Fake Plastic News

Evidence that ambiguity lives on and that this is probably deliberate comes in the apparent fact that there has been no IRA Convention, no attempt by the leadership to refashion republicanism for a new order. No Convention means no changes to the IRA constitution. The IRA’s legally binding commitment to “wage revolutionary armed struggle” when possible thus survives and sits uneasily besides P O’Neill’s new, non-binding public pledge to use only political methods in the future.

The fact that there has been no Convention also means that legally speaking the IRA has not ended its war, no matter what yesterday's statement said. Only a Convention can end the war with Britain and that has not happened. Ending the armed campaign - #150; notice the statement did not say "armed struggle" - #150; means this move is similar to the ending of the 1956-62 campaign. An important event for sure, even historic but the option of returning to armed struggle survives, as it did in 1962.

But they were puzzled and frustrated by the decision to get rid of all the guns when loyalists remain fully armed.
Widower Jimmy McAley, 50, urged republicans to store their huge arsenal rather than destroy them.

"Give all the weapons up and the swines on the other side will come in and wipe us out like they did in `69," (which gave birth to the Provisional IRA) he claimed.

Mr McAley, admitted the conflict had left him a bitter and committed republican.

One question comes to mind while reading the New York Times' report today that the Bush administration has decided to change the name of its counterterrorist campaign from "the global war on terrorism" to "the global struggle against violent extremism": Are these guys really this clueless?

What else to make of the story's opening sentence:

The Bush administration is retooling its slogan for the fight against Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups, pushing the idea that the long-term struggle is as much an ideological battle as a military mission, senior administration and military officials said Monday.

Three subquestions arise just from the lead. First, this is the administration's solution to the spike in terrorist incidents, the Taliban's resurgence in Afghanistan, and the politico-military deterioration in Iraq to retool the slogan?

Second, the White House and the Pentagon are just now coming around to the idea that the struggle is as much ideological as military? This wasn't obvious, say, three or four years ago?
Apparently not. Eric Schmitt and Thom Shanker, the Times reporters who co-authored the article, note:

Administration and Pentagon officials say the revamped campaign has grown out of meetings of President Bush's senior national security advisers that began in January, and it reflects the evolution in Mr. Bush's own thinking nearly four years after the Sept. 11 attacks.

It took four years for the president of the United States to realize that fighting terrorism has a political component? It took six months for his senior advisers to retool a slogan? We are witnessing that rare occasion when the phrase "I don't know whether to laugh or cry" can be uttered without lapsing into cliche.

But the shallowness gets deeper still. The Times story doesn't notice what appears to be the driving force behind the new slogan a desire for a happier acronym.

Look at the first letters of Global War on Terrorism. GWOT. What does that mean; how is it pronounced? Gwot? Too frivolously rowdy, like a fight scene in a Marvel comic book (Bam! Pfooff! Gwot!). Gee-wot? Sounds like a garbled question (Gee what?).

Then look at Global Struggle Against Violent Extremism. Its acronym is GSAVE i.e., gee-save. We're out to save the world, see, not wage war on it. Or, as national security adviser Stephen Hadley puts it in the Times piece, "We need to dispute both the gloomy vision and offer a positive alternative."

The Irish Republican Army has given up its armed struggle for a united Ireland, agreeing to turn solely to political methods, an American businessman said yesterday after being briefed on a statement expected from the guerrilla group later this week.

The agreement, if borne out, would be a historic turning point in the violent history of Ireland and Northern Ireland. But there is still widespread official skepticism about I.R.A. promises, particularly when it comes to the issue of disarmament.

Indeed, it was not immediately clear whether the I.R.A. would address how several tons of arms, hidden in bunkers across Ireland, would be disposed of, according to the businessman, Niall O'Dowd, who brokered talks between the I.R.A. and American officials that helped lead to a cease-fire in 1994. The continued existence of those weapons, which were to have been destroyed under an agreement reached after the cease-fire, contributed to the collapse of the Northern Ireland government in 2003.

Speculation has been ebbing and flowing since April, when the Sinn Féin leader, Gerry Adams, made a groundbreaking speech challenging the IRA to abandon its armed struggle and embrace politics, discarding the old strategy of the Armalite in one hand and the ballot box in the other...

