Michelle Malkin was big on the Flight 327 story, and a lot of folks have been trying to say that Annie Jacobsen - author of that story - and thus Michelle are hysterical women. But Michelle has been doing real reporting on this thing, way ahead of all the rest of the media.

And then there is this: today, Federal and New York officials are warning of credible intelligence - more than the usual chatter - about attacks planned for NYC. In that report is the following:

Intelligence sources say al Qaeda plans to move non-Arab terrorists across the border with Mexico.

Authorities already have in custody a woman of Pakistani-origin arrested after crossing into Texas. She carried a South African passport with several of the pages torn out, $7,000 in cash and an airplane ticket to New York.

That article from ABC is July 31. Michelle Malkin had it three days ago.

Hysterical? An opinion writer? My only hope is that, one day soon, women, who have all earned their right to their opinions instead of being labeled opinionated will be called smart and well informed, just like men.

UPDATE: Another choice passage from the ABC story:

"Intelligence reporting indicates that al Qaeda continues to target for attack commercial and financial institutions, as well as international organizations, inside the United States," the New York City Police Department said in a statement released today on the "ongoing al Qaeda threat."

International institutions in New York? Who could that be?

Well, in Parade, actually. That Sunday supplement magazine in a lot of papers. Has an interview with GEN Franks that includes a lot of very interesting stuff. Like Pres. Mubarak of Egypt told him personally that Hussein had bio weapons and was going to use them on US troops. And that if he had to do Iraq over again, he'd use the exact same number of troops. A good read. If your paper doesn't carry it, it will be available here August 9.

UPDATE: Here's a synopsis.

So the Kerry campaign will "go dark" in August to conserve funds.

Entirely coincidentally, the DNC will run a $100M "independent" campaign in August. According to Terry McAuliffe, "we have never done this until September."

Hmmm.

I was hunting some stuff the other day and came across a document entitled Radical Responses to Radical Regimes: Evaluating Preemptive Counter-Proliferation. It was published in 1995. Interesting tidbits:

Numerous preemptive counter-proliferation strikes have taken place since 1940. Allied air forces and special operations forces destroyed German nuclear facilities and heavy water supplies that were an integral part of the Nazi A-bomb research effort. U.S. bombers also destroyed the most important Japanese nuclear research laboratory in Tokyo at the end of WWII. Other raids include: Iran versus Iraq in 1980, Israel versus Iraq in 1981, Iraq versus Iran with seven raids from 1984 to 1988, and the U.S.-led coalition versus Iraq in 1991.

Presidents contemplating a PCP action should realize that they may not know the entire scope of the enemy NBC or ballistic missile capabilities. Unfortunately, if an attack misses even a few such enemy weapons, they could cause tens of thousands of American casualties in retaliatory strikes. Even the relatively complete destruction and occupation of a country might not arrest its NBC and ballistic missile program entirely. Indeed, as former CIA Director Robert Gates has testified, once Iraq is left free to operate independently, he predicted that it will take no more than two years to return to the nuclear technology level it had achieved at the inception of the Gulf War.

Unfortunately, the certainty of a bloody conventional Korean War now, especially if made more dangerous and lethal by one or two North Korean nuclear weapons, outweighs the uncertain future risks created if the DPRK nuclear proliferation goes unchecked. Neither choice is positive, but the choice between jumping into war now, or taking a chance that it could be deterred, is not hard to make.

An interesting document, read the whole thing.

Since Iraq is all about oil and making Dick Cheney rich, why were all those Democrats applauding that Kerry and Edwards say they want to win there? Why would they applaud winning an illegal and unjustified war?

I just have to think the Deanites were squirming.

Wrote this in May, 2003, in a note to Democrats:

No. No "message." You need to to defend our nation. You need to want to defend our nation. You have to feel like our nation deserves to be defended. That isn't a message. Its a belief. And if you don't believe those things, your message can't be credible, no matter how good you are at faking sincerity.

Still appropriate today.

This is good news-bad news.

Catching bad guy (gal) good. "Floods" of middle eastern males coming over Rio Grande bad.

From my reading of the Michael Moore - Bill O'Reilly smackdown Drudge has, Michael Moore thinks that Saddam Hussein was okay as leader of Iraq because hte people did not revolt.

What an idiot. I have heard lots of folks on that side make that argument, and it is just silly. Because the people of Iraq revolted, more than once, and Saddam put down the revolts with force, using chemical weapons if necessary. So Moore seems to be saying because Saddam was ruthless enough to keep his opposition from succeeding, the US was not justified in removing him.

That's where the Left is today. Supporting the most brutal dictators because they are the most brutal dictators. Nice.

