Bill's Bites -- 2006.09.16
Contributed by Bill Faith
The webmaster's blog-within-a-blog. Continuously updated and bumped, newest items at the top.
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The Limited Reluctance Of Israel
Israel has warned Lebanon that a failure to disarm Hezbollah will lead to a war with Lebanon if Hezbollah attacks Israel again. Tzipi Livni, Israel's Foreign Minister, told the Washington Post that the stakes will go up considerably if the terrorists attempt more provocations along the Blue Line: ...
JAGs Were Not Coerced
After the White House produced a letter signed by the leaders of the Pentagon's lawyers supporting a clarification of Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, the Republican Senators opposed to the effort accused the Bush administration of coercing the statement. The New York Times reports today that the signatories did not get forced into signing anything:
Somali Islamist cleric: Let’s kill us a Pope
Right on schedule. Assuming he doesn’t offer a groveling apology this week, I figure we’ll see the first embassy go up sometime next Friday afternoon.
What’ll it take to satisfy the ummah? Why, just ask a “moderate” Muslim: Dr Muhammad Abdul Bari, general secretary of the Muslim Council of Britain, said today’s apology was a “welcome step” but the Pope needed to repudiate the views he quoted to restore relations between Muslims and the Catholic Church.
Wore out Dog
I've been spendin' quite a bit of time on a site-related side project we aren't ready to talk about publicly yet and it's startin' to catch up with me. I may even crawl back under the porch for another nap sooner today than I do most days -- I was up till daylight and only got up when I did because I didn't have sense enough to eat before I bedded down.
They Liked It When It Was McCain's Idea
John Hinderaker
Yesterday the New York Times editorialized against the administration's bill to authorize military commissions to try al Qaeda detainees. The editorial is over the top even for the Times; a principal grievance is that the administration is moving too quickly to comply with the Hamdan decision, which came down in June. The Times thinks that the administration is moving with undue haste; its editorial is titled "Stampeding Congress," and the paper harrumphs that the administration must be acting so precipitously only because the elections will take place in a couple of months: ...
... For the moment, though, I want to focus on something else. The Tmes writes: One section of the administration bill would put American soldiers in grave jeopardy by rewriting the Geneva Conventions, condoning the practice of hiding prisoners in secret cells, and permitting the continued use of interrogation methods that violate the Geneva Conventions at the C.I.A. prisons.
Can the Times possibly be so out of touch that it does not realize that American soldiers captured by al Qaeda are already in "grave jeopardy"? The paper continues: ...
Pope Rage on the Internet; church bombings in Gaza
Michelle Malkin
My friend Lorenzo Vidino, counterterrorism expert and author of al Qaeda in Europe, sent the above photo and this note: Attached is a picture of the Pope that is circulating in Qaeda-friendly chat rooms and websites. Lovely (and predictable) that they call for his beheading.
The script in red calls for the Pope's beheading. The rest of the translation:
Cardin staffer fired
for writing about racism, harassment in campaign office
On Thursday the Cardin campaign fired a staffer who wrote about the going-ons in one of their campaign offices. The staffer, now revealed as Ursula Gruber, went by the pseudonym Persuasionatrix on her blog.
Rove confident, laughing at Democrat antics
Bryan Preston
I pass this on without a great deal of comment: Now, let me pass along some exclusive gossip: I’ve been too busy to blog much lately, but this past week I spoke to someone who occasionally talks with … Karl Rove. My friend reports that Rove is absolutely confident of victory in November, chiefly because of the national-security issue. ...
Pope to Muslims: Sorry if you’re offended
Update: British Muslim papers threaten
Allahpundit
It’s one of those non-apology apologies, like “sorry you’re too stupid to understand.”
Sorry you’re so sensitive and eager for pretexts to justify violence: ...
*** 14:54 Muslim Backlash At Pope Proves His Point
The New York Times carries water for the outraged Muslims and as Captain Ed so accurately says, the Pope apologizes for being prophetic. I mean, how better to demonstrate that your religion does not advocate violence in proselytization than to burn down some Christian Churches? How better to prove the point of the Pope in his appeal to “reason” than to react unreasonably? ...
