Free at last
From today's New York Times A Nation Challenged section (still going online), a great photograph:



The New York Times caption:

Women Open One More Door in Afghanistan
Young women hoping for a university education gathered on Friday at the gates of the University of Balkh in northern Afghanistan. This year, the university plans to admit 400 women.

posted by Thomas Nephew at 6:08:00 PM -- |    

 

Southern snowstorm slows US aid to Australia
A couple of days ago, I wished we could help Australians; it looks like we're trying. Via the German newsweekly Der Spiegel article "Flaming hell in East Australia":

Currently the fire departments are waiting for help from the USA. Two more fire-helicopters are to be flown in via a cargo plane from the United States. But the plane was grounded due to a snowstorm in Atlanta, Georgia. The two helicopters will arrive in Sydney on Monday.

"Fire-helicopters" is not right, but I don't know the right word for them: I'm assuming "Lösch-Hubschrauber" means those helicopters that carry huge buckets of water over forest fires here in the U.S.

=====
Update: Australian blogger Tim Blair calls them "helitankers"; there's already one there named Elvis. -- "Elvis" is an Erickson Air Crane; I'm still not sure what model the 2 helicopters that were stuck in Atlanta are. posted by Thomas Nephew at 5:45:00 PM -- |    

 

Iraq sanctions revisited
In early December David Cortright published an excellent article, "A Hard Look at Iraq Sanctions", in The Nation. The subtitle, "Death rates are alarming but lower than claimed. Saddam shares responsibility", is an pretty accurate summary of the contents -- except that I think that if one read this article with no preconceptions about the issue, one would come away saying that "shares" is an understatement. Nevertheless, it's strong medicine for many Nation readers, I suspect. Among the points that Cortright makes:

Comparisons of the south-central zone (under Hussein's thumb) and the semi-autonomous northern Kurdish zone show that death rates actually declined in the Kurdish zone, while they increased under Hussein's mismanagement. It is true that the Kurdish zone gets more rain, and has a higher per capita allocations under the relief program. But it is also true that child mortality rates in the Kurdish area were higher than those in the south before the Gulf war, and now they are lower. As Cortright puts it:

The tens of thousands of excess deaths in the south-center, compared to the similarly sanctioned but UN-administered north, are also the result of Baghdad's failure to accept and properly manage the UN humanitarian relief effort.

(A reader e-mailed me the same point shortly after I posted the Iraq piece linked below.)

Baghdad's failure to even accept aid has been egregious. Although proposed in 1991, Hussein's objections prevented deliveries of food and medicine until 1997, and Baghdad has periodically halted oil sales since then to protest sanctions.

The oil-for-food program no longer simply allows food and medicine shipments, but also imports of materials for infrastructure improvement, addressing the point that many of the deaths since the Gulf War are attributable to that war, due to the bombing of utilities.

When I wrote about this a while back, my main point was that everything depends on what you believe would have happened without sanctions; that might have been a truism, but the point that political assumptions were baked into the estimates of deaths caused by the sanctions seems important to realize right away. No matter how you go about the estimates, too many children are dying; Cortright says that Richard Albright, author of the authoritative study on the impact of sanctions on child mortality in Iraq, now estimates about 350,000 excess children deaths happened through 2000. Cortright's article makes clear that Hussein bears a great share of the blame for this suffering. I'd go further and say it's completely his fault. As Cortright himself writes:

Sanctions could have been suspended years ago if Baghdad had been more cooperative with UN weapons inspectors.

Cortright suggests that rather than reflexively opposing any sanctions at all, sanctions opponents should focus on further relaxation of the civilian sanctions, beyond even the U.S./U.K. "smart sanctions" proposal. To the extent this doesn't make "dual-use" issues (e.g., powerful computers that could be used for military purposes instead of civilian ones) too numerous to handle, I suppose I could support his suggestion.

