2005 – 9th International Aerospace Exhibition, Emirates announced firm orders for 42 Boeing 777 aircraft, to be powered by GE90 jet engines, in a deal worth Dhs 35.7 billion (US$9.7 billion) at list prices. This is the largest-ever order for the Boeing 777 family of aircraft and consists of: 24 Boeing 777-300ERs, 10 777-200LR Worldliners and eight 777 Freighters, with the first aircraft scheduled for delivery in 2007. In addition, Emirates will have purchase rights for 20 more 777 aircraft.

At the Paris Air Show in June 2003, Emirates announced the largest aircraft order in aviation history worth US$19 billion, adding 71 new aircraft – a mix of Airbus and Boeing – to its fast-growing fleet. It is now the main launch customer for two innovative ultra-modern aircraft – A340-600 HGW and A380 double-decker super-jumbos.

At the Farnborough Air Show in July 2004, Emirates announced firm orders for four Boeing 777-300ER aircraft and nine options with a list price value of US$ 2.96 billion.

Emirates’ current order book stands at 127 aircraft, with a total value of approximately US$35 billion.

How many of our esteemed Senators are even aware that Emirates Air exists, let alone how much it spent on US goods?

Posted by: Pat on Mar 10, 06 | 11:17 am |
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Thu Mar 09, 2006

The DPW ports deal is killed

Not a good deal for anyone

AJ Strata, a blogger I've relied on to keep abreast of the Plame Blame Game is none too happy:

No, in the DPW acquisition of P&O we have seen a strange and bad alliance. A desperate left willing to do and say anything to win votes, and a frightened, skittish right afraid of anything Arab or, now, un-American. The comments by Rep Jerry Lewis yesterday, as the spineless Congress voted to protect the masses from the evil Arab Company, showed many have decided it was best to follow the Lou Dobbs formula: fereignors are bad.

What has me saddened is how this is playing in our military, and which is why the reasoning of the right is probably more damaging to America’s image than that from the left. Many on the right, like me, backed the regime change in Iraq. We backed sending our fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers, sons and daughters into a basket case region of the world to clean it up and try and set it right. In Afghanistan our troops have had to reach out to the locals, many who tolerated if not supported Al Qaeda and the Taliban, to build a free society. Our military trained these people, armed them, and then went and fought side by side with them. All the time never sure if these people were what they said they were, or an under cover assasin.

In Iraq the support was all from the middle and right side of the political spectrum - the left wanted no part of it. So we are the ones who sent our neighbors and family members to Iraq to sacrifice life and limb (and many did) to repeat the process. They went into the middle of the turmoil that brought us 9-11 and again reached out to the people, and worked side by side with them. Fought side by side with them. Died side by side with them.

The military doesn’t expect us keyboard warriors to do what they do, they simply hope they are respected and honored for their efforts. But what kind of honor are we bestowing to chicken out when it is our turn to do the most modest of acts: reach out and work with Americans who will now get their paychecks from The UAE bank instead of the UK bank?

The military folks, who risked everything to build bridges of respect and community, must be wondering what kind of cowards we are back here in the US? People are pissing their pants because a country and company, both of which have worked for years with us in the torrent that is the Middle East, is buying some stock in London. And we are falling apart in a panic over it.

The opponents to the DPW deal seem to be oblivious to how important UAE is to US interests in the region. We've unnecessarily offended an ally for no good reason.

Posted by: Pat on Mar 09, 06 | 5:37 pm |
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Tue Mar 07, 2006

Fighting a war with our hands tied behind our backs

That's no way to win and it costs American lives

Junkyard Blog links to an ABC report that Iran has been caught red-handed shipping lethal road-side bombs to Iraqi terrorists. What will the US do to stop this? I'd say bomb every armaments facility in Iran, followed by their nuclear sites if they attempt any retaliation. Chances of the US doing that? Close to zero.

Bill Roggio at The Fourth Rail describes the situation in the tribal areas of Pakistan.

The resurgence of the Taliban is often credited to their resilience in Afghanistan, however the truth is the Taliban is not very popular within Afghanistan proper. The Taliban’s power is derived from Pakistan, as it always has since its inception in the early 1990s. The fighting in Afghanistan is largely being fueled in Pakistan’s lawless border region, and Pakistan has proven unable to establish government control five years after the fall of the Taliban in Afghanistan.