Pope Apologizes For Being Prophetic
Pope Benedict XVI apologized more clearly for any offense taken from his speech by Muslims that decried violence in relgious proselytization, as Muslims burnt two churches in the West Bank. Benedict now says that he hoped Muslims would understand the core meaning of his speech, which appears extremely unlikely: ...
Scandalous if true
Paul Mirengoff
Elements of the JAG Corps -- career government military lawyers -- exert, in my view, an undue amount of influence on how this country will fight the war on terrorism. And not for the good. Along with their former JAG colleague and current mouthpiece in the Senate, Lindsey Graham, they have spearheaded the movement to provide gold-plated process to terrorists who are hell-bent on killing as many Americans and other Westerners as humanly possible. Any rational effort to stop such terrorists would focus on learning, through aggressive interrogation tactics, all that they know. But, as liberal ex-JAG John Hutson has admitted to Lindsey Graham (who did not disagree), the conferring rights on terrorists comes at a cost to our ability to obtain needed information. For more on the threat posed by the terrorist rights campaign see this editorial from today's Washington Times and this one in yesterday's Wall Street Journal which explains why, if the liberal JAGs and Lindsey Graham have their way, "we may not break the next Khalid Sheikh Mohammad."
Until reading this piece in today's Washington Times by Bill Gertz and Rowan Scarborough, I assumed that the JAGs in question view matters as they do for parochial but substantive reasons. As lawyers, the JAGs care deeply about process, and should. Unfortunately, their belief in process appears to have crowded out, fetish-like, any serious focus on competing concerns. In place of such a focus they probably just assume, as one of their members has pronounced, that we cannot lose the war on terrorism as long as we provide lots of process to detainees. ...
02:26
The Pope's Real Threat
Many people have written about the controversy over Pope Benedict's recent remarks at the University of Regensburg, where he quoted a medieval emperor about the barbarity of forced religious conversions. In a replay of the Prophet Cartoon madness, Muslims only escalated their rhetoric after the Vatican apologized for any offense the quotation may have given followers of Islam. Despite apologizing Wednesday for quoting Manuel II's words from 1391 (but not for its argument against violence in religion), Muslims burnt effigies of the Roman Catholic leader and staged demonstrations around the world:
[...]
All this has shown is that Muslims missed the point of the speech, and in fact have endeavored to fulfill Benedict's warnings rather than prove him wrong. If one reads the speech at Regensburg, the entire speech, one understands that the entire point was to reject violence in pursuing religion in any form, be it Islam, Christianity, Judaism, or Bahai. The focal point of the speech was not the recounting of the debate between Manuel II and the unnamed Persian, but rather the rejection of reason and of God that violence brings ...
Daniel Ellsberg begs “conscientious insiders” to leak Iran war plans
NYT: Pope owes Muslims a “deep and persuasive apology”
From the miserable bastards who not only wouldn’t publish the Mohammed cartoons, but had the titanium balls to illustrate an article about the ensuing jihad with Chris Ofili’s manure Mary.
Video: Bush gets testy with David Gregory
Highlights from [Friday's] presser. How would we like it, asked Gregory, if North Korea treated captured American prisoners the way we treat Khaled Sheikh Mohammed?
Video: L.A. Mayor Villaraigosa jumps ugly with John and Ken over immigration
Allahpundit
I was going to call him “Mayor MEChA” but that wouldn’t be fair. He’s reformed now, you see.
KFI has video. ...
Video (game): “Night of Bush Capturing”
Released today by the Global Islamic Media Front, which Rusty describes as “a propaganda outlet for al Qaeda 3.0 and other wannabes.” Made by jihadis for jihadis, although BDS sufferers might enjoy it too: according to SITE, the sixth and final level features a shootout with the Bushitler himself. I’ll see if I can find a code so that our nutroots readers can skip right to the end and live the dream. If you’re hot to try it out, you can download the game here. I haven’t tested it so I make no promises about viruses, malware, etc.
Here’s the trailer.
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