Extra: Read all about it: Matt Welch writes about Iraq sanctions
Over at Online Journalism Review, Matt Welch has published a great overview of resources on Iraq sanctions, "Effects of Sanctions on Iraq: Trustworthy studies that may determine the front of the next war", which I've included in my own ongoing "iraq sanctions" backflip link list. Matt's article is chock full of links to anti-sanctions groups, relevant UN resolutions, relevant public health studies by Richard Albright and others, etc., etc., all well-connected into a very readable article. Given the "Online Journalism Review" and "Toolbox" nature of the piece, Matt doesn't use this piece to deliver his own opinions on the issue itself. Instead, he cites articles like the Cortright piece I discuss above to suggest that the old media is finally catching up to bloggers in covering this issue.

posted by Thomas Nephew at 6:15:00 AM -- |    

 

Former anti-war protester supports draft
Via Jeff Jarvis ... via Slotman: David Talbot, of Salon.com, has published an interesting manifesto: The making of a hawk. As Jeff notes, it's long but amounts to "when you're right, you're right and when you're right, you fight." Jeff charitably chooses to overlook at least one disagreement he might have with a fellow "former pacifist": Talbot is for a draft, Jeff is not. Using Walter Mead's suddenly famous Jackson/Wilson/Hamilton/Jefferson terminology (see "...Special Providence"), Talbot argues:

Jacksonians [patriotic "Don't Tread on Me" types, in Talbot's shorthand description -TN] have moral authority when it comes to making momentous war decisions because they and their children do the preponderance of fighting and dying. But this is not the way it should be. Placing the burden of military service on a warrior subculture is an unjust division of labor that, as Powell has argued, should be repellent to our democracy. This is why I have come to believe we need to bring back the military draft, stripped of the loopholes for "fortunate sons" that made a mockery of it during the Vietnam War.

I've previously argued for a draft, too, although I waffle about it: the all-volunteer army is better off for having people who want to be there. Talbot makes a good counterargument. My notion of a service corps doesn't entirely meet Talbot's objection, either, although it might blunt the sense of "we're the only ones who serve" that some in the U.S. military seem to have. Powell appears to believe this gap is overstated*, yet, as Talbot notes, he once wrote

"I can never forgive a leadership that said in effect: 'These young men -- poorer, less educated, less privileged -- are expendable (someone once described them as 'economic cannon-fodder') but the rest are too good to risk.' I am angry that so many of the sons of the powerful and well-placed ... managed to wangle slots in the Reserve and National Guard units."

(Hmm; let's all move on, shall we?) I suppose Powell may see this as an argument against the Viet Nam era draft, while Talbot sees it as an argument for a fairer modern day one. I'm still thinking about this, but I'm not persuaded by the "those who want to should, just leave us out of it" argument Glenn Reynolds and Jarvis make. There are a number of things I don't support unless everyone else has to do it too, such as pay income taxes, switch to drive on the left side of the road or go on a red light and stop on a green, have my California neighborhood blacked out to save electricity, etc. As the examples suggest (to me, at least), some burdens must be shared by everyone to get the desired result; the question is how useful the result is. There is no real inconsistency between supporting a draft of everybody, and not volunteering to be among the few. But what do you think? Comments welcome!

PS: Mr. Slotman also noticed Beinart's piece about Cape Town well before I did. He's got lots of good links and comments on 'em, you can read him for near-instantaneous coverage of everything possible, from the Orange Bowl to the end of the universe. That story casts a bit of a pall on that pretty Hubble photograph below. But we've got 30 billion years to try to do something about it (assuming we can get a new sun or something in 4.5 billion years). Newsrack blog: replace your little immediate worries with bigger more distant ones!