But Sinn Féin says the IRA has spent months in an intense internal debate over abandoning guns for pure politics. It is thought that the organisation could issue a statement this week saying members are to end "active service" and transform themselves into an old boys' network of republican clubs.

But timing is everything and many remain cautious. The republican machine prides itself on news management. It would not want to make its historic announcement when it was not guaranteed to top the news agenda. Having often bombed London, the IRA does not now want to be associated with Islamist suicide bombers or risk seeing its groundbreaking announcement relegated to a paragraph on the wider terrorist threat...

Mr Adams and Mr McGuinness were in talks at Downing Street this week, and General John de Chastelain, the disarmament chief who would oversee any decommissioning that followed an IRA statement, is on standby in Dublin.

Last night Sinn Féin announced that Mr McGuinness and party colleague Rita O'Hare would head to the US today, heightening speculation that an announcement is imminent. A party spokesman said: "The purpose of the visit is to brief political opinion and Irish America on the political situation."

Schmidt commends Hackett for his service, but believes Hackett should "stand with the president" by "supporting the Iraqi war effort and our troops that are over there," her campaign manager Joe Braun said. (Through Braun, Schmidt declined to speak with Salon.) When asked to answer that charge, Hackett is blunt: "The only way I know how to support the troops is by going over there." He doesn't hesitate to criticize Schmidt's support of the war: "All the chicken hawks back here who said, 'Oh, Iraq is talking bad about us. They're going to threaten us' -- look, if you really believe that, you leave your wife and three kids and go sign up for the Army or Marines and go over there and fight. Otherwise, shut your mouth."

Exerpts from DEBKA-Net-Weekly July 15.

While the Bush administrations prepares a troop buildup in Iraq, al Qaeda is engaged in the elaborate logistic process of shifting 1,000-1,200 terror combatants out of Iraq and getting them ready to fight on new warfronts. Everything is done in total secrecy. The terrorists are first repatriated to their countries of origin and provided with new passports and identities, before going on to join networks in Europe and the Middle East.

Reporting exclusively on these surreptitious movements, DEBKA-Net-Weekly’s Al Qaeda and counter-terror experts estimate that the terror group has already kicked off its new offensive. The coordinated bomb blasts on three London Tube trains and a bus on July 7 was one of its initial strikes – although not the only one - and there are more are to come.

At least two major attacks already carried out in London and Damascus herald the new terror offensive:

The Syrian authorities have never released any figures or details of this attack. Scores are believed to have died and hundreds injured, including holidaymakers from Gulf Arab states, when a busload of armed men opened fire on the teeming cafes and restaurants of the Mount Qassioun resort overlooking the Syrian capital. DEBKA-Net-Weekly reveals here for the first time that it was the work of a Jordanian crime mob known as the Semadi Gang. They were aided by several al Qaeda adherents who were resting in Syria from their terrorist activity in Iraq

Last night, I saw Howard Fineman call Roberts a 'brilliant' pick on one of the cable shows because he is the most conservative candidate Bush could appoint without sparking a battle with Democrats. As usual, Fineman is astonishingly wrong. A better way to characterize Roberts is: the most moderate and uncontroversial candidate Bush could appoint without sparking a battle with James Dobson and the Christianists.

Three months ago the President would have delighted in jamming an untra conservative like Janice Rogers Brown down the Senate's throat while invoking the nuclear option and spitting in each Democratic senator's eye. Fast forward to this week, when he was forced to accept a late night visit from Arlen Spector, who had the audacity to demand that Bush replace O'Conner with a "moderate justice" in order to "maintain the balance." This the same Spector who was on his knees vowing fealty to the President just last year.

The Roberts nomination is not a sign that Bush is finally getting "sensible" on judicial matters. It's an indication of just how politically weak he's become. Roberts is just conservative enough to squeeze by the Dobson crowd without howls of anger. He is arguably the least conservative of Bush's "short list" of nominees. Clearly, Bush and Rove were terrified about losing this battle to the Democrats and moderate Republican senators. Having lost already social security and with the Rove scandal boiling, such a loss would be too devastating to contemplate.