Here's your chance to participate in that crazy system we call capitalism! There is an ad on this page, over there on the left, in the sidebar, for a book called "America's Right Turn." Click on it, exchange your storehouse of value for a tangible good, and I act as a middleman and earn from the fruits of other's labor! America, what a country! Now click, click I say! And buy!

I'm going to have to say that I don't find it very surprising that USA Today decided they couldn't publish an Ann Coulter column. As Ann is asking (in all the radio and TV spots she is getting as a result of the spike), haven't they read her columns?

But even for someone who is a fan of Ms. Coulter's stuff, you can't read that column and think "this is going in the McPaper for sure." It's a little strong even for her usual. And she obviously knows that USA Today does not seek out controversy. She might have written her column a little differently for the customer that was paying for it. I think she is enjoying the fruits of being spiked more than she would have being published. She had to know they couldn't publish that column.

But "pie wagons"? That is excellent. I'll have to remember that for the future.

Airports in Turkey have been placed on the second highest terror alert level after officials received intelligence that the Al Qaeda (search) terror network may be planning Sept. 11-style attacks, a newspaper reported Tuesday.

But Jackson has the marquee, even on Fox.

Wow, did Andrew Sullivan evermore like the Democrat convention last night. It had Bill Clinton! Jimmy Carter lecturing on foreign policy! Jimmy Carter! And it was all great because they were all playing "against type," doing the stuff they wouldn't otherwise be expected to do. You know, all the stuff they complained about - politicizing 9/11, and all that.

The same kind of stuff that Sullivan has preemptively dismissed as "lies" because Rick Santorum is not the keynote speaker at the Republican convention.

The man is decidedly unserious. Though his fund raising drive is well timed! Having hoovered conservative pockets, he'll have a bunch of new liberal friends to hit up.

A little while back pittspilot posted on a David Warren column, and it generated a good discussion. One of my problems with the column was that Warren made the point that it was important to properly identify the enemy in the War on Terror, then wasn't terribly helpful in that identification. Some interpreted his column to mean that the enemies were Wahabis, or more broadly, Muslims. I wrote in the comments the following:

I wouldn't characterize our enemy by being Muslim, however. The problem is Islamo-fascism - the combination of Islam with the fascist states that most Muslims live in. Muslims in democracies are not really the problem.

This is of a piece with the latter half of the 20th Century. Radical ideology married to fascist state power is a problem for the rest of the world. National Socialism, a divine Emperor, in Italy, Fascism itself, and throughout the Cold War, Communism were not dangerous because they were beliefs, but because they had state power.

And since the problem is actually similar to what we've faced before, the solution is similar to what we've faced before - breaking the fascist states, either head on like WWII or by wearing them down and beating them ideologically like the Cold War.

In short, I guess, the problem with Islamo-fascism isn't really the Islamic part, but the fascist part.

So I like the article by Michael Ledeen at NRO today quite a bit. It is chock full of quotable goodness, but I will try to keep the excerpting as little as necessary:

All of a sudden everybody's asking, "Who are we fighting anyway?" It's an interesting question, but it's not nearly as important as many of the debaters believe....

You see where I'm going, surely. The debate is a trap, because it diverts our attention and our energies from the main thing, which is winning the war. It's an intellectual amusement, and it gets in our way. As that great Machiavellian Vince Lombardi reminds us, winning is the only thing.

That's why the public figure who has best understood the nature of the war, and has best defined our enemy, is George W. Bush. Of all people! He had it right from the start: We have been attacked by many terrorist groups and many countries that support the terrorists. It makes no sense to distinguish between them, and so we will not. We're going after them all....

He says the way to win the war is to liberate the Middle East from the tyrants who now govern it and sponsor terrorism.

And that's exactly right. There are plenty of terrorists out there who aren't Islamists. (There are even some suicide terrorists who have been forced into it; Coalition commanders are reporting the discovery of hands chained to steering wheels in suicide vehicles.) But all the terror masters are tyrants. Saddam didn't have any religious standing, nor do the Assads, but they are in the front rank of the terror masters. Ergo: Defeat the tyrants, win the war.

Yes, exactly. If we have to go after them all, then whether Iraq or Iran is not the right question. It is how to take on Iraq and Iran (and all the rest), with the resources and allies we have at our disposal. That's an entirely different question - one that George W. Bush clearly understands. Even if he doesn't have the complete answer for it, he's light years ahead of Kerry, who doesn't even recognize that it is a question, much less the question.

One more quick quote from the Ledeen article:

Machiavelli, Chapter Two: If you are victorious, people will always judge the means you used to have been appropriate.