=====
* The Evolution of the Civil-Military 'Gap' debate; footnote 74. No, I haven't read the whole thing; I went to the end to read the conclusions, and noticed the footnote nearby.
posted by Thomas Nephew at 4:52:00 PM -- |    

 

Cape Town Muslims hate crime, too, go the PAGAD way
As if by magic, an excellent backgrounder article by The New Republic's Peter Beinart, "TRB from Cape Town: Left Out" appears days after Mandela's capitulation to the Muslim lobby in that country (see "Mandela disappoints"). Mandela may have been worried about more than scowls, pamphlets, and student demonstrations. Beinart reports that in the 1990s Cape Town Muslims formed a violent anti-crime vigilante group, PAGAD, which is now reported to be a front for Qibla, a group seeking to make South Africa an Islamic state. PAGAD is accused of bombing a Planet Hollywood in Cape Town in August 1998, in apparent response to Clinton's Sudan and Afghanistan missile attacks days earlier. Beinart concludes:

There's a lesson here for both the American left and the American right. For the left, it's that viewing militant Islam as a successor to the Third World "liberation" movements of the twentieth century (and therefore worthy of sympathy) is nutty. The Taliban surely showed that Islamism represents the opposite of gender and sexual liberation. And PAGAD and Qibla--which have allied themselves against the ANC's notions of "black" unity and empowerment--show that it often represents the opposite of racial liberation as well.

The lesson for the right is strangely similar. It's that militant Islam isn't a phenomenon of the left--powered by the anarchic poor and the intellectuals who harness them to create futuristic utopias. It's often a phenomenon driven by the American right's favorite class, the petit bourgeois: the people who tend small shops and tiny houses, who believe in family, faith, property, and order. And who see those values threatened by rising lawlessness, and by governments too corrupt and too ill-equipped to keep them safe. Such people turn to fundamentalism because it offers security, structure, and the perverse pride that comes from "standing up" to the West.

At least in South Africa, Beinart may be correct with his "petit bourgeois" idea; I simply don't know enough to judge elsewhere. It seems to me that religious zealotry cuts across all classes, from Pakistani poor sending their boy to madrassas for lack of alternatives, to Saudi sheikhs bankrolling jihad, to Cape Town Muslim shopkeepers. At any rate, despite the South African government's equivocation about 9/11, Beinart argues that a little well-targeted "nation building" -- in the form of support for ILEA, a South African law enforcement academy -- would go a long way in South Africa. I think he's right.

PS: Incidentally, the ILEA was started with funds from that well known "soft on terror" Clinton administration. posted by Thomas Nephew at 12:35:00 PM -- |    

 
Hubble telescope image of "Thackeray's Globules in IC 2944"


I'm on an image kick recently; this one is especially nice, I think: dust clouds and a star forming region. Click through to learn more; on "newsrack", the companion site to this blog, you can see "headline" images from Hubble and NOAA any time you like. Go to the "Science" section.

=====
6PM: So what's the point? In part, it's a followup to the 2001 science news wrapup a couple of days ago. But mainly I was just charmed by the picture, and by the idea of looking up and far away and finding such a beautiful sight; by how the picture was taken with a telescope launched into space, and by how exploration and discovery like that happens every day, despite 9/11 and a war and anthrax and India/Pakistan and all of the rest of the news swirling around us. I'm not sure there's a point in there, but it's what I was thinking. posted by Thomas Nephew at 2:08:00 PM -- |    

 

Some Muslim Americans fight back
...against radical Islam. Perhaps "stunted" Islam would be a better description of what they oppose, judging by two articles I've read the last two days.

Via Charles Johnson's "battling the puritans", I found this LA Times story about UCLA law professor Khaled Abou El Fadl. Mr. El Fadl is shaking up traditional views of Islamic practices by doing better research into their origins. The body of Islamic law called "shari'a" is often based not directly on the Koran, but on research by later Islamic scholars about how Mohammed did things, or, failing that, how the Arabs of his day did things. Needless to say, researchers can differ both in what they learn and how they interpret what they think they know. Johnson excerpts the article extensively. Here's a part I liked:

Most troubling to his ideological enemies, Abou El Fadl cannot be written off as a Westernized "Uncle Tom," a term puritans use to dismiss American Muslims with similar open views. His work is painstakingly grounded in classical Islamic sources, they acknowledge, giving him the ability to defend his modern interpretations with a dizzying command of ancient traditions.

For example, in a book published this year challenging Saudi legal rulings on women--barring them from freely wearing bras or high heels, for instance--Abou El Fadl read 350 sources, some of them ancient Islamic texts that are virtually impenetrable to the untrained Muslim.

