REPORTS FROM THE FIELD

• Five U.S. soldiers were killed and five more wounded by a roadside bomb in Sadr City on Friday. U.S. troops also clashed with Shiites in the Sadr stronghold, killing a reported three Iraqis.

• Terrorists blew up a car bomb outside a joint U.S./Iraqi base in Taji on Sunday, killing at least nine and wounding 61 more. As 1 July approaches, the terrorists are presumably pulling out all the stops to try to derail the occupation. If this is the best they can do, however, the situation in Iraq may not be as bad as advertised.

• Michael Tucker has been making two films in Baghdad over the past year. His latest effort is available here. Beyond the film, Michael's commentary about what he saw is well worth seeing.

RECONSTRUCTION & THE ECONOMY

• Tim Blair notes just how far the U.S. is willing to go to support Iraq's recovery: nickel a gallon gas. It's not hard to imagine John Kerry using this as a campaign point against President Bush, but there's little doubt it is providing a significant boost to the Iraqi economy. Conversely, when the subsidies end, it could be a significant blow.

IRAQI POLITICS

• He didn't sound overly thrilled with the new government, but Ayatollah Sistani gave the interim government at least a lukewarm endorsement. Given his standing with Iraq's Shiites, this marks a major victory for the new government.

THE INTERNATIONAL STAGE

• Iraq's new Prime Minister informed the United Nations that Iraq will control its own armed forces in close cooperation with American forces in Iraq. The Minister also formally invited the United States to maintain a presence in Iraq following the turnover of sovereignty. These announcements may help the U.S. get a UN resolution approving the turnover through this week.

ETCETERA

• Congress is becoming concerned with the DoD investigation of Abu Ghraib. Republicans and Democrats are worried the investigations are too narrowly focused to expose problems higher up the chain of command, a concern that has been expressed by many outside observers including yours truly.

• A California National Guard soldier is claiming he reported prisoner abuse by his unit last summer, but the only action his superiors took was ship him home for a psychological evaluation. If he's telling the truth, the claims that prisoner abuse was a policy and not an aberration will be bolstered significantly.

• The U.S. released hundreds of prisoners from Abu Ghraib on Sunday, although some 3,100 remained in detention.

• The troops are still there. So is the Winds of Change.NET consolidated directory of ways you can support the troops: American, Australian, British, Canadian & Polish. Anyone out there with more information, contact us!

• Don't forget Chief Wiggles' Toys for Iraq drive!

Thanks for reading! If you found something here you want to blog about yourself (and we hope you do), all we ask is that you do as we do and offer a Hat Tip hyperlink to today's "Winds of War". If you think we missed something important, use the Comments section to let us know.

• a Hummer (!)

Shopping at WalMart is an interesting experience. Our local store serves a wide range of shoppers and the employees are a diverse group too, many of them immigrants - my Spanish, such as it is, always comes in handy there. As I was maneuvering the shopping cart down the aisles, peering around the big box in front of me, it was alternately "Beg pardon, please" and "Despensame, por favor ..." Somehow I managed to avoid bringing down anything off the shelves or running over any kids on my way to the checkout line.

Lots of families shopping together. A fair number of young teens in groups, too. Four or five different languages drifted up the aisles ... English, Spanish, Cantonese (I can recognize the melody but not the words themselves), the lilt of two women in saris talking (Hindi?).

But yesterday was the first time I've seen a Hummer in the lot.

BIOTECH & MEDICAL

• The United Kingdom seeks to advance quickly in the realm of embryonic stem cell research. The UK government is pouring millions of British pounds into labs across the country and the first ever embryonic stem cell bank is now open for business.

• Meanwhile, MIT Technology Review reports that the United States' stem cell policy may be reaching a tipping point. A recognition of the worldwide competition, and of unsatiated consumer demand, may be forcing the Bush administration's hands. Finally.

• Congratulations are due to St Mary's Hospital in Manchester, UK for breaking the world record for successful sperm storage. A test-tube baby was recently born to a father who had his sperm frozen over twenty-one years ago! The man was diagnosed with testicular cancer at an early age and opted for the deposit of several sperm samples before receiving treatment. He subsequently survived his battle with cancer and had tried several times to have his new wife impregnated with his frozen offspring. This breakthrough is big, as the number of cancer survivors with full lives ahead of them continues to climb.

