No child left behind: Boston-area schools cancel classes because of a BC04 fundraiser.

 
What about Bob? Here's your Save Bob Edwards online petition. Here's your Save Bob Edwards WaPo column. If you donate to your local NPR affiliate, please contact them (find your station here, or here) and tell them you want to Save Bob Edwards.

It's a boneheaded move by NPR. I've my differences with the network; I remember in particular a Morning Edition story on funding crunches at a tuition-free Native American college that never even asked whether an Indian-only college was a desirable use of taxpayer funds, or if better ways to approach policy and treaty requirements could be found.

Nonetheless, NPR represents the best news available on any broadcast medium, and Bob Edwards is unquestionably one of the best anchors they have.

 
Crazy like a fox: ETLNR's Gregg Easterbook claims that "people protested when Bill Clinton tried to stop bin Laden early, and ... many of the same people today defending the invasion of Iraq roundly criticized prior action against the same country." But the record suggests otherwise.

On the 1998 Afghanistan strikes, GOP support was strong enough that the WaPo did an article discussing it. Some pull quotes:

"I think the president did exactly the right thing. By doing this we're sending the signal there are no sanctuaries for terrorists. ... Anyone who watched the film of the bombings, anyone who saw the coffins come home [from the embassy bombings] knows better than to question this timing. It was done as early as possible to send a message to terrorists across the globe that killing Americans has a cost. It has no relationship with any other activity of any kind." -Newt Gingrich

"[T]he American people stand united in the face of terrorism." -Dick Armey

"[The attacks are] appropriate and just." -Trent Lott

"In the past I was worried that this administration didn't take this threat seriously enough, and didn't take Osama bin Laden seriously enough; I'm going to support him, wish him well and back him up." -Orrin Hatch

"If anything, this was somewhat overdue, and I'm not talking days, but months and years. This needs to be the first punch we land. We need to land more." - Porter J Goss (R-FL)

In retrospect, it's amazing the President withstood such withering criticism.

Regarding Iraq, Clinton did take some hits from GOPers such as Tillie Fowler (R-FL), who said, "I think the President is shameless in what he will do to stay in office," and from the Ron Paul bonds-not-bombs libertarians. But the criticism usually came from people who wanted more, not less, action against Iraq:

"I’m not sure the President deliberately bombed Iraq to stave off the impeachment vote. ... I take my cue from William Safire in today’s New York Times. I find it painful to believe that any President would risk American lives just to pull his butt out of the fire. ... The bombing was the right thing to do. That fact is the key." - Jonah Goldberg

"The real problem today is not that President Clinton has so far refused to take military action. It is that the Clinton administration is unlikely to embrace the kind of military option that is needed. ... The only solution to the problem of Iraq today [in 1998] is to use air power and ground power, and not stop until we ... remove Saddam and his regime from power and open the way for a new post-Saddam Iraq whose intentions can be safely assumed to be benign." - Robert Kagan

"I am convinced that Saddam Hussein has left the United States with no choice but to strike Iraq. ... These strikes, however, must be the beginning of a new Iraq policy: Saddam must go." - Jesse Helms

Let's stop this meme before it gets started. Clinton did some things right, some things wrong, understood the threat bin Ladin represented, but underestimated the imminence of that threat -- a lot like the current Administration, actually. But don't pretend he was hamstrung by anything other than political problems of his own making.

 
You may remember A&M; football coach RC Slocum, a man who took the scandal-ridden Aggie program and cleaned it up while winning more games than any other A&M; coach, never having a losing season, and going to nine bowl games in the process. For his unbending morality, he was fired by a university obsessed?with beating its cross-state rivals in Austin.

Dennis Franchione isn't a bad guy, but here's what A&M; has wrought: nine players arrested since September, two of whom were just picked up shouting racist taunts while drunk at a fast-food drive-through.

A&M; likes to cultivate a pseudo-military culture, centered around football and its "Corps of Cadets." But, of course, it isn't a military academy, few of its alumni will end up in the Army or Marines, and the military retains one thing A&M; has never had: accountability. Any enlisted soldier or officer who was drunk, disorderly, and bringing discredit upon the military would be confined for six months on one-third pay. Let's hope Franchione isn't so corrupted by A&M;'s big-time conceit as to let this one slide when next season rolls around.

 
Israel made good on its threat to kill Shaykh Ahmed Yassin, the "spiritual leader" of radical Palestinian group Hamas, killing him today in a missile strike on the Gaza Strip.

