Friday, May 07, 2004

Interesting article on Iraqi WMD:

First, Prince John covers his bases, just in case:

"It appears, as we peel away the weapons of mass destruction issue, and -- we may yet find them, Chris," Kerry said. "Look, I want to make it clear: Who knows if a month from now, you find some weapons. You may."

Next, there are some interesting dots to connect:

Perhaps Kerry was hedging because the night before Jordanian television had broadcast the confessions of the surviving suspects in an al-Qaida plot to attack the U.S. embassy in Amman and the headquarters of the Jordanian intelligence service with 20 tons of explosives and deadly chemicals.

"Shown in a casual interview setting, detainees Azmi al-Jayousi and Hussein Sharif Hussein provided calm descriptions of a plot they say was hatched in Iraq and forged in Syria and Iraq," wrote the Chicago Tribune's Evan Osnos.

...

The same day that Jordanian conspirators were making their confessions, Israel's military chief told an Israeli newspaper there is "no doubt" that Iraq possessed both chemical weapons and the means to deliver them. In the first two days of the war, the United States -- acting on tips from Israeli intelligence -- destroyed the aircraft Saddam had prepared to carry chemical munitions, Lt. Gen. Moshe Yaalon said. The munitions themselves were buried, or transferred to other countries.

"We very clearly saw that something crossed into Syria," he said.

"We have six or seven credible reports of Iraqi weapons being moved into Syria before the war," a senior administration official told Kenneth Timmerman of Insight magazine.

A Syrian intelligence officer, in letters smuggled to an anti-regime activist in Paris, identified three sites in Syria where Iraqi WMD are being stored, Timmerman said. The sites were the same as those identified earlier by a Syrian journalist who defected to Europe.


Recall the earlier article in Insight Magazine on findings since last year's war which we linked to here. There was also an earlier Insight article on WMD being moved to Syria.

The WorldTribune and Debka have both reported that Iraqi WMD stockpiles were moved to Syria. Bill Gertz of the Washington Times has mentioned it as an unconfirmed but persistent rumor, and several administration officials, including Rumsfeld, have specifically mentioned Syria as a possible hiding place.

Finally there is the article by Ion Mihai Pacepa, the highest ranking Eastern Bloc intelligence officer ever to defect to the west and someone who has worked with Libya and other Middle Eastern countries to develop WMD. Pacepa claims there was a plan from day one called "Sarindar" for "ridding Third World despots of all trace of their chemical weapons if the Western imperialists ever got near them."

The April unemployment numbers are out, and the news is good: 288,000 new jobs for the month. The March numbers have also been revised up (revisions are common as the initial reports are preliminary) from 308,000 to 337,000. The brings the four month total for this year up to 867,000 new jobs. Not bad!

Let it also be said that for all the bellyaching about jobs during the Bush presidency, the fact of the matter is that he inherited this problem and has been doing well remedying it. Employment is a lagging indicator--jobs are shed after a downturn begins and they are added after an upturn has begun. The employment numbers Bush inherited in January 2001 were the highest ever and represented jobs created during the internet bubble. Bush immediately began setting things right, with the tax cuts being a huge part of his turnaround plan. It worked. The economy turned around. The final proof of that are the latest jobs numbers. As a lagging indicator, rising employment now demonstrates that the economy started growing again over a year ago. Best of all, this ain't no bubble economy. It's the real McCoy.

Is the future so bright that we gotta wear shades? No. Oil prices are high enough to hurt our economy. Spending is out of control. States are raising taxes. Being at war doesn't help either. Nor do prospects of rising interest rates. There's still plenty of work to be done, but it looks like for once the business cycle is going to help Republicans in November. We don't think that will matter much for Bush--he's running as a war president, and Prince John is DOA anyhow. It may, however, help down the ticket. Fingers crossed for the Senate this fall, where Republican recruiting has been just awful--no serious challenge to Reid, Dorgan or Blanche Lincoln just for starters--and even our "safe" seats are often occupied by turds like Alren Specter.

Tuesday, May 04, 2004

Prince John got a Purple Heart for this!?

Some of his crew confided that they did not receive any fire from shore, but that Kerry had fired a mortar round at close range to some rocks on shore. The crewman thought that the injury was caused by a fragment ricocheting from that mortar round when it struck the rocks.

That seemed to fit the injury which I treated.

What I saw was a small piece of metal sticking very superficially in the skin of Kerry's arm. The metal fragment measured about 1 cm. in length and was about 2 or 3 mm in diameter. It certainly did not look like a round from a rifle.

I simply removed the piece of metal by lifting it out of the skin with forceps. I doubt that it penetrated more than 3 or 4 mm. It did not require probing to find it, did not require any anesthesia to remove it, and did not require any sutures to close the wound.

The wound was covered with a bandaid.

We were deeply disappointed when RINO (Republican in Name Only) Arlen Specter beat challenger Pat Toomey in the PA primary last week. The loss was especially bitter because it was president Bush's endorsement that put Specter over the edge.

The good news is that Pat Toomey is not going away, and will be running for governor in 2006. Go Pat!
The UN is a joke that keeps writing itself. Now Sudan will have a seat on the U.N. Human Rights Commission.
This is just crazy:

Adhering to a policy instituted 10 years ago, but not always followed, the UI athletics department recently canceled a baseball game with Bradley University of Peoria, Ill., because of the school's mascot.

The game was originally scheduled to be played today, but the athletics department canceled the nonconference game in February, recognizing that Bradley's nickname - the Braves - falls under the university's policy to not schedule nonconference games with teams that have American Indian mascots.


Someone asked us recently what amendments we might want to make to the US Constitution. We thought about it, which was pretty depressing. The kinds of things we would have liked to see constitutional protection for were Free Speech, the right to Keep and Bear Arms, protection against unreasonable Search and Seizure, that sort of thing.
Suicide bombings are down in Israel and part of the reason is IDF action against terrorist leaders and technical specialists--like bomb makers. Making a proper bomb is fussy work which often results in "work accidents" that prematurely end the aspiring bomb maker's career.

How effective has the Israeli campaign been? Aside from attacks being down 96%, here's a story today about a would-be shahid (martyr) who was caught when his poorly made bomb belt started leaking:

It appears a leak in his bomb-belt caused phosphorus material to reach his skin causing such a severe burn that a hole was literally seen in the stomach of the would-be bomber.
Ahmed Chalabi, head of the Iraqi National Congress and a member of the Iraqi Governing Counsel, has been accused of working for Iran.

David Frum today mounts a spirited defense.

We don't know what's really going on here, but we do know that the left hates Chalabi, seemingly more than they hated Saddam. And that weighs in his favor.
We still think this president and congress are spending way, way too much. Still this is nice to hear:

Smaller-than-expected tax refunds and rising individual tax receipts will pare back federal borrowing significantly for the first half of this year and could reduce the $521 billion deficit projected for the fiscal year by as much as $100 billion, Treasury and congressional budget officials said yesterday.

Hat tip to Instapundit.

Monday, May 03, 2004

PoliPundit has a great post on Prince John's war record. Appears that every single one of his Vietnam commanding officers has signed a letter stating that the "war hero" is unfit to serve as commander in chief.
The Marines, according to StrategyPage, have taken silly string with them to Iraq. They spray it around unexploded ordinance to check for trip wires.