• Beware future mothers: Taking aspirin during pregnancy may deprive your sons of their libidos! You can relax a bit for now, though. The current information comes from tests on newborn male rats, and the results were somewhat subtle.

• Leroy Hood is a living legend, no, the living legend in the world of biotechnology. The list of inventions attached to his name is extraordinary and his visions for the future of biotech have been proven correct time and time again. Now, his latest venture is beginning to bear some fruit. The release of Cytoscape 1.1 will certainly be just one of many tools developed by Dr. Hood's team that will fuel progress in the nascent field of systems biology.

• As the average life expectancy for the nation ramps up, so too does the number of cases of Alzheimer's Disease. Consequently, the scientific community has been searching high and low for potential cures for this mentally crippling illness. Perhaps the answer lies within yeast cells. Or maybe what is required is an antibody to destroy tiny proteins known as ADDL's. Time will tell, and we certainly have more of it.

• This one's for paranoid germophobes only. Or maybe it isn't. Mwahahah. (Hat Tip: Matt Drudge)

• Do we really use only 10% of our brains? Scientific American asks the expert.

NANOTECH

• Professor Reynolds says that we may be witnessing a nanotechnology turnaround, but I think his worries were overblown. The nanotech industry has been chugging right along, and there was no way that a few months of bad press could have stopped it in its tracks. Heck, the GM food industry has suffered years of bad press, yet even the highly eco-skeptical European Union finally succumbed to the tide. Public perception aligns eventually (perhaps slowly) with reality, and if nanotech products are indeed safe, then they will have their market. Only governmental legislation could hamper future development, and it appears that Congress has already decided to take an open-minded approach to nanotech.

• On nanotechnology, Nobel theoretical chemist Roald Hoffmann remarks, "I'm glad you guys [that includes women, of course] found a new name for chemistry. Now you have the incentive to learn what you didn't want to learn in college." He also notes what real progress has been made and declares that nanotech is "the way of the future, a way of precise, controlled building, with, incidentally, environmental benignness built in by design".

• Nanosonic sounds pretty cool, but the company's feature product may be even cooler. Metal Rubber 'conducts electricity like metal even when stretched like rubber', and may fit future aircraft with shape-shifting wings. Pretty cool indeed.

• With little fanfare, computer chipmakers have entered into the nano realm.

• The title says it all: Military Nanotechnology Continues Its March Toward Battlefield Use.

SPACE

• Keep your eyes fixed on the sky on June 8th. The path of the planet Venus will cross the sun for the first time in 122 years!

• Dean Esmay let me know that the first ever privately arranged manned space launch will be attempted on June 21st. It'll be a big day indeed.

• Astronomers have recently measured the universe at 156 billion light-years wide (or 1.5 with-twenty-three-zeroes-after-it kilometers). Now that is pretty far, but the matter is just as far from being settled. The universe may or may not be infinite (If the universe is infinite, how can it be expanding?), and it may or may not have boundaries. So, could its size ever be measured? We are forever limited to some degree by the extent of our observatory powers, thus there will always be a new frontier (Of course, some scientists are finding ways to work around this too).

• Researchers at Arizona State University, spanning across multiple disciplines, are learning new things about the birth of the sun and seeing that some things which are known about the solar system in general and the Earth in particular are making more sense.

• Just a few months ago, I laughed at the prospect of a "space elevator" in my lifetime. The whole concept just seemed so outrageous, something from a sci-fi movie. But this amazing initiative continues to gain publicity, and now there's even a blog dedicated to space elevators. Liftport's countdown to liftoff: 5061 days, 10 hours, 23 minutes, 39 seconds.

• That's not all folks. NASA is financing a whole slew of sci-fi technologies these days. Check them all out!

ENVIRONMENT

• Al Gore and his band of not-so-merry environmentalists are in an absolute tizzy over the release of the motion picture, The Day After Tomorrow. These characters hope that the movie will scare some people into taking the issue of global warming more seriously. Don't they understand that scare tactics will get them only so far? It certainly does not make them right.

• No modern scientist has faced as much worldwide vitriol and as many personal attacks as Bjørn "The Skeptical Environmentalist" Lomborg, the man who dared to suggest that global warming should not be the world's #1 environmental priority. He recently gathered a group of economists to evaluate the challenges facing the globe on measures of cost-benefit and importance. The "Copenhagen Consensus" concluded that the HIV/AIDS epidemic ranked #1. In response, a UN official compared Lomborg with none other than that infamous leader of the group which rhymes with "Yahtzee". That's right, Lomborg thinks just like Hitler.