This is a game in which Sharon is holding his cards close to his chest. Last week, King Abdullah of Jordan -- whose father brokered a deal with Israel in 1997 to exchange Shaykh Yassin for two Mossad agents held in Jordanian prisons -- met with Sharon in unscheduled talks at the Israeli leader's ranch. Binyamin Netanyahu gave his conditional support for the unilateral disengagement of Israeli troops from the West Bank on Sunday, and Monday Israeli officials will talk with the American government on the matter. Tomorrow also brings a no-confidence vote in the Knesset, which is not expected to gain the supermajority needed to reorganize the government.

All the signs point to (A) general approval, or at least magisterial indifference, to the proposed unilateral pullout; and (B) Jordan's willingness not to foreclose Jordanian-Israeli relations over a final push against Hamas prior to disengagement. Jordan's history with the Palestinians has been troubled; Palestinian extremists, including the PLO, attempted a takeover of Jordan in the late 1960s, and only the Hashemite monarchy's Bedouin fighters and loyal army averted total chaos. Lately, Jordan has offered sanctuary to Hamas members if they give up political activity, but is concerned about radical Islamist influences from Hamas within the country, especially within the Muslim Brotherhood and its affiliate the Islamic Action Front.

This is a remarkable piece of brinkmanship by Sharon, who is absolutely gambling everything on this roll of the dice. Events should move quickly indeed over the next few days.

 
The High Court in Taiwan has ordered the ballot boxes from Saturday's controversial Presidential election sealed in advance of a possible recount as opposition candidate Lien Chan charged possible voter fraud and tacitly suggested that Friday's attempted assassination of President Chen Shui-bian and running mate Annette Lu may have been an inside job ... In Afghanistan, Aviation Minister Mirwais Sadiq was killed in an ambush set by what appears to be tribal rivals ... The continuing and likely-to-expand A.Q. Khan scandal in Pakistan leaves Musharraf in a bind between the Scylla of Islamism and the Charybdis of American leverage ... A Kashmiri columnist says Musharraf has alienated too many of his countrymen by accepting American power in the South Asian theatre ... In addition to their humanitarian work in Iraq, the Japanese may advise the INC on how to try Saddam Hussein and other Baathist figures ...

Rahul Gandhi has entered Indian politics as the fifth generation of Gandhis to do so ... Hindu nationalists believe that if Vajpayee is elected PM again, they will be able to proceed with the controversial Ram Temple construction in Ayodhya (and here)
... In Nepal, 500 Maoist rebels were reportedly killed and 200 injured during an attempted strike against Myagdi province (and here) ... Chaos rules in Jammu-Kashmir, where Pakistani-funded terrorists are torturing and mutilating civilians in a bid to gain more power in the troubled province through terror ...

Two Russian military operatives jailed in Qatar since February have reportedly confessed to assassinating former Chechen President Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev on the orders of Moscow ... Algeria is said to be close to a $1.5 billion deal with MiG Corporation for 50 advanced MiG-29 fighters ... Renewed Albanian-on-Serb violence in Kosovo leads the Duma to ask whether Russia should grant asylum to Kosovo Serbs, while B92 says the rumors of Serb attacks on Albanian children that started the violence are false (photos here) ... A Pravda columnist attacks German influence in the Czech Republic, calling the EU an incarnation of the Third Reich's "Final Solution" ... LUKoil has signed a deal with Refinery Associates of Texas to supply POL to northern Iraq, with quarterly supplies of 180,000 tons of gas and 130,000 tons of diesel fuel to be delivered by the Russian company ...

A Saudi columnist has called terrorists the "public enemy of humanity", while still reserving blame for Shia clerics ... Arial Sharon is working to secure American and Binyamin Netanyahu's support for the unilateral disengagement from the West Bank by Israeli forces ... Independent Iranian news agencies have gone largely silent in recent weeks ...

In Venezuela, the government of Hugo Chavez has fired government workers who signed a demand for a presidential recall, prompting NGOs and intellectuals to savage Chavez's increasingly autocratic rule ... political tensions between the branches of government grew as the Electoral Chamber of the country's Supreme Tribunal of Justice issued a ruling that effectively placed the number of accepted recall signatures at 2.7 million, more than needed to initiate the recall process; the Constitutional Chamber of the TSJ then took over the case, creating more uncertainty as to the future of Hugo Chavez.