If US forces were sent into the area the Taliban and AlQaeda remnants sheltering there would be crushed within weeks. The US forces would probably emerge with Bin Ladin's head on a pike. Chances of the US doing that? Close to zero.

In an earlier post, Bill Roggio describes the steps being taken to secure the Syrian border against infiltration by Jihadists. The action is all on the Iraq side of the border. But everything that happens in Syria happens with the regime's knowledge and assent. It's a fascist police state almost as pernicious as the one that Saddam once ran. So, why doesn't the US make Syria pay a steep and public price for providing safe passage to Jihadists hoping to enter paradise by killing US forces, or, failing that, Iraqi women and children? Libya was brought to heel with one well targeted bombing raid. Chances of the US doing young Assad that favor? Close to zero.

But, without taking the fight to our enemy's home bases and supply lines, we are prolonging the war and teaching them, once again, that the US is a paper-tiger easily constrained by diplomatic niceties that our enemies ignore. We are still paying for letting Iran take the US embassy hostage under Dhimmi Carter.

What is going to do for the US to get the political will necessary to actually win this war? Another major attack on the US? A smuggled nuke going off in Tel Aviv? A gas attack in Jordan? An anthrax attack on London? Because, unless we strike our enemies while they are relatively weak, we will remain at increasing risk of another catastrophic attack.

Posted by: Pat on Mar 07, 06 | 11:07 pm |
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Mon Mar 06, 2006

The Iraq War was just

It removed a great evil from the face of the Earth

Those who opposed the war on Saddam's regime cite the failure to find WMD as proof that their position was right. The jury is still out on what happened to Saddam's WMD. I suspect some was shipped out to Syria, some hidden and some destroyed. Be that as it may, the justification for the war was Saddam's failure to comply with UN resolution 1441 which also cited grave human rights violations by the Baath regime.

Michael Totten visited the Kurdish holocaust museum in Suleimaniya. His amply illustrated report conveys some of the reality of the genocidal campaign that Saddam conducted against the Kurds. Those who think the US was morally wrong to destroy Saddam's regime need to understand the evil that was that regime. They could start wth a visit to the Suleimaniya museum. Michael Totten sets the scene:

When you enter the museum you will walk through a long and winding hallway. The walls are covered with mirror shards. Each represents one of the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi Kurds murdered in the genocidal Anfal campaign. A river of twinkling lights lines the ceiling. Each represents one of the five thousand villages destroyed by Saddam Hussein.

The NYT time used its front page to hammer the United States for abuses at Abu Ghraib. Pity they didn't tell us what Saddam did at Abu Ghraib. Michael Totten does:

10,725 people were killed in this one building [now the holocaust museum] alone. All died during torture. Formal execution actually took place in Abu Ghraib.

Please hit his tip-jar. This lone blogger, with our support, is doing the work that should be done by our press. Blogger supported reporting will get the truth out.

Memo to the anti-war crowd: by opposing action against Saddam you actively supported the evil remembered at Kurdish holocaust museum in Suleimaniya.

Posted by: Pat on Mar 06, 06 | 10:07 pm |
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The Burning River is now a River of Fish

The Cuyahoga is a strange river

My apartment overlooks the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland. The other morning I looked out at the river and it seemed to be icing over. But it didn't look right and it wasn't cold enough for it to ice over. I got the binoculars out and looked closer. The white sheets I saw were dead fish; millions of them floating slowly down the river like a white carpet. The fish are actually Gizzard Shad, a member of the fesh water herring family. They are not native to the region but migrated to Lake Erie up the Ohio & Erie Canal. They cannot tolerate rapid changes in temperature, so a cold spell followed by a warmer spell kills them off.

You'd think the seagulls would be in fish heaven but there is no sign of them feasting on the Cuyahoga's largesse. The first picture shows the white carpet of fish.



Here's a close-up of the leading edge of the mass of fish.

Posted by: Pat on Mar 06, 06 | 6:06 pm |
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Sat Mar 04, 2006

Do radical feminists support the overthrow of the Taliban?

