"Foreign policy experts now say this Iraq prison abuse scandal could be a real setback in relations between America and the Arab countries in the Middle East. And things were going so well."
-- Jay Leno

The Iraqi governing council is flexing its sovereignty.

Iraq's leaders, flexing muscles as the United States prepares to cede sovereignty, are sending a delegation to the United Nations to demand control of their oil wealth and an end to reparations it pays for Saddam Hussein's wars.

Deputy Foreign Minister Hamid Bayati told Reuters Tuesday that the embryonic government in Baghdad would demand a say this week in a new U.N. resolution on the country's affairs.

Good for them.

Yesterday, over 1,000 couples sought marriage licenses in Massachusetts on the first day they were allowed to wed. No doubt this will lead to the instant destruction of the institution of marriage.

In related news, ABC will be picking up a reality show called Wife Swap, in which two wives will switch places for a few days. Which is okay, y'know, because heterosexual marriage is sanctified, despite divorce, cheating and The Bachelor. Well, it was sanctified, anyway, until those homosexuals got the right to marry. Now it's armageddon! God himself is going to strike us all down!

Or, you know, not.

Well, now that it's confirmed that two chemical artillery shells, one with sarin and one with mustard gas, have been found--and both used by the Iraqi insurgents, I have to say that I'm more and more nervous. Ever since last May, the big story of post-war Iraq has been that when the Iraq Survey Group visited sites that, according to the CIA, had WMD, those sites were found to have been cleaned out and looted by parties unknown.

Well, with these two discoveries, we now are faced with the possibility that some of Saddam's chemical and biological weapons are in the hands of Iraqi insurgents. Right now we're benefiting because they apparently didn't even know they had them. But no doubt they'll get the news eventually. It's well known that Zarqawi, among others, has experience with the production and use of chemical weapons. How long, I wonder, before some of Saddam's old weapons are made effective again?

And to the naysayers who say that chemical weapons aren't all that dangerous, I say look to history. In World War I, mustard gas was used to devastating effect. And Saddam himself used sarin in 1988 to kill over 5,000 people in the village of Halabja.

"Obsession about the details of the current news cycle is the best way to ensure that the future smacks you on the back of the head hard some day. Live micro, but think macro. Inhabit the day, but apprehend the week, the month, the year, and beyond."
-- James Lileks

"It really gets me when the critics say I haven't done enough for the economy. I mean, look what I've done for the book publishing industry. You've heard some of the titles. 'Big Lies,' 'The Lies of George W. Bush,' 'The Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them.' I'd like to tell you I've read each of these books, but that'd be a lie."
-- President George W. Bush

Well, after a day of back-wrenching lifting and carrying, Amanda and I moved into our new house yesterday. We are renting it, but just going from a crappy apartment complex to somewhere nice, with a garage and basement and landlord who actually cares what it looks like is awesome. We'll be here for a couple of years, and it's a great place.

Unfortunately, the guy who installed our digital cable yesterday drilled through an electric line, so I have to stop writing now so the electrician can make sure we aren't going to die and resurrect the fried circuit in our house. More later, with pictures hopefully!

This seems like a very strange case.

Greenpeace, charged with the obscure crime of "sailor mongering" that was last prosecuted 114 years ago, goes on trial on Monday in the first U.S. criminal prosecution of an advocacy group for civil disobedience.

The environmental group is accused of sailor mongering because it boarded a freighter in April 2002 that was carrying illegally felled Amazon mahogany to Miami. It says the prosecution is revenge for its criticism of the environmental policies of President Bush, whom it calls the "Toxic Texan."

Sailor mongering was rife in the 19th century when brothels sent prostitutes laden with booze onto ships as they made their way to harbor. The idea was to get the sailors so drunk they could be whisked to shore and held in bondage, and a law was passed against it in 1872. It has only been used in a court of law twice, the last time in 1890.

It doesn't seem like what Greenpeace did fits the bill here, or that even the group as a whole should be charged. But then, it's always pretty strange when laws that haven't been invoked in over a century are being used as the basis for a criminal charge.

Now this is comedy.

7. Carcharodontosaurus

6. "Oh, I see: it's okay to liberate Iraqis, but try liberating a few American nipples and all of sudden you've committed a crime...?"

Read 'em all!

Wizbang has a lot of goods on the Berg/al-Qaeda stuff. But, just to make things weirder, he also links to this article which may hint at a completely different guy altogether.

Berg's parents and brother and sisters are liberals and anti-Bush and antiwar in equal measure, according to friends and the bumper stickers on their cars. Nick was not. He believed in President Bush and the liberation of Iraq. He went out to play football with Lorenz and another friend last December. It was a balmy day and, as always, they talked about everything. Toward the end, Berg spoke of going to Iraq, where he would climb and fix communications towers -- and put American flags on top. He wanted to make some money, and he wanted to be part of building something good.