 
Things are wierding up in Taiwan: More.

 
The revelation of Jack Kelley's fabrications has reached a critical mass. So many lies, coverups and doubts have been exposed as to invalidate his entire body of work.

Although the Kelley story is being extensively reported -- and with 700 stories to go through, there's probably material for more yet -- it's hardly garnered the attention that the Philip Glass or -- perhaps more tellingly, the Jayson Blair -- stories did.

In part, perhaps, it's because USAT hardly has the reputation that the Grey Lady does (unfairly, although USAT's improved hard-news position was in large part indebted to Kelley himself). In part, the press is burned out on stories of its own malfeasance. In part, Jayson Blair's race and youth made him a target, though in retrospect his sins probably didn't merit his being called a "comulsive [sic] liar, traitor and plagiarist" by Andrew Sullivan, or compared to "Joseph [sic] Mengele" by Slate's Jack Shafer.

Perhaps it's simply that many reporters have trouble believing that such a well-respected reporter lied about so many stories and plagiarized in so many others. He was on location, he had the contacts, and the news was happening all about him; yet he lied from nut graf to byline and beyond.

Kelley's fake reports are all the more important because of the international beat he covered. So far, he's lied about Palestinian suicide bombers, Cuban refugees, Bosnians and Serbs, Islamist madrassas, the hunt for al'Qaeda, Russian money-laundering, and Jewish-Israeli extremists. Compared to the pathetic lies of Blair, the gonzo creations of Glass, and the other examples of journalistic misconduct, Kelley towers amongst them like a god of lies.

I've argued before that nothing is so disreputable as a respected profession; when journalism became an A-list career for the sons and daughters of the Ivy League, their concern shifted from reporting the truth to maintaining their privileged position within their community -- a status that generally comes from hardening the conventional wisdom that passes for analysis amongst that community.

UPDATE: "You've got to live with yourself." Kelley on media ethics (and claiming to have been shot at "two or three hundred times" at the Newseum. (MP3 clip)

 
The Kurdish riots in Syria are causing a great deal of consternation in the Middle East and abroad. The Washington Times sees the Kurds as democratic freedom fighters, but this is too-simple a view of a complex situation. (Some interesting views, including video of the rioting, can be found here.)

Syria's Kurds have not traditionally been secessionist; arriving from Turkey to escape Ataturk's anti-Kurdish pogroms in the 1930s, they were perhaps not tempermentally suited to creating the kind of armed movements that Iraqi and Turkish Kurds have championed. It can hardly be said that Syria has treated the Kurds any better than its neighbors; although Kurds comprise around 10% of the Syrian population (or 1.5 million), they are often treated with obvious discrimination. A 1962 census of the north, believed to be the first step in a "Arabization" campaign, arbitrarily stripped some 120,000 Kurds of Syrian citizenship; today, 142,465 to over 200,000 Kurds are considered aliens in their own land. These unfortunates have essentially no rights: issued special red ID cards, they are marked out as not possessing even the most basic rights: they cannot vote, marry, own property, or travel inside or outside of the country; nor can they run for office, be employed by a government agency, practice certain professions (such as medicine or engineering), cannot be admitted to public hospitals and are denied public food aid. Some Kurds are in an even worse position: known as maktoumeen, "unregistered," they not only face the hardships of the specially-registered Kurds, but must fight to prove they even exist. Human Rights Watch notes that enrolling a maktoumeen child for school, while possible, requires the approval of Syria's State Security, a daunting prospect for anyone; one Kurd interviewed by HRW told them, "My children do not have identitycards. They do not exist. Cows are higher than my children. Cows at least have registration cards."

The Kurdish successes in Iraq have led to an increase in tensions in Kurdish Syria. On March 12, violence erupted at a soccer game between Syrian Arab and Syrian Kurdish teams in Qamishli as Syrian Arabs carried portraits of deposed Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein and chanted anti-Kurdish slogans. (Soccer's role in ethnic conflict is well-documented; for example, Catholic and Unionist violence frequently breaks out in Irish soccer games, and the Serbian leadership used its soccer clubs to foment ethnic violence, eventually using fan clubs as genocidal militia.) The next day, as funerals were held for the dead, further rioting broke out and spread across the northeastern province of al-Hassaka. Around 14 were killed in the first two days, while the local governor, Salim Kabboul, said five Arabs were killed in the subsequent days of fighting, and Interior Minister Ali Hammoud puts the number of Arab and Kurdish dead at 25 (Kurdish sources say 36 people have been killed in the fighting). Hundreds were wounded, and train stations, schools, and government buildings were damaged or ransacked, and smoke from fires could still be seen today.