Reading bits and pieces of the 9/11 commission report (haven't read the entirety, yet) and especially others readings of it, it seems that the "Iraq as the central battle of the war on terror" idea forwarded by the administration holds up rather well. One of the better analyses I've read is Byron York's at NRO. Yet it is still kind of convoluted, in part, I think, because York is attempting to score points on the war's opponents with it - the teaser link from the NRO front page reads, "Will Bush’s critics correct themselves about Iraq and al Qaeda?"

But there is a very solid and simple narrative about Iraq and Al Qaeda that can be told without the "in your face, Richard Clarke" stuff. And this story is easily supported with stuff that we already know - stuff that doesn't require secret sources.

The key commission finding on this is that bin Laden had sought safe haven in Iraq in 1997 when his relationship with the Taliban was a little rocky but was rebuffed, or at least got no answer, from Iraq. And then in 1998, Hussein offered safe haven to bin Laden, but bin Laden, cozy in Afghanistan, turned down the offer.

This is of a piece of the commission's conclusion that there was no collaborative, operational relationship for committing attacks on the US. But as for the war on terror, it is very revealing.

Baghdad has been a great place for terrorists on the run since Carlos the Jackal stayed there for a while in 1976. Other terrorists who had their home bases turned inhospitable found their welcome there, guys who had targeted the US, like Abu Abbas and Abu Nidal. So it would not be unreasonable to think that Al Qaeda, pushed out of Afghanistan, might seek safehaven in Iraq, and might be granted it. Again, the commission report states that in 1999 Richard Clarke thought this a likely effect of using U2's for surveillance over Afghanistan - writing that "old wily Usama will likely boogie to Baghdad."

Zarqawi's arrival in Iraq shows that this is exactly what happened - Al Qaeda members, pushed out of Afghanistan, went to Baghdad. Zarqawi started operating right away, coordinating the murder of a USAID official in Jordan from Baghdad. And many think that Zarqawi is now the top operational Al Qaeda leader (PDF).

So the very simple narrative is this: the top Al Qaeda operational leader fled from Afghanistan to Iraq, just as the counter-terrorism folks thought would happen, and as history has shown would happen. And that makes it the central battle in the war on terror.

And I get to take the California Bar. My head is so full that it might just explode.

The good news is that I get to miss the Democratic Convention. It's a sacrifice I willingly make.

Wretchard points out the problems with feckless allies, and writes:

The main question facing coalition partners USA and Australia is whether to keep working with the Indonesian and the Philippine governments which seem unwilling or unable to face the forces that are slowly tearing them apart; or prepare for a scenario that accepts the failure of these two states.

I think there is a bigger question than that. The Phillipines have moved from being strong allies - I think that President Arroyo was the first to offer help to the US in the War on Terror - to being worse than weak allies. Not only have they withdrawn their troops, but they provided money directly to the terrorists. The result has been a significantly worse security environment in Iraq.

President Bush said early on you are either with us, or with the terrorists. There is no middle ground. We need to let The Phillipines know that they are on the wrong side.

Andrew Sullivan endorses Kerry. What a surprise!

UPDATE: Allah said July 30.

I noted just 4 days ago that John Kerry didn't list "National Security" as an issue on his website (I noticed that months ago about all of the other candidates except President Bush). Well, they've been redoing the site, and in addition to clearing away a bunch of Sandy Berger and Joe Wilson stuff, they added "National Security" as an issue.

Welcome to the party, pal!

Just got the largest spam attack yet - over 800 comments.

Thank heavens for MT-Blacklist.

Seriously.

As SGT Stryker says, "wait a minute, it's Two-Thousand F***ing Four! Jesus, why am I reading about people from the Clinton Adminsitration?"

Shocking but true!

We were flipping through the on-demand offerings on the digital cable the other day, and came across a movie and I didn't want to commit to spending $5 to watch it right then. Mrs. Blaster looked it up on the Internet and found some people who thought it was very funny. So I put it on the Netflix queue. Boy, was the Internet wrong.

Heed my warning: Evil Alien Conquerors is among the worst movies ever made. Don't fall for any reviews that say otherwise!

That is all.

I am not fast enough at posting to have caught the "nukes in Iraq" story before it was declared stupid by the Iraqi government.

So, umm, color me unconvinced.

I suspect Jonah Goldberg is right about whether the Berger scandal will go anywhere is right. It will all come down to whether the documents were in his pants or in his pockets. If it was just his pockets, the story will boil down to the "stories are untrue," which will be true, of course, but that will mask the serious issue of him removing all copies of highly sensitive documents.