This seems great to me. Freedom of thought and religion in the United States are contributing to a reappraisal of Islam. Needless to say, though, El Fadl's books are banned in Saudi Arabia.

The second article is in today's Washington Post op-ed page: Mona Eltahawy's "My Islam":

...I belong to a third camp that refuses bin Laden's options of being on his side or with the "infidels." I am fed up with the self-pity and self-denial that for too long have paralyzed Muslim thinking. By constantly blaming Western conspiracies for our ills we fuel our own helplessness. Strength is the essence of introspection. [...]

Some may question who I am to speak for Muslims. My answer is who is bin Laden? He received no formal religious education but took it upon himself to represent us. He does not represent me. I am a Muslim woman who is wrestling with her faith and questioning its meaning for me today. It is equally my right to speak out. [...]

Muslims in America are fortunate because we are free to debate without risking our lives. [...]

Kevin Hasson pointed out in his Dec. 27 op-ed article how religious freedom in America had influenced the Catholic Church. American Jewish friends have told me how their faith has evolved in America and given birth to the Reconstructionist movement. Muslims in America have the chance to lead the way for the Umma.

(Umma is the community of Muslim believers.) I think Mr. Hasson is on to something. As a nonbeliever, it's not my place to reform Islam. But I can wish Mr. El Fadl, Ms. Eltahawy, and their colleagues well in the struggle ahead. posted by Thomas Nephew at 11:48:00 AM -- |    

 

Mandela disappoints
In mid-November I was very pleased to see Nelson Mandela publicly support U.S. action in Afghanistan. Now Mr. Mandela has been prevailed on to qualify that support. According to Islam Online, Mandela now says:

"Subsequent discussions with our family, friends and advisors have convinced us that our view may be one-sided and overstated."

Friends and advisors have voiced concern that Mandela's initial support for the war "gives the impression that we are insensitive to and uncaring about the suffering inflicted upon the Afghan people".

"We (...) regret if the manner in which we stated our position gave any offence to Muslims in South Africa and throughout the world," the statement added. [...]

Mandela's office said the labeling of Bin Laden as the one responsible [for] the September 11 terror attacks in the United States before he had been convicted in court could also "be seen as undermining some of the basic tenets of the rule of law".

Jeff Jarvis, not unreasonably, calls this "mealy mouthed equivocating." I prefer to excuse it as the act of an old man beset by a politically correct entourage, among a political leadership not known for its grasp on reality (see "An ounce of denial..."). So he opted for some peace. Much of his restatement isn't all that bad on close examination: no one wants to give the impression of being insensitive and uncaring about suffering; no one believed Mandela gave that impression; to say a view may be one-sided is not to say it actually is; and to regret the manner of saying something is not to regret what was said.

But that's grasping at straws. Mandela has been forced or convinced to back away from a strong statement of support for a just action by my country, and that disappoints me. His "rule of law" statement annoys me the most. I'm not against the rule of law, of course, but I am against using it as a smokescreen for terrorists. Bin Laden was very reasonably a "suspect" even before the Kandahar video was released; he's on the run, and he's shooting back. Pirates at sea were not deemed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law; they were blown out of the water whenever possible, whether there was a court ruling to support that or not. The analogy isn't perfect, but it will do; Mandela seemed to understand that last year. posted by Thomas Nephew at 10:42:00 AM -- |    

 

Taliban!
Comic relief, in which a harried Mr. Taliban learns he should have bought an answering machine. (ActiveX; via Welcome to the Sideshow, by Avedon Carol). posted by Thomas Nephew at 10:41:00 AM -- |    

 

I'm saving my hide for you
MSNBC forwards a Washington Post item reporting that Bin Laden lieutenant Zawahiri urged al Qaeda to let fighters escape for jihad’s sake. But not just any fighter:

IN WHAT U.S. intelligence officials call his "last will," Ayman Zawahiri wrote that “if the entire movement, or part of it, faces a situation where the noose is being tightened around it and its collapse is a matter of days or hours,” some of its key members must escape. That way, he suggested, those who remain behind can fight to the death without fear that their cause will die with them.