Roberts may turn out to be an extremely conservative justice who votes to strike down Roe v. Wade and many other liberal favorites. The fact that we're not certain about this must be a bitter pill for Dobson and friends, however."

In fresh interrogations carried out by Pakistani intelligence after the London bomb blasts, Nazir admitted having met Shehzad Tanweer in 2004. Osama has further claimed that Shehzad stayed with him at the Jumia for religious and spiritual inspiration from its head Qari Ahlullah Raheemi. When questioned, Nazir estimated that over 300 British Muslims of Pakistani origin have been to Pakistan since the 9/11 terror attacks, received training at Jaish-e-Mohammad and Harkatul Mujahideen camps and signed up with al-Qaeda for suicide missions.

LONDON, July 18 - Less than a month before the London bombings, Britain's top intelligence and law enforcement officials concluded that "at present there is not a group with both the current intent and the capability to attack the U.K.," according to a confidential terror threat assessment report.

The previously undisclosed report was sent to British government agencies, foreign governments and corporations in mid-June, about three weeks before a team of four British suicide bombers mounted their July 7 attack on London's public transportation system.

William Childs Westmoreland was born near Spartanburg, South Carolina, on March 26, 1914, into a banking and textile family.

He was an Eagle Scout and attended The Citadel for a year before transferring to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. He graduated in 1936 and, during his senior year, held the highest command position in the cadet corps.

Westmoreland saw action in North Africa, Sicily and Europe during World War II. He attained the rank of colonel by the time he was 30.

As commander of the 34th Field Artillery Battalion fighting German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, he earned the loyalty and respect of his troops for joining in the thick of battle rather than remaining behind the lines at a command post.

He was promoted to brigadier general during service in the Korean War and later served in the Pentagon under Army Chief of Staff Maxwell Taylor.

Westmoreland became the superintendent of West Point in 1960 and, by 1964, was a three-star general commanding American troops in Vietnam.

This was a sad week for the war on terror. The Senate voted, disgracefully, to shift homeland security money from high-risk areas to low-risk ones—a step that is likely to mean less money to defend New York and California against terrorism and more for states like Wyoming. Before the vote, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff made a powerful appeal to the senators to distribute the money based on risk. But the Senate, led by Susan Collins, a Maine Republican, and other small-state representatives, put political pork ahead of national security...

Senators had a chance to fix next year's formula, but they voted to make it worse. The original homeland security budget would have allocated 70 percent of the money according to relative risks. Senators from the highest-risk states, led by Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat, introduced an amendment to raise that number to 87 percent. Ms. Collins, supported by Joseph Lieberman, a Connecticut Democrat, introduced an amendment to lower to 60 percent the amount given out according to risk...

Financing formulas are technical, and there is no way to know precisely how much any state will wind up receiving. But at bottom, the senators had a choice between accepting the recommendation of the Homeland Security Department or the preference of senators from states with sparse populations that are highly unlikely targets for terrorism. They chose wrong. It is telling that the senators from the states most at risk - New York, California, New Jersey, Texas and Illinois - unanimously voted against the Collins amendment

Fox Sports and Chevy teamed yesterday to deceive millions of people during the Major League Baseball All-Star game. They did such a good job of it that many of you viewing probably didn't even notice.

As Fox came back from a commercial break in the bottom half of the third inning, many viewers caught sight of a very long, flashy banner draped over an equally ostentatious advertisement picturing a yellow Corvette. The banner read HHRYA.com with the letters done in pseudo Asian design - clearly the work of professionals. However, the Fox Sports broadcasters Joe Buck and Tim McCarver played off the ad like it was the work of a goofy sports fan, dangling his banner in the hopes of securing a moment of TV glory.

"Welcome back to Detroit," Buck said. "A lot of banners and signs around the ballpark. No surprise there. Somebody just unfurled a big banner behind left field."

You'll love the next bit, as Buck devolves into a second grader.

"H-H-R-Y-A. Tim, you'll have to tell me what that means. I am not sure, but someone went to a lot of trouble, obviously, to put it up out in left center field."