Read the whole profile. It paints the picture of a different guy than someone involved in AQ. Or does it? Who the hell was this guy? What was he doing in Iraq? What, if any, connection did he have with terrorists?

"The highest stage in moral culture at which we can arrive is when we recognize that we ought to control our thoughts."
-- Charles Darwin

Sometimes truth is stranger than fiction.

Authorities in Baghdad denied that Berg, 26, was held in U.S. custody before he disappeared in early April, despite claims to the contrary by his family. The authorities said he had been held by Iraqi police for about two weeks and questioned by FBI agents three times.

In Baghdad, U.S. spokesmen Dan Senor said that "to my knowledge" Berg was not affiliated with any U.S. or coalition organization, nor was he ever in U.S. custody.

Iraqi police arrested Berg in Mosul on March 24 because local authorities believed he may have been involved in "suspicious activities," Senor said. He refused to elaborate, except to confirm that the Americans were aware Berg was in custody.

The article doesn't elaborate on what these "suspicious activities" were, but might they have had some connection with this?

U.S. officials say the FBI questioned Berg in 2002 after a computer password Berg used in college turned up in the possession of Zaccarias Moussaoui, the al Qaeda operative arrested shortly before 9/11 for his suspicious activity at a flight school in Minnesota.

The bureau had already dismissed the connection between Berg and Moussaoui as nothing more than a college student who had been careless about protecting his password.

But in the wake of Berg's gruesome murder, it becomes a stranger than fiction coincidence -- an American who inadvertently gave away his computer password to one notorious al Qaeda operative is later murdered by another notorious al Qaeda operative.

Moreover, it appears that Berg actually refused a chance to leave Iraq.

Shortly before Berg's disappearance, he was warned by the FBI that Iraq was too volatile a place for unprotected American civilians and that he could be harmed, a senior FBI official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Wednesday.

Officials said the U.S. government warned Berg to leave Iraq, and offered him a flight out of the country, a month before his grisly death.

On April 10, four days after Berg was released from an Iraqi prison, an American diplomat offered to put him on a flight to Jordan, State Department spokeswoman Kelly Shannon said.

James Joyner has more. I don't know what to make of all this. It's just too bizarre. Was Berg somehow connected to al-Qaeda? What, exactly, was he doing in Iraq anyway? Was he complicit, somehow, in his own death? All of these questions are, right now anyway, unanswered. More as the story breaks...

Oliver wonders how long it will take for the right to call Michael Berg 'evil' for his comments about his son "dying for Bush's sins." Personally, I wonder how long it'll take the cuckoo left to say that since Berg's family were anti-war activists, the Administration deliberately let him get killed.

Both positions are, of course, nonsense. I deeply sympathize with the loss that Berg's family is feeling right now. I certainly don't agree with Michael Berg's comments--al-Qaeda fanatics, not Bush or Rumsfeld, killed his son. However, people also say outrageous things during the grieving process, and it may well be that he retracts those comments later.

Or he may not. I don't know. But either way, his comments nor his son's death should be used as political fodder to feed the campaign cycle. That's my opinion, anyway.

This would be funny if it weren't so sad.

When a federal judge ruled two weeks ago that the American Civil Liberties Union could finally reveal the existence of a lawsuit challenging the USA Patriot Act, the group issued a news release.

But the next day, according to new documents released yesterday, the ACLU was forced to remove two paragraphs from the release posted on its Web site, after the Justice Department complained that the group had violated court secrecy rules. . .

. . . The dispute set off a furious round of court filings in a case that serves as both a challenge to, and an illustration of, the far-reaching power of the Patriot Act. Approved by Congress in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the law gives the government greater latitude and secrecy in counterterrorism investigations and includes a provision allowing the FBI to secretly demand customer records from Internet providers and other businesses without a court order.

The ACLU first filed its lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of such demands, known as national security letters, on April 6, but the secrecy rules of the Patriot Act required the challenge to be filed under seal. A ruling April 28 allowed the release of a heavily censored version of the complaint, but the ACLU is still forbidden from revealing many details of the case, including the identity of another plaintiff who has joined in the lawsuit. The law forbids targets of national security letters to disclose that they have received one.

This whole aspect of the PATRIOT Act is ridiculous. Government processes, particularly lawsuits challenging the lawfulness of a statute, should be open and transparent. The fact that the PATRIOT Act itself makes challenges to its validity a secret is testament to the fact that, revealed in the light of day, the PATRIOT Act is not good policy.

That is, of course, unless you want to help end the scourge of online casinos!

"Knowledge is just opinion that you trust enough to act upon."
-- Orson Scott Card