What a guy! Always thinking of the cause! Sound like it's not Zawahiri's "last will", it's his troops'. posted by Thomas Nephew at 6:42:00 PM -- |    

 

Actually, I like all those American flag bumper stickers
But other than that, I agree with a lot of Tom Friedman's Let's Roll column*:

The most obvious bold national project that Mr. Bush could launch now — his version of the race to the moon — would be a program for energy independence, based on developing renewable resources, domestic production and energy efficiency. Not only would every school kid in America be excited by such a project, but it also would be Mr. Bush's equivalent of Richard Nixon going to China — the Texas oilman weaning America off of its dependence on Middle East oil. That would be a political coup! [...]

"Today one out of every seven barrels of oil produced in the world is consumed on American highways," says the respected oil consultant Philip Verleger. "We could cut that by a third in five years if Washington were to offer tax incentives for manufacturers to produce more efficient vehicles and for consumers to buy them. Such tax cuts could be paid for with a higher gas tax, gradually phased in. Then we could replace all those American flag bumper stickers with ones that read: `I cut my oil use by a third, how about you?' "

Well, they could still have a little flag on them. Also, Friedman must finally be catching up on his "newsrack" reading; I posted a similar article ("Sacrifices worth making") last October, based on a Gregg Easterbrook article in The New Republic.

The general counterargument to +/- artificial energy conservation policies, of course, is that "doing what's cheapest is what's best for America"; by not fooling around with energy conservation measures the market doesn't want, you have the money to spend on higher-utility goods. For that matter, the Saudis are arguably doing Friedman's noble work for him right now with the price hikes he condemns; by raising prices, they encourage innovation in energy-saving, etc. But we're facing a cartel called OPEC here, and there is a national security aspect to our dependence on them that rises beyond economics. The more we can substitute for oil, the better off we are. If anything can be called "blowback", it's lining Saudi pockets (private and public) with money they can use to promote madrassas, jihad, and the Wahhabist Islam agenda -- and that's if the "moderates" stay in power.

=====
* Via Charles Johnson (little green footballs). posted by Thomas Nephew at 5:43:00 PM -- |    

 

$7 billion here, $7 billion there, pretty soon you're talking real money
Via "newsrack" reader Chris Protopapas, a late December news item from CNSnews.com. It's about a wildly expensive scheme to lease 100 Boeing 767s to serve as Air Force tankers at $20 million apiece per year. After 10 years, the planes must be reconverted to passenger use, at a cost of $30 million each, and returned to Boeing. CNSnews.com reports that a broad coaliton including Ralph Nader, the National Taxpayers Union, and others is protesting:

The cost of the lease plan may be as much as five times higher than an outright purchase, according to the coalition . [...]

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) complained Wednesday that "without a hearing before the Armed Services Committee, without any scrutiny, we're going to give Boeing a deal, noncompetitive, for $26 billion cost to the taxpayers, where airplanes will be leased, converted into tankers at a government expense" and then "given back to Boeing."

"It's perhaps the biggest rip-off -- it is the biggest rip-off of the taxpayer that I've seen since I've been here in Congress," McCain said. [...]

The "five times too high" is not universally accepted, but everyone seems to agree we're paying too much. Even the OMB:

The Office of Management and Budget estimates that the lease plan would cost $22 billion, while purchasing the aircraft outright would cost just over $15 billion.

The Washington Post reported recently that Boeing has dispatched its top executives to lobby Congress on the proposal as a way of creating a multibillion military market for the company's popular civilian aircraft including the 767.

The use of B-767 aircraft would also require an additional handout from taxpayers, as modifications to existing hangers would be necessary to house B-767s and would cost an estimated $ 600 million.

The B-767 lease proposal prompted a November 2, 2001 letter of opposition from OMB Director Mitchell E. Daniels. Daniels said it would circumvent rules that disallow lease agreements that are more expensive than traditional direct purchases.