On a side note, one of the big Berger defenders right now is Lanny Davis. I wrote back in February: "if Davis is telling your story, you have something to hide." Note this piece at Just One Minute - link via Instapundit.

Really - the news announcer said that in response to a story about Senator Warner talking about an interim Iraq Survey Group report. Here's a link to the story of that (sent by AMac). Essentially, the Senate got an interim briefing, and Warner says that the next report "will contain 'a good deal of new information' backing up the Bush administration's contention that Saddam Hussein pursued weapons of mass destruction." Of course, we heard that a year ago, too, and we see where we are today. This report is due out in September, and any such conclusions could only help Bush, so I expect that it will be reported falsely, just like Kay's first report was, just like the 9/11 Commission report was.

And just like the CNN guy saying after this report that "no WMD have been found in Iraq. Flip over a couple of stations on the cable, and you can hear from Charles Duelfer himself that so far 35 chemical rounds have been recovered in Iraq (which comports with the IHT report I noted here). Via Ace of Spades HQ.

Warner says "I'm not suggesting dramatic discoveries," so I don't expect the narrative to change much. Unless maybe they found some WMD in Sandy Berger's pants.

Glenn Reynolds notes in a post: "This whole national security thing threatens to become a "wedgie issue" for the Democrats!" ("Wedgie issue" is linked as a pants joke.)

I know that this was a funny, but the thing is, even today, on the Kerry campaign issues page, national security is not listed as an issue.

Could it be possible that we really are suicidal - that the essence of our democracy will lead to our own demise? Some days you just wonder.

Via LGF.

How exactly do you "step down" from an informal, unpaid position?

Seems like a bad idea for these guys to be so partisan. It may seem petty to base shopping on such things, but there you are. I still don't buy Tyson's chicken.

The blogosphere has been an important voice in getting major media to correct themselves. Fat lot of good that it does, but at least its a start. One of the key knives to twist is that they claim to be superior due to editing and fact checking. And right now with a bunch folks with their panties in a twist over the topic of major media v. blogs, now is not the time to get sloppy.

One big piece of sloppiness right now is going on over that story by Annie Jacobsen. Folks have been second guessing whether she made the whole thing up or not - she didn't. (That says nothing about her interpretation of the events. The events did happen. Period.) And in trying to Google their way to the truth, some sharp individual sent a link to Powerline Blog that proved there are indeed bands of Syrian musicians. This is what Powerline wrote:

Responding to my call for additional information, one of our our enterprising readers has located a photo of such a group -- the group known as Kulna Sawa.

Emphasis mine. Powerline (and its enterprising reader) do not claim that they have identified the group on Flight 347. But somehow, people read it as they have. LGF says that a reader emailed and said it was that band, and Donald Sensing wrote it (linking to LGF), and Ace links to Powerline and says they said it was that band.

I don't believe that anyone has actually identified that the band on Flight 347 was actually Kulna Sawa. But there it is.

On a more minor note, Bill Quick notes a story in the NYT about people in Northern Virginia abiding by a gun law that allows "open carry," with the headline "Now Let's Get Virginia Concealed Carry." Except of course Virginia does have concealed carry - even here in Northern Virginia - and it is a "shall issue" state. Easy to check at packing.org.

There are people who say you can't beat terrorists, and I say, of course we can. If you've read my comments in the post below, you know that I disagree with the David Warren column and Wretchard of Belmont Club's analysis of it. However, he has a new post on what is happening in Gaza right now that I do agree with a lot.

Gaza is probably the top "underreported" story right now. There is something serious happening within the ranks of the Palestinian leadership. One of the first real challenges to Arafat, and it is playing out violently. They are coming apart at the seems, I think, and it is likely to get worse before it gets better. The end of Arafat's despotism among the Palestinians will be a huge step forward for them, and provide a path to opening real negotiations with Israel, and more importantly, the US.

It puts the lie to all the talk of "we must solve the Palestinian situation before Iraq" (you do remember when that was in vogue, right?). I always thought that had it backward, that the states that supported Palestinian terrorism had to be convinced to stop supporting it before the situation there could be resolved. And Iraq was one of the key supporters - no Senate Intelligence Committee invesigation required. And I think we got leverage to crack down at least some on Saudi charities, too. And the Syrians are much more circumspect than they were. And as Wretchard points out, the Egyptians are now worried about Palestinian violence impinging on them.

David Warren has a number of thoughts, and Wretchard explicates further.

I agree wholeheartedly.

9/11 only surprised me by magnitude, not by event. I expected a few car bombings, maybe a homicide bombing or two, with the level of violence to ramp up. The fact that we had an enemy was clear from the early 90's, and even before.

But the thing is, that most people that I speak with have no idea about the magnitude of the threat we face.

