As two people who drafted and negotiated the scope of the 1982 Intelligence Identities Protection Act, we can tell you: The [Robert] Novak column and the surrounding facts do not support evidence of criminal conduct.

Memories being short in this country, this is unlikely to make an impression in the crowd that believes Bush personally called for Plame’s outing with the intention of ruining Joe Wilson’s career and reputation.
Piper thinks this is more relevant to the quality of editorialism than anything else. With sloppy disregard for anything remotely close to objective reporting, the instant allegations were made that Novak was a messenger of revenge, the call for investigations into the matter assumed too much and failed to dig deeply enough to find the truth. Piper:

Even in the absence of sources who can speak freely, the response from editorial pages and journalism advocacy groups to the Plame affair has been uncharacteristically sloppy. They didn’t know her CIA status, simply assuming that she must have been covert for Novak to exact this retribution on her. They never considered that Plame’s agency role might have been the decisive factor in the CIA sending Wilson, “an expert neither on nuclear weapons nor on Niger,” on the fact-finding mission (and what effort he put in there!). The editorialists and pundits who were screaming for an investigation apparently never thought that other journalists who were tangentially involved might get hauled before a grand jury and sent to jail if they refused. It’s no wonder that so few newspaper readers bother with the staff editorials if this is the average quality of research.

That about sums it up. Newspaper editorial sections have long ago abandoned reasoned debate, investigation, and discourse in favour of shouting matches and shadowy rumour mills. Someone should hire Greg–I have a feeling he’ll be a bit more partial to the actual details and less interested in the sugary crumbs that everyone else seems to fall for every time. Investigative journalist/editorialist waiting in the wings over there in Bethseda, and he’ll work for cheap!

IT’S AN ODD campaign gimmick, but Sen. John F. Kerry, D-Mass., often tells voters that he was “misled” and that’s why he voted for an October 2002 resolution authorizing military force against Iraq.
Kerry says he believed the resolution tied President Bush to promises to build an international coalition, to work with the United Nations and only go to war as a last resort. A disappointed Kerry now says Bush failed in all three venues.

Fair enough. I suppose that one might think that if one didn’t know of Bush’s activities in the UN before the war. This is what Bush told the UN a month before Kerry voted YES to grant war powers to Bush:

“Saddam Hussein has defied the United Nations 16 times. Not once, not twice — 16 times he has defied the U. N. The U.N. has told him after the (Persian) Gulf War what to do, what the world expected, and 16 times he’s defied it. And enough is enough. The U.N. will either be able to function as a peacekeeping body as we head into the 21st century, or it will be irrelevant. And that’s what we’re about to find out.“

Okay, Mr. Kerry, what do you have to say about that?

“I think that you had a hard-line group (then Pentagon adviser) Richard Perle, (Deputy Defense Secretary) Paul Wolfowitz and probably (Vice President Dick) Cheney. But when Brent Scowcroft and Jim Baker (former advisers to the first President Bush) weighed in, very publicly in op-eds in the New York Times and the (Washington) Post, the chatter around Washington and (Secretary of State Colin) Powell in particular, who was very much of a different school of thought, was really that the president hadn’t made up his mind. He was looking for an out. That’s what a lot of people thought.“

Interesting. And so what Bush said…

“That was ‘rhetorical’. So most people, actually on the inside, really felt that (Bush) himself was looking for the way out to sort of satisfy Cheney, satisfy Wolfowitz, but not get stuck. The fact that he jumped and went the other way, I think, shocked them and shocked us.“

Can I say that John Kerry mislead America about his belief that he was mislead by Bush about going to war with Iraq because some things he has said DON’T EFFING MAKE SENSE?!!!!
(Ed. You can, but remember, he did serve in Vietnam.)
He gives “talking out of both sides of his mouth” a new definition.

Much as I have tried to escape this conclusion, I cannot: there are no sensible grounds on which one can argue that it is morally right to execute Saddam but not Ian Huntley. Anyone who accepts that Saddam should be killed must also accept the case for capital punishment more generally. We can argue about details – to which forms of murder it should apply, and in what circumstances – but the principle is clear. Accept the moral validity of executing Saddam and you must accept it for executing Huntley – and, indeed, anyone convicted of cold-blooded and deliberate murder.

Read the whole thing.
Via Instapundit

It appears that the Fedayeen Saddam, a vicious paramilitary force run by Saddam’s eldest son Uday, has spearheaded the terrorist campaign using the alliances Saddam built up with terrorist groups from Ansar Al Islam to Al-Qaida to groups based in Syria as proxies.

Then there’s the part about Saddam leading the resistance. Democrats trying to spin Saddam’s capture into an insignificant event would do well to shut their traps before they dig themselves deeper into a hole of irrelevance and useless blather. Observe.

[The anonymous source] corroborated information from Governing Council sources that Saddam was indeed the primary financier of the resistance. Much of the resistance, said the agent, one of whose tasks was to monitor and control the internal enemies, pinned its hopes on Saddam. Without him as a rallying point the resistance will slowly die down.

Is it nice being wrong all the time? Are there perks that come with being on the losing side of things so consistently?

“One year ago, the Security Council was divided between those who wanted to appease Saddam Hussein and those who wanted to hold him accountable,” Zebari told the 15-nation council, which was sharply divided over the war.
“The UN as an organisation failed to help rescue the Iraqi people from a murderous tyranny of 35 years,” he said. “The UN must not fail the Iraqi people again.”