Tankers were critical to the Afghanistan war effort, no argument there; but why overpay for them? Supporters appear to include Rep. Todd Tiahrt (R-KS), and Senators Ted Stevens, (R-AK), Patty Murray (D-WA), and Daniel Inouye (D-HI). So it's some good old fashioned pork barrel work (build 'em in Seattle, convert 'em in Wichita), plus whatever it is the senators from Alaska and Hawaii see in this. As Chris writes, "Maybe the next step will simply to dispense with any complicated "lease" deals and just give defense contractors the money directly..." posted by Thomas Nephew at 1:37:00 PM -- |    

 

Australian smoke visible from space


Sorry: satellite photos can look gorgeous even when they're about disasters. I lived in Oakland in 1991, when the Oakland-Berkeley Hills fire happened. It was scary: over the course of one or two hours, the news went from "ho hum, a fire" to "we don't know whether this can be contained." Once the houses started burning, the smoke got so heavy cars had their headlights on at noon. Eucalyptus trees might as well be soaked in gasoline, the way those things burn; I've always thought one small good thing would be to get rid of them in California. Wish there was a way to help Sydney. posted by Thomas Nephew at 12:49:00 PM -- |    

 

India relies on U.S. to prevent nuclear war?
Maybe not India, but the Times of India, where writer K. Subrahmanyam argues "Indo-Pak nuclear conflict unlikely". Somewhat reassuringly, he (or she) notes that India has pledged not to use nuclear weapons first, and points out that India, with the larger armed forces, is not likely to need to resort to nuclear weapons to prevail. The analyst is less reassuring about the Pakistan side of the equation:

If and when Pakistan takes out its weapons and starts readying them for firing, the US can never be sure that some of them may not be aimed at the US carriers, considering the enormous resentment among the Pakistani servicemen against the US.

After all, Pakistani nuclear scientists have collaborated with Osama bin Laden. In such circumstances, the US, which is keeping Pakistan under close surveillance, will destroy the Pakistani nuclear weapons through accurate non-nuclear strikes.

The Pakistanis know it, the Americans know it and the Indians also know it. Therefore, there is no risk of an Indo- Pakistani conflict with the US forces present in the Arabian Sea. It is a very different scenario from all four previous wars.

I would think it's just a little more of a toss-up than that between withdrawing the fleet to a safe distance, and declaring war on Pakistan! Quite aside from whether Pakistan's nuclear weapons were such a serious a threat to the U.S. forces that we'd want to destroy them, those weapons may not be all that easy to locate on short notice; remember the Scud hunts of the Gulf War? Still, the assertion is interesting: the attack on the Indian Parliament itself may have been an Islamist reaction to the U.S. fleet in the Arabian Sea and the Afghanistan war: its predictable main effect has been to draw Pakistani forces away from the Afghanistan border, and complicate the U.S. war on Al Qaeda. It would be nicely ironic if the same U.S. presence moderated the India-Pakistan crisis. But it's also interesting, and a little disturbing, that Indians may view U.S.political and military prestige as a moderating factor that they can't find in their own institutions.

=====
12PM: On re-reading the last sentence, I realize I left out a step. Obviously, Subrahmanyam sees Pakistan as more in need of U.S.-supplied moderation than India is. But that seems to leave India off the hook for taking its own steps to de-escalate, or at least not escalating tensions with loose talk about taking a nuclear war in stride or boxing Pakistan and Musharraf into a corner. Quite aside from the effect on the fight on terrorism, a lot of lives in those two countries are at stake, and it's not altogether minor that the fallout would eventually drift our way. -- Also, I added the CNN link to "draw Pakistani forces away..." posted by Thomas Nephew at 3:08:00 AM -- |    

 

John Walker: not easy to convict, but it's certainly worth a try -- no matter the penalty
In a recent article in the New York Times, a Mr. Leon Friedman outlined why "It Won't Be Easy to Convict John Walker." I think Walker may not be found guilty of treason, simply based on so many people saying treason would be too tough to prove. Since I'm not a lawyer, I'm no more or less competent to judge this than any other non-lawyer. I can only use my own sense of justice: Walker is guilty of something, and I'd support going to great lengths to prove it.