The Syrian government has denied that ethnic tensions are to blame, despite the long-simmering problem of Kurdish disenfranchisement; official Syrian reports blame "foreigners" and outside agitators. However, this week's riots point to problems within Syria that extend far beyond the Kurdish borders. Bashar Assad has sincerely tried to reform the Syrian economy and political system, but has run into opposition from the entrenched kleptocracy that runs the government bureaucracies. Consequently, the government has opened in some ways, but the underlying problems of poverty and corruption have not been addressed; people are thus as frustrated as ever, but able to publicly voice their resentments. To put it another way, the lid that was internal terror has been lifted on a political pot that's rapidly boiling over.

Although Syria is a rogue state, it has shown signs of a reorientation, in particular Assad's sharing of anti-terrorist intelligence with America and in the attempted reforms of its public and private sectors. But Assad's grip on power is shaky, and he's already facing opposition not only from domestic reform groups (which are not generally opposed to Assad himself), but also Islamist political forces and a considerable revanchist military and bureaucratic alliance that has been publicly yearning for the more stable if tyrannical days of Hafez Assad. As the Cato Institute notes, if Damascus slips into internecine factionalism, there's no certainty who might win, and what that could do to our hopes for peace and stability in an always-fractious region. Rioters are not freedom fighters, even if motivated by great injustices; and simple-minded interventions into complex situations rarely provide the results desired.

 
From a recent Slate article:

After the Madrid attacks, a number of journalists, academics, and other experts picked up on the idea ... that al-Qaida may not be what many people think it is. It's not one vast organization with tentacles everywhere; it's a kind of franchise that helps with cash here, logistics there. Most important, it is the brand name of an umbrella ideology that all the jihadists subscribe to, the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat and Salafia Jihadia, among others. Bin Laden is just the public face.

This is a very important point, and one that we don't consider often enough. "Al'Qaeda" and "bin Ladin" have become global brands, in the sense that terror groups are starting to use supposed al'Qaeda affiliation as a kind of badge of authenticity. The "Abu Hafs al-Misri Brigades," a radical Islamist group that has become very accomplished at assault by press release, has used bin Ladin's name to make various spurious claims, including taking credit for the 2003 American blackouts and the 3/11 bombings, and arguing that the Ashura bombings against Shiite Iraqi mosques were caused by Americans. (That last communique, from March 2nd, somehow forgot to warn that Spain would be a target in a matter of days.)

Saad al'Faqih, mentioned earlier, sees al'Qaeda in this way, noting that the bin Ladin brotherhood didn't even use the term "al'Qaeda" to refer to themselves until after 9/11. For al'Faqih, al'Qaeda's power comes from the elevation of it by America and its allies as a symbol of terror and evil; if he is to believed, our public hunting of bin Ladin since the African embassy bombings represents a serious misstep.

Al'Faqih's thesis, though well-researched and argued (as an Islamist himself, his political goals are consonant with bin Ladin's, though al'Qaeda's terroristic violence is not), is controversial, and the fact that we are now living in a world polarized between Bush and bin Ladin may make his argument moot. But we have always lived in a world where al'Qaeda is not the only, and perhaps not the most important, Islamist terror threat gathering against us.

Interviews with al'Faqih can be found at the Jamestown Foundation, and the Middle East Intelligence Bulletin.

 
The conseravtive wisdom on Spain is that the country is rolling over, exposing its soft belly to Islamist terrorists. While I have no doubt that the Spanish elections will be seen by the terrorists as a victory, I have equally strong convictions that Spain is not turning appeaser, no matter the muddled insistence of Tom Friedman.

The Socialist government -- which, in the grand Continental tradition of meaningless party names, is politically and economically middle-of-the-road for Europe -- is threatening to pull its troops out of Iraq if we don't make the handover deadline this summer, a target that is looking increasingly hard to hit. If we are still conducting OOTW this summer, and there's no reason to think we won't, any Spanish pullout will affect the Polish effort, for whom Spain is handling logistics, communications, and force deployment in the central-southern security area. This will result in a minor hitch in operations as America moves to take over the role, and will certainly embolden Islamist and nationalist critics of the Coalition occupation.