You'd think that would be the end of the stunt, but no. Fox returned to the action to see baseball's best pitcher Roy Oswalt face off against Johnny Damon. After one pitch, McCarver brought all the weight of his formidable intellect to bear on the puzzle:

"I don't know what that sign means, but 'hooray' is the first thing that comes to my mind."

Funny you should mention that, Tim. Hooray is exactly the sound Fox executives made as they cashed their checks from the largest advertiser of the day. Chevy, the sponsor, must have been disappointed as it failed to prepare its HHRYA.com website for the traffic it expected to receive. Visitors to the site were unable to reach the page for about thirty minutes after the "I don't know what that is" ad appeared.

Yesterday, I heard that the rumor being spread in GOP circles on the Hill was that the leaker of Plame's name to Judy Miller was Joe Wilson himself, in an attempt to create the impression that the administration was trying to destroy him -- a kind of double super-secret double cross.

Unfortunately for that rumor, it didn't make a bit of sense. So to develop Version 2.0 of this theory, they decided to go open source: You can see the alpha design over at Redstate.org (still the best conservative blog, because at least they have comments). After you sort through a bunch of "six-sigma" management consulting mumbo jumbo that probably came from Matthew Freedman, the theory goes something like this:

First, since the New York Times is liberal, and also called for a special prosecutor on the Plame case, it doesn't make sense that they would be defending Miller's refusal to testify if Miller were protecting Rove or another White House official, so perhaps she's protecting a Democrat. Second, Wilson made several media appearances the week of his New York Times op-ed, as the redstate writer notes, "things like that usually happen because someone is out there 'pitching the story' to the media. In this case, that person is most likely a very partisan Democrat." Fiollowing on these premises, "Can it be that the person [Miller] talked to wasn't an 'Administration Official' at all, but a Democratic political operative setting up a 'media hit' on Bush?"

I love the old "Can it be...?" method of empirical inquiry. Especially when the answer is, "Ummmm, No."

The writer, who goes by the name "Nick Danger," doesn't name the Democratic operative, but several of the commentors suggest James Carville or Paul Begala as the culprits

"The war on terror goes on," Bush told reporters hours after the explosions.

Some have questioned whether Bush's strategy to fight the terrorists abroad so "we do not have to face them at home" is working when terrorists are planting bombs on London's public transportation. Great Britain is a key member of the U.S.-led coalition in Iraq.

Bush's homeland security adviser, Fran Townsend, defended the strategy during an interview on "Fox News Sunday."

The war in Iraq, she said, attracts terrorists there "where we have a fighting military and a coalition that can take them on and not have the sort of civilian casualties that you saw in London."

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - An Israeli actress cast in Steven Spielberg's controversial new film about her country's counter-terrorism tactics said on Monday the Hollywood director intended to improve the image of the Jewish state.

Gila Almagor, the grande dame of Israeli drama, confirmed reports that the thriller is based on "Vengeance," a book about the Mossad intelligence service's assassination of Palestinian guerrilla chiefs in the 1970s that has been widely discredited.

That mission was mounted to avenge 11 Israeli athletes seized by Palestinian gunmen at the 1972 Munich Olympics and killed during a botched rescue effort. Several Mossad veterans have come out of the cold to question Spielberg's research....

At least one of Almagor's fellow cast members has disagreed with her take on the screenplay for Spielberg's film.

"It's about how vengeance doesn't ... work -- blood breeds blood," actor Daniel Craig told entertainment magazine Empire.

Yet whatever the final death toll from the worst incident in the history of the Seals — the Sea Air Land Commandos — there were tantalising hints that the original mission had been far from routine.

According to former special forces officers and other military sources, the four-man Seal strike team may have come too close to one of the US-led coalition’s highest-priority targets — perhaps Mullah Muhammad Omar, the former Taliban leader, or even Osama Bin Laden, the leader of Al-Qaeda. Other military sources suggested the target was a regional Taliban commander suspected of links with Al-Qaeda.

We found that justices vary widely in their inclination to strike down Congressional laws. Justice Clarence Thomas, appointed by President George H. W. Bush, was the most inclined, voting to invalidate 65.63 percent of those laws; Justice Stephen Breyer, appointed by President Bill Clinton, was the least, voting to invalidate 28.13 percent. The tally for all the justices appears below.

