Duthie On...

This story may be some comfort for those of us with loved ones in Iraq: An estimated 123 people were shot and killed over the summer. That's nearly double the number of soldiers killed in Iraq over the same time period. In May, cbs2chicago.com began tracking city shootings and posting them on Google maps. Information compiled from our reporters, wire service reports and the Chicago Police Major Incidents log indicated that 123 people were shot and killed throughout the city between the start of Memorial...

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So the Pentagon released a report that says, among other things: One question remains regarding Iraq’s terrorism capability: Is there anything in the captured archives to indicate that Saddam had the will to use his terrorist capabilities directly against United States? Judging from examples of Saddam’s statements (Extract 34) before the 1991 Gulf War with the United tates, the answer is yes . In the years between the two Gulf Wars, UN sanctions reduced Saddam’s ability to shape regional and world...

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OK, so could someone please tell me exactly when Castro actually stood for re-election? Perhaps the Miami Herald could use a little reminder of what the term " dictator " actually means: Saying he is no longer healthy enough to hold office, Cuban leader Fidel Castro has announced he will not seek reelection after 49 years in power and nearly 19 months sidelined by illness, marking the first official step in a long-awaited succession in the island's leadership. The report returns to the same theme...

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OK, it was bad enough when the threat was lead paint in kids' toys ...now this : BEIJING (Reuters) - A Beijing factory recycled used chopsticks and sold up to 100,000 pairs a day without any form of disinfection, a newspaper said on Wednesday, the latest is a string of food and product safety scares. Counterfeit, shoddy and dangerous products are widespread in China , whose exports have been rocked in recent months by a spate of safety scandals, ranging from pet food to medicine, tires, toothpaste...

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Apparently Barak Obama has figured out how to win the war on terrorism: WASHINGTON - Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama said Wednesday that he would possibly send troops into Pakistan to hunt down terrorists, an attempt to show strength when his chief rival has described his foreign policy skills as naive. ADVERTISEMENT The Illinois senator warned Pakistani President Gen. Pervez Musharraf that he must do more to shut down terrorist operations in his country and evict foreign fighters...

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Saudis attempting to silence critics who claim they're funding terrorism in the name of charity? Sounds like it: Here’s a story with huge implications for freedom of speech (all negative), and it’s apparently gone almost entirely unreported in the mainstream press. According to the Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription required), under threat of a law suit, Cambridge University Press has just agreed to pulp all unsold copies of the 2006 book, Alms for Jihad: Charity and Terrorism in the Islamic...

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Apparently, the U.N.'s idea of punishment for sex abuse by its peacekeepers is to send them home: ABIDJAN, Cote d'Ivoire (Reuters) -- The United Nations said on Saturday it had suspended a Moroccan military contingent from its peacekeeping mission in Cote d'Ivoire while it investigated allegations of widespread sexual abuse. "It means they don't participate in our operations," said Hamadoun Toure, spokesman for the U.N. mission in Cote d'Ivoire (ONUCI). "Those who are found guilty will be sent back...

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Andy McCarthy on the Iraq war and the surge : That's why I get so disheartened when I hear the president talk this nonsense about the universality of freedom. If the surge is just about Iraqi freedom, we shouldn't be doing it. The American people don't care what form of government Iraq has — not enough to fight a war over it. They care about defeating enemies who threaten the United States, and the president has never made the case — nor do I think he could — that American national security is materially...

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Bob Novak : I never spoke to Armitage again about Wilson. But he acknowledged to me nearly three months later through his political adviser, lobbyist Ken Duberstein, that he was indeed the primary source for my information about Wilson's wife. Shortly thereafter, he secretly revealed his role to federal authorities investigating the leak of Mrs. Wilson's name but did not inform White House officials, apparently including the president. After Patrick Fitzgerald, the U.S. attorney in Chicago named...

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Iain Murray observes , regarding the foiled London car bomb: James Forsyth of The Spectator has an important comment : One of the great delusions of our time is that once Blair, in the UK case, and Bush, in the American one, stepped down from office the terrorist threat would disappear. The news that a car bomb attack was foiled in London last night illustrates just how wrong this belief was. Although, the fact that the vast bulk of planning for the 9/11 attacks was done during the Clinton presidency...