According to MSNBC ("Walker’s Brush With bin Laden"), Walker claimed to be a member of the non-Afghan "Ansar", which he knew was "funded by Bin Laden." He also admitted receiving training in weapons and explosives at an Al Qaeda camp. All of this after after the U.S.S. Cole was attacked, killing 17 U.S. sailors, after two U.S. embassies were attacked with much larger large loss of life, and after Osama Bin Laden's infamous 1998 fatwa calling for the murder of U.S. civilians (and military). However, Walker's apparent choice to join the Al Qaeda fighting alongside the Taliban against the Northern Alliance, rather than train for terrorist attacks, may be a key mitigating circumstance.

Sorting through the variety of charges noted in Mr. Friedman's article and the MSNBC article's "What are the charges?" box is quite a chore. Mr. Friedman notwithstanding, I don't think the government should have any trouble showing that "at least one goal of the non-Afghan fighters in Afghanistan was to carry out a terrorist act prohibited by the law." Another possibility noted in the MSNBC article involved invoking an "obscure" Civil War era statute used to try Missouri civilians lending support to Confederate "bushwhackers." Obscure or not, it seems to fit the circumstances fairly well.

Leon Friedman appears to identify a loophole in some versions of the "material support" charge, since the terrorist act being supported would have to be in the United States. I should think that the intent to commit future terrorist acts in the U.S. is fairly clear from Bin Laden's videos and fatwa. If that's not good enough, the law should be fixed to include "future" acts as well as completed ones. Whether or not he trained before the October law change, he trained, and after the law change he materially contributed to the defense of a terrorist organization that had already attacked U.S. interests. If it's only such technicalities between Walker and a prison term on any of the direct charges Friedman identifies, so be it, but it's nothing for Mr. Friedman to crow about.

It seems to me what Walker did was no different from joining a Mafia organization just before they kill the local D.A., and/or after they killed the local police captain: if you get rounded up in the aftermath, you should go to jail as a co-conspirator, or for any possible charge that will stick, whether you were a small potato or not. Regarding the CIA operative Mr. Spann's death during the prison uprising at Mazar-e-Sharif: Walker may not have played a role in the uprising, but he may have known of that uprising in advance and failed to warn Walker, which I should think would be actionable. I'd support a lot of questioning of his buddies at Mazar-e-Sharif to see if that were the case, and a lot of plea-bargaining for their testimony about this or any other possible charge, in coordination with the new Afghanistan government.

Whether or not it's easy to convict Walker of something, I think the attempt should be made, including very aggressive investigation and plea bargain deals with other witnesses. First, the fear of the United States of America should be instilled in everyone so foolish as to want to imitate him. Second, we (rightly) went after his fellow soldiers without quarter; we have no right not to go after Walker hammer and tongs as well -- and for the same reason: he was helping shelter a murderous, terrorist organization that attacked and killed Americans, and that vows it will do so again. But moreover, he's one of ours, and that makes it worse. To me, Walker's conviction -- and on substantial charges -- seems just about as important as Bin Laden's demise.

This brings me to the distinct possibility that Walker may face the death penalty. I believe that penalty is wrong in principle -- strictly because human error and/or malfeasance make it inevitable that truly innocent people will sometimes be executed. But that blood is on our hands regardless of any conviction of Mr. Walker for an offense he truly committed. I believe the severest possible charges should be brought against Mr. Walker. I would prefer the severest sentence were life in prison. But unlike European countries who refuse to extradite suspects to the United States because of our death penalty, I can not support preventing or soft-pedaling U.S. criminal justice on that basis alone. posted by Thomas Nephew at 12:12:00 AM -- |    

 

Happy new year
Thanks for dropping by; I hope you have a great new year.