Thomas 65.63 %
Kennedy 64.06 %
Scalia 56.25 %
Rehnquist 46.88 %
O’Connor 46.77 %
Souter 42.19 %
Stevens 39.34 %
Ginsburg 39.06 %
Breyer 28.13 %

One conclusion our data suggests is that those justices often considered more "liberal" - Justices Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, David Souter and John Paul Stevens - vote least frequently to overturn Congressional statutes, while those often labeled "conservative" vote more frequently to do so. At least by this measure (others are possible, of course), the latter group is the most activist.

Al-Qaida's new modus operandi is a combination of strategy and necessity. After the US coalition destroyed its training bases in Afghanistan, word went out, allegedly from Bin Laden himself, that jihadi veterans should return home to their countries of origin, recruit locally and prepare to attack domestic targets. The attacks in Casablanca and Madrid were illustrations of this. What made the Madrid bombers so difficult to detect was that some members of the cell were takfiris, Islamist militants committed to jihad while continuing to live a western lifestyle, drinking, smoking and taking drugs. The leaders of the cell deliberately set out to radicalise and recruit street criminals so they could bring their expertise to the cause. Jamal Ahmidan, the Madrid takfiri who got hold of the explosives, was a drug dealer. One of the critical questions to be answered is: where did the London bombers come from? Were they British jihadis, some of whom, Peter Clarke admits, have gone to fight in Iraq?

...The former head of the CIA's Bin Laden unit, Mike Scheuer, tellingly told me that al-Qaida's policy was to launch warning attacks against countries helping America in Iraq and Afghanistan: "At one point Bin Laden and Zawahiri [his number two] named 23 countries that deserved to be punished. All 23 have been hit. It's a pretty good record of consistency."
And now London. It seemed only a matter of time. Yesterday was the day the nightmare came true.

7 July 2005; 12:54 ET: Preliminary reports from a source inside the Pentagon indicate that one of the operatives involved in this morning's bombings in London was recently released from the prison at Guantanamo. DEVELOPING

This war has a popular label and a political label, but it’s not accurate,” said Gregson. “Terrorism is a means of power projection, it’s a weapon, it’s a tool of war. Think of it as our enemy’s stealth bomber. This is no more a war on terrorism than World War II was a war on submarines. It’s not just semantics . . . Words have meaning. And these words are leading us down to the wrong concept.”

Gregson added, “What we’re fighting is an insurgency defined as a popular movement that seeks to change the status quo through violence, subversion, propaganda, terrorism or other military action. But it’s different from other national insurgencies that we’ve known in the past. This one is networked thanks to the wonders of technology. It’s primarily ideologically driven, fundamentalist and extremist.”

[...]

“It’s a collection or a confederation of movements empowered by regional and global fundamentalist extremist insurgents,” Gregson said. “You can borrow an old phrase and say they think globally and act locally.”

[...] “The center of gravity, the decisive terrain in this war is the vast majority of people who are not directly involved but whose support, willing or coerced, is necessary to insurgent operations around the world,” he said. “Hearts and minds are more important than capturing and killing people.”

“The main thrust of my remarks was that we know we’re stuck with the name, it’s going to be the global war on terrorism. . . . But even though we’ve got that name out there, we’ve got to at least in the security community and then further on through the greater world . . . explain what we’re about here and get it into something that is properly categorized and puts us on the side of the angels in various areas.”

We have a chance to start winning this war here and walk it back into the Middle East, but we can’t just continue to admire the problem,” Gregson said. “We have to start doing something and we have to start walking the propaganda back in the other direction and get ourselves on the right side of this issue.”

Providing doctors, engineers, dentists, veterinarians and other aid to enhance the lives of people living in very troubled parts of the world is “often far more important than projecting some type of force,” Gregson said.

Lt. Gov. Michael S. Steele, who is African-American, said he hadn't talked to the governor about the event and wasn't concerned by it.

"I don't know that much about the club, the membership, nor do I care, quite frankly, because I don't play golf. It's not an issue with me," Steele told the Associated Press yesterday.