Nonetheless, Spain will remain an ally in the war against terror, even if it drops out of the war against Baathism. And it's important to remember that Spain is hardly the most questionable ally we have in the war against Islamist terror.

Things are murky in the world of counterterrorism: France led the coalition of the unwilling during the runup to Iraq one year ago, but is front and center in the hunt for bin Ladin; Britain is seen as our closest ally in the war on terror, but its asylum laws have protected virulent Islamism in the middle of London, and French intelligence officials privately believe Downing Street let Algerian terror groups run free in Britain as long as their violence remained off the shores of Albion. Russia is an ally, but its continuing protection of Transdniester has effectively kept the global arms bazaar open for terrorists, and a large number of high-tech weapons such as the RPG-29 Vampir anti-tank missile have shown up in Iraqi hands. Saudi Arabia's deals with terrorists have surely led to the al'Qaeda attacks on America, while Pakistan not only supported terror groups and the Taliban, but also ran a global black market in nuclear weapons, though now it seems poised to capture bin Ladin's right-hand man. Syria is a rogue state, but one with a vested interest in helping us defeat Islamist terrorism; India, a strategic ally, is making things worse internationally through BJP-aided clashes between Hindu militants and Indian Muslims. In Somalia,  Hussein Aideed, son of the warlord (and ally of Islamist radicals) who we tried to kill in the early 1990s, is helping us roll up al'Qaeda forces in that war-torn country.

The "wilderness of mirrors" that is counterterrorism does not admit chiaroscuro views of the world, and pretending that such an image is accurate will cripple the delicate diplomatic, military and intelligence efforts needed to protect our nations. Hopefully, this fit of pique against the Spanish will quickly dissipate, and we can return to the serious work of keeping ourselves safe -- all of us.

 
Rumors from Pakistan place Pakistani troops within miles of Ayman al'Zawahiri, weeks after Islamabad began a fresh offensive against revanchist Pashtun tribes in the Northwest Frontier Province. That offensive -- and the use of American troops in the area -- was a surprisingly open quid-pro-quo for America's silence on Pakistan's creation of an international black market in nuclear arms.

Since 9/11, Pakistan's intransigence in allowing American forces to operate in the Pashtunistan area has consistently hampered our efforts to ferret out the last major elements of al'Qaeda in Afghanistan. During the anti-Soviet jihad, the porous border was a geographic ally of the United States, since the ISI was able to move weapons and men into Afghanistan with relative ease. Today, we're caught in the same trap: if we tighten down in Afghanistan, al'Qaeda and other targets simply take advantage of the mountain border and move into the NWFP, where we couldn't operate.

If al'Zawahiri is caught, only a few weeks after the real Pakistani offensive began, it will suggest that the real obstacle to our shutting down the Afghani leadership was our putative ally, something that would surprise very few of us.

Al'Zawahiri is perhaps a more important target than bin Ladin. Saudi oppositionist Saad al'Faqih, an Islamist leader generally considered one of the top experts on al'Qaeda, has argued that al'Zawahiri was the real mastermind of bin Ladin's jihad against America and the West, transforming al'Qaeda from a small and largely unknown radical group to the personification of extremist Islamism and its terror. If bin Ladin is the financial source of al'Qaeda and its affiliate groups, al'Zawahiri may be the mind behind it -- and if he is caught, at least some of the impetus behind radical terror today may slacken.

 
The Chronicle of Higher Education has a must-read article on the dearth of sociological studies of Arab and Muslim anti-Semitism.

 
For those collecting links, here's the mailing list European counterterror officials believe was used by al'Qaeda to disseminate strategy plans. (Arabic only, logically enough, so it's useless to me.)

 
La reconquista islamica seems to have netted a significant recoup for the Islamist terror groups most likely behind the 3/11 bombings. It's absolutely true that the fall of the conservative government will be seen as proof that terrorism can weaken the resolve of the West; it's also true that such a conclusion is not in itself reason to support the now-outgoing party or, for that matter, to assume that the Islamist attacks against Coalition countries means that the invasion of Iraq was in any way an attack against al'Qaeda and its ilk. (The war was justifiable on entirely different grounds.)