I want to thank everyone who's taken the time to read this blog. I've enjoyed getting to know a new group of friends online, via comments, e-mail, and reading their own blogs. I particularly appreciated the links to my blog and individual posts by other bloggers, including Matt Welch, Jeff Jarvis, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, Ken Layne, and particularly the extended "blog discussion" I had with Steve Den Beste about Iraq. I have also enjoyed exchanges of e-mails and comments with Charles Johnson, Jim Henley, Shiloh Bucher, Ray Eckhart, Chris Protopapas, and Andrew Hofer, among many others.

It's been nice to have civilized discussions about important issues with these new friends of mine; and I say to them: it's been a pleasure getting to know you online, and I hope I get to meet you in person some day. posted by Thomas Nephew at 2:38:00 PM -- |    

 

The Saudi Wahhabite role, contd.
Following up on earlier posts about Wahhabism and Saudi Arabia: In the New York Times, the 12/27 article "Holy War Lured Saudis as Rulers Looked Away" provides an account of the role of Saudi secular and religious establishments in that country's jihadist movement. Re religious establishment:

A half-blind man of 61, Sheik Sadlaan is a professor at the kingdom's leading Islamic university and a religious adviser to a senior member of the royal family. What he says carries the weight of the ulemaa, Saudi Arabia's official religious establishment, and what he says, carefully, is that the king is his imam, and the king does not currently advise young men to march off to holy war.

But asked about other scholars, like Sheik Hamoud al-Shuaibi, who since Sept. 11 and the American retaliation have openly called for jihad against the United States, Sheik Sadlaan stops short of condemnation.

"He made a mistake, but it was not a major one, and it does not detract from his reputation," he said of Sheik Shuaibi, a former teacher.

Even the Saudi government is not known to have taken action against Sheik Shuaibi, despite his statements that those who support infidels, or unbelievers, should be considered unbelievers themselves, a statement that would seem perilously close to treason in Saudi Arabia, still home to more than 5,000 American troops.

Out of roughly 10,000 religious scholars in the kingdom, perhaps just 150 embrace such a radical view, according to American estimates. But among this group, only a handful is known to have been detained by Saudi authorities since Sept. 11...

This in a country known for crushing religious uprisings of whatever stripe, from the defeat of the Ikhwan in 1929 to the 1979 Mecca Mosque uprising to the 1992 Burayda roundups.* Mr. Sadlaan's ambivalence may be changing in light of Crown Prince Abdullah's call yesterday for unequivocal condemnation of terrorism (AP). Then again, it may not, given that "legitimate armed struggle" by the Palestinians was specifically distinguished from terrorism in Abdullah's comments (Reuters). I don't know whether Abdullah considers suicide bombing a pizza parlor or busloads of commuters "legitimate" or not.

Re government oversight, there is a lot of detail about the surveillance of Al Qaeda and "Afghan Arabs" by the Saudi government. But this is suggestive, I think:

But in private, Saudi and American officials say the real mystery to the Saudi government is not whether Saudi citizens took part [in the 9/11 attacks], but how so many of them were able to evade detection by the Saudi authorities. [...]

To the Saudis, American officials say, the fact that the Saudis involved in the assaults were unknown to them was almost as startling as the attacks themselves.

In recent years, the mubahith, the Saudi equivalent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, infiltrated Al Qaeda cells within the kingdom, while the monitoring of the Saudis fighting abroad was thought to have kept a handle on potential troublemakers.

Assume for a moment that the article is accurate in portraying the Saudi government as merely feckless or negligent in their handling of the "Afghan Arabs." It seems to me we are still left with a portrait of (1) extremist clergy tolerated in a notably intolerant country -- suggesting the government either fears them, believes they are sufficiently well observed, or both -- and (2) gaping blind spots in the mubahith surveillance of Al Qaeda. As a theory, I suggest that some of these mubahith officials, and likely some of the domestic mutaween religious enforcement police may be treasonously extremist Wahhabites themselves, and may have helped the 9/11 attackers evade detection in Saudi Arabia. The CIA, FBI, and reliable muhabith should be (and may well be) looking for "sleeper" cells in the Saudi government, particularly in their police forces.

=====
* Viorst, Shadow of the Prophet, Ch.7: "The Saudi Dilemma." posted by Thomas Nephew at 2:22:00 AM -- |