Kofi Annan replied, saying it was “no time to pin blame and point fingers.” Of course not, Kofi. We wouldn’t want to get our feelings hurt, would we?
“The fact that the war was won doesn’t make legitimate something that was not legitimate,” France’s UN ambassador Jean-Marc de la Sabliere said after the council meeting. “But this is the past.”
If it’s the past, then why are you numbnuts still living in it? It’s one mouth, but two things are coming out of it in the same breath.

Suppose for an instant that no weapons of mass destruction ever turn up in Iraq. Of course, WMD might well still appear, but let’s imagine that intelligence estimates were completely wrong about Saddam Hussein having an advanced program for chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons, as well as the missiles to carry them.
What would that imply?
President George W. Bush’s Democratic opponents say it renders the decision to go to war a “fraud” or “hyped.” But they miss the point, for there was indeed massive and undisputed evidence to indicate that the Iraqi regime was building WMD.

Read on…

For now, however, the obvious conclusion from even this interim report is that pre-emptive military action did preclude the future threat apparent in Kay’s discoveries. There is every reason to believe, based on Saddam Hussein’s past crimes and aggression, that he posed a threat to his own people, to his neighbors and, sooner or later, to those he considered his international arch-enemies, the United States and its principal allies.
President Bush, drawing the needed lessons from the catastrophic terrorist attacks of 9/11, hardly needs to apologize for acting before Saddam’s evil regime could produce a new arsenal of horror weapons.

Dear Post 45,
I caught wind of and read the recent news articles being circulated back there in the states. I figured I could clarify some things for you. As usual the news media has blown some things way out of proportion.
The countryside is getting more safe by the day despite all the attacks you are hearing about. Imagine every shooting incident or robbery committed in LA or Portland being blown way out of proportion. This is a country where most of the Saddam Hussein thugs are being chased around like scared rabbits by Coalition forces. It is literally open season on them! We hunt them down like animals. There were about a million soldiers in the Iraqi army at the beginning of hostilities and most of them took off before we attacked. There are some that were very loyal to Saddam! that are trying to sneak around and take pot shots at us. We are cleaning them up pretty fast.
There are also thugs from other countries running around, like Iran and Syria. Well, the Iraqis hate these thugs as much as we do. So the Iraqi people are hunting them down too! I can honestly say 98% of the population of Iraq love us and they do not want us to leave…ever! They say as long as we are here they feel safe.
What is going on with the countries infrastructure? Everything is going well! The railroad is running again! The railroad has not run since 1991. In the city of Hilllah, the power stays on 24 hours a day and it has more power than prior to the war. Some Iraqis are worried about getting too much food from the coalition because they don’t have enough room in their homes to store it. The markets are open. The Seabees have rebuilt all of the schools and put in furniture and chalkboards. The kids used to sit on the floor! Now they have nice desks! to sit at. Commerce is running. New money is being printed. The Iraqi Dinar has stabilized and is now increasing in value. Most of the Iraqi men want to buy Chevy pickups (I told them a Dodge Ram with a Cummins Diesel is better Ha Ha). They pretty much want any vehicle made by General Motors. The highways and bridges are being repaired. In the Universities, the girls have tossed their deshakas (long black dresses with head and face coverings) and are now wearing Western style clothes and even some are wearing short sleeves. The favorite drink is Pepsi, followed by Coke. They want us to bring them any and everything American. Any item made in America or that is from America is worth money over here.
The newspapers and television paint a picture of doom and gloom and that we are having major problems over here. That is just not the case. The Iraqis have a saying about the situation over here “Every day is better than the day before”. Life is flowing back in to this country and it is fun to watch and I am so glad I got to watch it happen. Some days watching the Iraqi people is like watching the faces of little kids on Christmas Day! Many of them are walking around in a daze wondering what to do with their freedom. They are starting businesses everywhere. They want to build shopping malls and factories, they want McDonalds and Jack in the Box and Pizza Hut. Of course anything American Fast Food, because of the stories the troops are telling them. We give them our old newspapers and magazines that you have been sending us and they are absolutely flabbergasted when they read them! They want us to keep bringing them. They read every single page even the advertisements over and over! This would be a good time for media to get their magazines going over here because the Iraqis just love them.
So in short you see I will give you the straight scoop and keep you informed of what is up over here. I will sign off for now and send this along! Thanks again to all of you for your support. My mailing address has changed. The older one is no longer working. I will tell you the new one as soon as we get it.
Senior Chief Art Messer
22 Naval Construction Regiment (Forward) Task Force Charlie
U. S. Navy Seabees

Indeed. I’ll award a “Fair and Balanced” trophy to the first media organization that reports the situation in Iraq as it really is, not as they’d like it to be.

Mr Straw requested that part of the document be “strengthened” to highlight the “centrality of WMD to Saddam Hussein’s role”, according to an e-mail presented to the Hutton inquiry.

“This is an accurate reference to an e-mail that was sent on my behalf by a private secretary, and what I wanted was to raise the prominence of Saddam Hussein’s defiance of the United Nations over 12 years. I still do.”

As such, the headline completely blows the entire story out of proportion, just as the entire Andrew Gilligan/BBC reporting has managed to do with the case for Saddam’s WMD program.