However, the pullout of Spanish troops from Iraq will certainly embolden Islamist groups of all stripes to undertake further attacks against Europe. Reports have suggested over the past year that bin Laden has come under criticism from other radical Islamists for having energized America and its allies to mount a substantial effort against Islamist terrorists. If Spain is seen as having knuckled under to al'Qaeda, that view might be revisited and reversed, leading other groups to support terror attacks against the West.

This is no small matter for Europe, because the Continent is arguably already enemy territory. Unlike America, where our terrorist fears revolve around enemies who slip into our country, the arrest of Spanish citizens in the 3/11 attacks shows that in that country, as in France, Germany and Britain, there is already a fifth column living in Europe. Small local populations coupled with increasing inflows of immigrants from Middle Eastern, North African and Central Asian countries have created crises in European societies, never particularly disposed to accepting strangers in their midst. Unlike the United States, where Muslim immigrants have by and large been absorbed into the greater American society (while adding their own garam masala to our national dish), Europeans have managed to alienate, marginalize and impoverish Muslim immigrants to the point that they virtually compose a para-state of their own.

Although some Europeans are beginning to re-evaluate their opposition to American policies against terror, others are resorting to the old shibboleths of "root causes:" it's poverty, the invasion of Iraq, support for Israel. Largely, I tend to dismiss these arguments, having read more than enough Islamist primary sources to see in them a contempt for everything we have achieved since the Reformation and Enlightenment -- the 9/11 killers were motivated by cultic faith, not their own poverty. However, should "old Europe" continue to argue that America is the cause of its own misery, it should equally look inwards and see how it has hatched a serpent at its heart.

 
Ah: so the anti-war left isn't against Jews, they're against Jewish intellectuals. Or conservative Jews. Or conservative Jewish intellectuals. They're not terribly clear as to what their point is, are they?

In any case, it's quite a tendentious list they've put together. The only thing they've proven is that they can put a reasonable number of Jewish intellectuals in a more-or-less randomly-compiled list of conservatives.

In related news, ETLNR takes on Tim Robbins' screed against the Iraq invasion.

 
Andrew Sullivan finds a putative Kerry malapropism in a letter from a reader:

My brother, Sean, debated Kerry back in 1970-71. Sean was a leader in Vietnam Veterans for a Just Peace. He and a colleague lunching with Kerry one time, before or after a debate, believe it or not.
Discussing some moral point or other, Kerry came out with: 'You just have to understand the higher modalities of the situation.'
This has been a catchphrase in our family ever since.

(The always-readable Tim Blair also picks up on it.)

Perhaps I'm misunderstanding the humor in the phrase, but I assumed that Kerry meant "deontic modalities" (i.e., rules of ethical behavior mandating that acts be obligatory, forbidden, or permissible). Although an idiosyncratic turn of phrase, it would certainly make sense if, for example, Kerry were defending a course of action against a consequentialist argument: "Regardless of the outcome of this act, I must do it because I am obligated to do it (or forbidden from doing it)." In other words, there's nothing particularly notable in Kerry's use of words, except that he was probably exposed to Kantian philosophy and probably never to modal logic at some point in his undergraduate career. (Sullivan, as an Oakeshottian, should well remember the many faces of modal logic, though I don't know Oakeshott's work well enough to know if he ever scrutinized deontology in so many words.)

Even if Kerry wasn't caught in a malapropism, there's still something amusing to me about his using a deontological argument in ethics, given the flip-flopping that seems to have been the hallmark of his political career. (Here's a modality for you: "It is forbidden to throw away another man's medals and claim them for your own.") But we'll leave that for another time.

 
When a writer describes the subject of a bio piece as speaking "in bizarrely conspiratorial fashion with no evidence to back him up," you know something's up. And when that subject's testimony contradicts the thesis of the writer's bestselling book ... well, let's just say that Time might want to revist the term "conflict of interest."

It is true that Gardner seems sketchy on details, singular in his assessment of Kerry amongst the boat crew, and, well, kind of crazy in a black helicopter kind of way. But that doesn't obviate the fact that using Doug Brinkley as point man on this interview was bad journalism.

 
Backpedal, backpedal. After a Guardian story on Saudi plans to increase tourism, the government quickly changed their website to remove some of the most inflammatory terms and conditions. The original website read:

Visas will not be issued for the following groups of people: An Israeli passport holder or a passport that has an Israeli arrival/departure stamp[,] Those who don't abide by the Saudi traditions concerning appearance and behaviors[, and] Jewish People.