Most of the left leaning people that I talk to about this aspect of world events have such a different perspective from my own. Initially, after 9/11 most of the chatter regarded the exact nature of the enemy. Who was it that wanted to take us out? I found that most of these folks seemed utterly unwilling to take any kind of definitive stance on who the enemy is. This was, taking into account American cultural values, entirely understandable.

While we all could agree that the whole of the Islamic religion, we could never agree that our enemy may be legitimate and mainstream subset of that group. That is where most people will block off the conversation. Most people are not confortable making these types of distinctions with another culture or religious group. They have been raised not to be comfortable with it. Therefore they never get to the next step.

How big is the problem group? I don't think we have the slightest idea. Nor do I think we will ever know because as Wretchard points out, the distinction between overt and covert supporters is a very fine one. Thus our problem may be huge, or it may not be so bad, but we do need to get on with figuring it out.

However, when having this discussion with some people, you will be frequently accused of being simple minded. This is an interesting charge. What is curious is that many of the world's thorniest problems are that difficult to understand. The Israeli-Palestinian problem, the problems facing South Africa, the Cold War, and the Chinese-Taiwan situation are not hard problems to understand at all.

However, understanding the problem and solving the problems are two entirely different things. I tend to believe some of those problems are insoluble.

Our problems in the GWOT are a real booger. Some of our interests as a nation are in direct contradiction to our interests in the GWOT. Saudi Arabia being a prime example. The Bill of Rights being another. In fact, much of what makes us a great nation creates near fatal flaws in this fight. We have an absolute booger of a problem, and no real solutions. The war in Iraq is not even the end of the beginning.

But the thing is, since most of those on the left are still spinning their wheels trying to get a handle of the nuances of the problem, that they have not begun to contemplate solutions to the problem. This may account for why we hear nothing from that section of the peanut gallery about how we should go about solving the problem.

This would all be fine, but for the fact that our enemies are racing to develop WMD capability. Once Iran gains nuclear capability the stakes of the game change dramatically.

Sooner or later we are going to have to get over this roadblock. Hopefully not under a nuclear mushroom.

People are starting to look at events - especially the 14 suspicious acting Syrians story - and go "something is up."

Well, duh. I know that in part of the blogosphere, the cool pose is that Homeland Security is a big joke that does nothing, and in another part it is all political eyewash trying to drum up votes for Bush, but maybe, just maybe, back in May when Attorney General Ashcroft and Tom Ridge announced a "season of symbolic events that could be attractive targets for terrorism," and earlier this month when Tom Ridge said that "credible reporting now indicates that al-Qaeda is moving forward with its plans to carry out a large-scale attack in the United States in an effort to disrupt our democratic process," it wasn't a joke.

For the Bush is a big fat liar crowd, such statements conflicted with the President's speech saying that we are safer. Even those who should nominally be on his side, like Jonah Goldberg (though Jonah started dumping on W a little earler), laughed off that assertion. But the truth is that we are much more prepared for a terrorist event, and much more aware of them.

The discussions around the Annie Jacobsen article are "is she telling the truth or exaggerating," and "if she's telling the truth we are all doomed or it's shows that things are working."

Count me in on the "things are working" crowd. No defense is perfect, but an active defense, combined with staying on the offense, is pretty darn good, and a damn sight better than what we had. Remember, John Kerry's idea - such as it is - is to return to what we had in the 90's. A bad idea. That's still the choice: live, and have the French hate us, or die.

UPDATE: Don't think I'm being pollyannish - just because no defense can be perfect, doesn't mean that we could not do better. I'm with John Derbyshire on this particular point: "Why on earth are we letting Syrians into the U.S.A.? Syria is a terrorist-friendly state." If I were king, we wouldn't be. I wouldn't let anyone from the countries AQ is operating in into the US until this whole thing is over. Thing is, I'm not the king, and neither is President Bush. He's the elected (don't start) President of the United States, and he has to navigate the waters of public opinion along with the requirements of national security. Look at the huge uproar over just fingerprinting folks from Middle Eastern countries. The ACLU types and the Harvard and other university administrators and CAIR would have an absolute fit if we shut off all those visitors to the US. You might argue that they shouldn't have a say in our national security, but the fact is that they do. It is the essence of democracy.

So while it could be better, it is also than it could be - better than it has been. And we should be glad when the system works, instead of just complaining about it.

If you just came here from Allah's joint, welcome!

Dunno why that came to mind. It just did. Read some of the other stuff here. Link me. Put me in your bookmarks. Whatever.

Just feeling a little weepy after Oceans 11.

Newsmax is out retailing the "