Some don't

The Frontpage Magazine article about the first national conference of HAW (Historians Against the War) contained this little nugget:

Andrea Smith, a radical feminist and a assistant professor in Women’s Studies and American Culture at the University of Michigan, took aim at those who dared to dissent from academic orthodoxy with respect to the wisdom of military intervention. Smith singled out for opprobrium feminists who supported the U.S.-led overthrow of Afghanistan’s Taliban regime. One report quoted Smith sneering that a bombing campaign could never liberate women. Enlarging on that theme, Smith asserted that the real threat to women came not from the governments like the Taliban but from concepts like the nation state.

I have a simple questions for Ms. Smith. Which of these photographs of Afghani women was taken under Taliban rule? Choose Picture 1 or Picture 2.



HAW seems a singularly appropriate acronym for this outfit. It must be in remembrance of Lord Haw Haw.

Via The Pink Flamingo Bar and Grill.

Posted by: Pat on Mar 04, 06 | 9:22 pm |
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More reading on the threat to the West

From Israeli Professor Haim Harari, a theoretical physicist

He anayses the nature of the evil we face. As always, read the whole essay. Here are a couple of key paragraphs:

What is behind the suicide murders? Money, power and cold-blooded murderous incitement, nothing else. It has nothing to do with true fanatic religious beliefs. No Moslem preacher has ever blown himself up. No son of an Arab politician or religious leader has ever blown himself. No relative of anyone influential has done it. Wouldn't you expect some of the religious leaders to do it themselves, or to talk their sons into doing it, if this is truly a supreme act of religious fervor? Aren't they interested in the benefits of going to Heaven? Instead, they send outcast women, naive children, retarded people and young incited hotheads. They promise them the delights, mostly sexual, of the next world, and pay their families handsomely after the supreme act is performed and enough innocent people are dead.

Suicide murders also have nothing to do with poverty and despair. The poorest region in the world, by far, is Africa. It never happens there. There are numerous desperate people in the world, in different cultures, countries and continents. Desperation does not provide anyone with explosives, reconnaissance and transportation. There was certainly more despair in Saddam's Iraq then in Paul Bremmer's Iraq, and no one exploded himself. A suicide murder is simply a horrible, vicious weapon of cruel, inhuman, cynical, well-funded terrorists, with no regard to human life, including the life of their fellow countrymen, but with very high regard to their own affluent well-being and their hunger for power.

...

Allow me, for a moment, to depart from my alleged role as a taxi driver and return to science. When you have a malignant tumor, you may remove the tumor itself surgically. You may also starve it by preventing new blood from reaching it from other parts of the body, thereby preventing new "supplies" from expanding the tumor. If you want to be sure, it is best to do both. But before you fight and win, by force or otherwise, you have to realize that you are in a war, and this may take Europe a few more years. In order to win, it is necessary to first eliminate the terrorist regimes, so that no Government in the world will serve as a safe haven for these people. I do not want to comment here on whether the American-led attack on Iraq was justified from the point of view of weapons of mass destruction or any other pre-war argument, but I can look at the post-war map of Western Asia. Now that Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya are out, two and a half terrorist states remain: Iran, Syria and Lebanon, the latter being a Syrian colony. Perhaps Sudan should be added to the list. As a result of the conquest of Afghanistan and Iraq, both Iran and Syria are now totally surrounded by territories unfriendly to them. Iran is encircled by Afghanistan, by the Gulf States, Iraq and the Moslem republics of the former Soviet Union. Syria is surrounded by Turkey, Iraq, Jordan and Israel. This is a significant strategic change and it applies strong pressure on the terrorist countries. It is not surprising that Iran is so active in trying to incite a Shiite uprising in Iraq.

I do not know if the American plan was actually to encircle both Iran and Syria, but that is the resulting situation.

Via The Braden Files.

Posted by: Pat on Mar 04, 06 | 9:07 pm |
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Fri Mar 03, 2006

Compulsory Reading on the threat to the West

And our abject response to date

Little Green Footballs links to this essay by Amit Ghates at Thrutch. He shows how the uniquely Western concept of "government of the people, by the people, for the people' evolved from the glory of Ancient Greece, and how it has been betrayed by our Governments kow-towing to Muslims who stand in opposition to our most sacred freedoms.

His essay ranks with the work of Belmont Club and Steven den Beste and shows why the blogosphere is more than a match for MSM pundits.

Posted by: Pat on Mar 03, 06 | 12:48 pm |
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