The post-Guardian version simply says, "The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia's visa regulations are available at the Kingdom's Consulates. When erroneous information was noticed on SCT's website, it was removed. SCT regrets any inconvenience this may have caused."

In any case, don't think you're going to find a direct flight from Tel Aviv to Riyadh anytime soon; the visa application from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs still lists "religion" as a necessary field.

The Guardian also noted that the al'Sauds had a history of arresting tourists on spurious charges of terrorism, which brings us to a not-unrelated piece of news: Two British men are suing Saudi government officials for damages, claiming that they were tortured into confessing to a series of bomb attacks against Westerners in 2000.

Sandy Mitchell and Les Walker spent two and a half years in prison, and were sentenced to beheading and crucifixtion before being released in 2003. Their lawyers claim that the Saudi government tortured the men and five other foreign nationals with beatings, sleep deprivation, and threats in order to coerce false confessions from them.

The Saudi government, which linked the bombings to rivalries between alcohol smuggling gangs, has denied any coercion. But others outside the government argue that the kingdom has tried to cover up the involvement of Islamist terrorists in the bombing wave, which has continued since 2000 to injure and kill Westerners in Saudi Arabia. Saad al'Fagh, a Saudi dissident now living in London, has told reporters that splinter terror groups have taken credit for the bombings.

 
Insofar as Lawler's feelings on bioethics go, his thoughtful pieces on biotechnology and human happiness are well worth reading: here and here. I do have to wonder if this comment will come back to haunt him, however: "Mormons are oppressive with a smile."

 
The President's Council on Bioethics is, let us be clear, a political creature designed primarily to give the President good advice within rather narrow ideological parameters. It is not an independent commission charged with careful consideration of the issues, but instead a group of like-minded theorists given the chance to promote their values in full. (Less charitable minds might say that they are an intellectual fig leaf for policies decided upon well before they convened.)

Having said that, the news that two members of the panel have been ejected for essentially disagreeing with the political stance of the White House is saddening if unsurprising. Both Dr. Blackburn, a former President of the American Society for Cell Biology, and Dr. May, a founder of The Hastings Center for Bioethics, were supremely qualified members of the Council.

Of the replacements, Dr. Carson is the most qualified; a brilliant neurosurgeon, he became director of Pediatric Neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins when only 32 years old, earning his way with high-risk, high-profile surgical interventions. He has also written a number of spiritually-uplifting books and was the subject of a short documentary, Heroes: A Triumph of the Spirit. Nonetheless, beyond his medical career and religious writings, it's not clear if he has any background in bioethics.

The other two appointees, Peter Lawler and Diana Schaub, are political scientists (which I cheerfully admit is "science" only in the most tenuous sense). Both are well-respected for their work in political theory and history (Schaub is a respected theorist, while Lawler has written extensively on Tocqueville), but neither is known for their work on bioethics, and both are politically very conservative (Schaub delights in attacking postmodernism and calls Generation X "degenerate," while Lawler is quite frankly a partisan Republican, having written extensively for The National Review on political topics).

We do at least know the position Schaub holds on the matters before the Council, as she made clear in an article for The Public Interest:

[I]f one were, with an open mind, to read the whole of the [Council's report on cloning] ... one would be persuaded of the rightness of banning all human cloning, whether for the purpose of children or research. ... Kass reminds us ... that "reasonable and morally serious people can differ about fundamental issues," but I take it that this unique experiment in clarifying the differences is undertaken in the hope that such clarification will lead to the concord of truth. In other words, this is not a matter about which we can just agree to disagree. There is an imperative to continue reasoning with one another, which implies, I think, that there is reason with a capital R out there somewhere, and that reasonable people, were they perfectly reasonable, or even just sufficiently reasonable to the occasion, would arrive at it. ...

Cloning is an evil; and cloning for the purpose of research actually exacerbates the evil by countenancing the willful destruction of nascent human life. Moreover, it proposes doing this on a mass scale, as an institutionalized and routinized undertaking to extract medical benefits for those who have greater power. It is slavery plus abortion.

Schaub does make, of course, a perfectly reasonable and defensible point -- but one might wish that she were willing to concede that those who disagree with her might be equally reasonable and their arguments equally defensible.

 
... And a thick neck, too: "If you want to be at the top, you've got to have broad shoulders." (Barry Bonds, on how he has been affected by the BALCO/steroids controversy)