• The world may be concerned about global warming now, but back in the 17th century, global cooling was the talk of the town. Looking to predict the next Maunder minimum (the solar oddity which likely caused the global cooling), scientists are discovering that this oddity is a rarity among nearby stars.

• Professor Philip Stott of EnviroSpin Watch links to a report on a team of Israeli researchers who found that humans harnessed fire 500,000 years earlier than previously thought, and makes a connection with today's climate change debate.

• Is the world running out of oil? Some recent publications have suggested so, but Michael Fumento argues otherwise.
  
  PUBLIC POLICY

• In what may be part of a promising trend, the State of California has formally approved the online sale of Canadian pharmaceuticals on a state-run website. The states of Wisconsin, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Minnesota and Rhode Island have already set up websites of their own. Will more states follow suit? Will the federal government attempt to intervene on behalf of the American healthcare industry? Will these newly opened marketplaces push down the price of prescription drugs in this country? These questions and many more are left to be answered. Stay tuned...

• Americans may be getting pudgier by the minute, but not everyone has given up the fight. A group of nutritionists is pushing for a ban of trans-fatty acids from America's food supply. How dangerous might these trans-fats be? So dangerous that an expert panel declared that there's 'no level of trans-fats in the diet that could be deemed safe'. Hey, I'm all for public policy in pursuit of better health for the nation, but this sniffs a bit like scare tactics to me. Do they mean that it's 'unsafe' or do they mean that it's 'unhealthy'? Isn't there a difference?

• Monsanto has won a court ruling against a Canadian farmer who was accused of patent infringement. The farmer believes that some of Monsanto's genetically modified seeds must have blown onto his property and cross-pollinated with his crops. Despite the ruling, the farmer was relieved from paying any damages. A book has recently been written examining the problems with America's patent system. Perhaps a chapter should have been included to cover Canada's.

• In a stunning turnaround, President Vladimir Putin has promised that Russia would soon ratify the Kyoto Treaty. Hans Labohm considers the president's motivations, and the future implications of this new arrangement.

ANIMAL KINGDOM

• Dinosaurs reigned across the planet for millions of years, yet their decisive end may have come faster than my Memorial Day weekend just flew by. A recent study has concluded that most dinosaurs sizzled to death within hours of a gigantic asteroid collision with the earth.

• Jacob Sullum wonders, "Must we learn to love cicadas?" and I wonder, "Is anybody really learning to love cicadas?"

• Dung beetles and chameleons and maggots. Oh my!

• And finally, Japanese researchers have confirmed that hippo "sweat" protects the beast from the sun's harmful ultra-violet rays. If you catch me down at the Jersey Shore this summer covered in a reddish-orange slimey goo, well, now you'll know why.

Please check back next month for another exciting edition of Winds of Discovery!

While attending the conference, I have to admit that I was somewhat unnerved by just how many people I recognized from TV appearances were there. I think that my (as well as Robi's) biggest single reaction was something akin to, "Oh my God, that's Christopher Hitchens!" when he walked passed us. Other notables I recognized were David Corn of The Nation (whom I'll come back to later on) and Matthew Yglesias of the American Prospect as well as the Washington correspondents for al-Sharq al-Awsat and al-Hayat. If there were many major Western media correspondents there, I must confess not having seen them, though I did notice Hussein Ibish in the audience - it's hard not to miss him, the man looks like the Kingpin from Marvel comics.

One of probably the best aspects of the conference was that the discussion dealt primarily with the issue of Iraqi ties to al-Qaeda rather than the justice or lack thereof with regard to the war in Iraq. As a result, with only a handful of notable exceptions during the Q&A period, most of the conversation was entirely civil and stuck within agreed-upon facts rather than on the usual back-and-forth of whether or not Bush lied/misled the American public that all too frequently exists within these types of debates.

Out of the panel, Bergen appeared to be the most skeptical of the four as to the nature of the connection, followed by Yaphe. Woolsey was definitely on the ball, not only from a rhetorical standpoint but also because much of his analysis was struck me as being very accurate, perhaps they can tap him to return to his previous position as DCI? He also really struck home with regard to his answers concerning the often-repeated meme about "connecting the dots" and explained that while one only needs to know how to count and use a pencil in order to see the whole picture in a children's book that intelligence is a little more complicated than that.

As far as the book itself goes, all of the panelists praised Hayes for his work on the issue of Iraqi connections to al-Qaeda. The Feith memo was discussed in detail and Hayes noted that several of the journalists who had attempted to "debunk" it (a thinly-veiled reference to Newsweek's Isikoff and Hosenball in my opinion) would do well to become familiar with the actual memo before they or their anonymous sources dismissed it as wholely inaccurate.

The issue of Iraqi/al-Qaeda animosity was also discussed in detail. Bergen noted that when he interviewed bin Laden in Afghanistan during the late 1990s that the terrorist leader had shrugged and told him that Saddam Hussein was a bad Muslim who had invaded Kuwait out of greed. While I would hold that both positions are entirely accurate, it struck me as odd that Bergen would cite them as some kind of "proof" of al-Qaeda incompatability with respect to Iraq - no offense, but if bin Laden was in cahoots with Saddam Hussein, do they really believe that he would say as much to a journalist? Woolsey probably had the most sensible answer to the question, which is, as in the case of al-Qaeda ties to Iran or the Saudi royals, that the terror network is perhaps best described as being somewhat analogous to the mafia, wherein various factions may hate one another or even assassinate one another, but they can still collaborate in areas of mutual interest. Similar collaboration evidently occurred during the Cold War between any number of organizations regardless of ideological animosities. There was also some discussion of whether Zarqawi received leg or nasal surgery while in Baghdad, to which I think Christopher Hitchens put it best that regardless of whether he was hurting in the knees or hurting in the nose when he came to Baghdad, the issue is still that he was in Baghdad rather than what kind of surgery was performed on the man.

I also found it interesting to note that all of the panel participants agreed that the FBI anthrax investigation was nothing short of a disgrace. While none of them singled out Iraq as the culprit, they all concurred that the FBI's "lone nut" thesis has several holes big enough for Godzilla to walk through.

All in all, the conference was more or less a rehash of things that I had heard before (indeed, many of which I've said before) with some new information, particularly in the case of Shakir, whom Hayes identifies as a Lieutenant Colonel in the Saddam Fedayeen. As Bergen in particular noted, this all but cries out for more investigation. Woolsey also noted that now-former CIA director Tenet has not distanced himself from remarks before Congress that Iraq provided training, money, and safe haven to al-Qaeda and that Ahmed Chalabi and the INC was hardly the only source of US information on Iraqi collaboration with al-Qaeda.

Hayes also spends a great deal of time in the book discussing media perception of the Iraqi connection with al-Qaeda. Whereas the media was only to eager to uncritically report information on the collaboration between Iraq and al-Qaeda back from 1998 to 2000, this changed dramatically during the run-up to the war in Iraq. I don't want to get into the whole issue of media bias in this particular analysis, but it is very much worth noting that US charges of collaboration between Iraq and al-Qaeda neither begin nor end with the administration of George Bush.

The Q&A was more or less a rehash of many of the same conversations that we've had here at Winds of Change, though Christopher Hitchens's wit was certainly a welcome addition to the mix. I have to say, though, that near as I can tell, David Corn's entire purpose in coming to the conference was to make a cheap shot at Hayes and Ledeen over the issue of Chalabi. Not only did that strike me as unprofessional, but in all honesty it really had very little to do with the subject at hand. Yglesias, incidently, did a much better job with his question of why the administration hasn't launched a search operation on par with the Iraqi Survey Group given how much effort they invested in their pre-war allegations concerning Iraqi ties to al-Qaeda. Ibish accused Hayes of peddling a conspiracy theory that Iraq was behind the 9/11 attacks, even though he conceded that he had yet to actually read the book.

Ultimately, that seems to be the basic thing that everyone got out of the conference: read the book, look at the evidence, and then come to your own conclusions. While I very much doubt that Hayes's book will change very few minds concerning the nature of Iraqi ties to al-Qaeda, at the very least I hope that it might convince one that those of us who do believe in the existence of such ties are hardly lingering in delusion the way that the Los Angeles Times editor suggested sometime ago.

And in case anybody asks, no, I have no idea as to why Tenet resigned yesterday, though there are some suspicions floating around. James Pavitt is also set to go according to CNN. I've learned more about Beltway politics over the last several weeks than I had in over 2 years of college courses and following news reports. And just in case anybody cares, I've also been told that the recent New York Times report on people over at the Pentagon receiving polygraph information is inaccurate.