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OK, so perhaps that isn't an exact quote, but he certainly seems to be a fan, and views them as having won a "democratic mandate" to lead. This should come as no surprise for Carter, who's never met an anti-American thug he didn't like, but what's remarkable is Carter being so open about supporting a terrorist organization supported by Iran: The United States, Israel and the European Union must end their policy of favoring Fatah over Hamas , or they will doom the Palestinian people to deepening conflict...

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This one, with the Hoover Institution's Peter Robinson, is a little more substantive than his appearance on Leno: The more I hear, the more I like. As an aside, I should mention that in last week's GOP debate, Rudy Giuliani impressed the heck out of me with his answer on health insurance, namely, that a major part of the problem is the disconnect between the individual and the costs of their health care, thanks to government and employers being intermediaries in how most of us pay for health insurance...

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More disturbing news about the wanna-be superpower in the east: China arming terrorists New intelligence reveals China is covertly supplying large quantities of small arms and weapons to insurgents in Iraq and the Taliban militia in Afghanistan, through Iran. U.S. government appeals to China to check some of the arms shipments in advance were met with stonewalling by Beijing, which insisted it knew nothing about the shipments and asked for additional intelligence on the transfers. The ploy has been...

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This is an amazing story about a brilliant maneuver pulled off by one of the amazing folks serving in Iraq to avert a bloodbath in Anbar: The Final Option Read the whole thing, because it's surely a story that won't be told in the mainstream media. Source: Michael Yon : Online Magazine » Blog Archive » The Final Option...

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While celebrating this weekend, don't forget to take time out to remember the reason we celebrate Memorial Day...all the men and women who have sacrificed to make the United States what it is, and who continue to sacrifice to protect our lives and our freedoms. Day By Day cartoon has some observations on the subject, too:...

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In this Corner post , Andy McCarthy points out, based on things we either know to be true, or cannot rule out, the absurdity of the immediate dismissal of any connection between Saddam Hussein's Iraq and 9/11. The gist is that there is abundant evidence of significant, ongoing, and operational ties between al Qaeda and Iraq, going back at least to the 1990s, and there's plenty of reason to believe that part of the animus for bin Laden's fatwa against Americans involved sympathy for Iraq (see this...

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...and you're a Democrat, you can be pretty sure that you've put your foot in it, big time. If you're Nancy Pelosi, and you've made a damn fool out of yourself by going to terrorist-sponsoring Syria and proclaiming yourself a broker of peace between Syria and Israel, only to have one side you're claiming to represent (Israeli PM Olmert) immediately repudiate what you've claimed, and even the Washington Post feels it necessary to criticize you (link requires registration), well you can feel certain...

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Although I wasn't able to make it, my mother and brother attended the Gathering of Eagles counter-protest to the usual moonbattery organized by International ANSWER and funded in part by George Soros. Although many of the MSM stories would lead one to believe that there were either only a few hundred counter-protestors, or that the anti-war folks outnumbered those who rallied in support of our troops, the folks who were actually there say differently...and their story is bolstered by unofficial park...

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That's what it looks like, according to this story . Of course, the DHS has issued a non-denial denial (effectively, yes, we're doing it, but we're required to by international conventions). But no matter how you slice it, this is outrageous. Our own government is colluding with the government of Mexico to effectively make it easier to illegals to slip across the border, and simultaneously endangering volunteer groups like the Minutemen. Whether or not you agree with what the Minutemen are doing...

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Question...why is it that it was imperative that we find out who in the White House "leaked" the identity of Valerie Plame to the media (I use the quotes because left unresolved has been the question of whether Plame actually had covert status at the time, and because of the fact that no crime has been alleged in the case relating to illegally leaking classified information), and yet attempting to discover who at the CIA leaked uncontestably classified information regarding the NSA wiretapping program...

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In a remarkable, if not surprising, revelation of the arrogance of the management of the New York Times, Times public editor (i.e. - the guy who's job it is to keep the NYT honest in the wake of things like the Jayson Blair scandal) Byron Calame writes that he has been completely stonewalled by management in his attempts to get more information on the questionable timing of their story on the NSA domestic eavesdropping story. The timing is important for a couple of reasons, not the least of which...

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Buried deep within a Times UK story on the grossly corrupt Iraq 'oil-for-food' program , amid revelations that yet more 'oil-for-food' money has been traced to the estranged wife of British anti-war zealot George Galloway, is the following interesting tidbit: The report found that Marc Rich & Co financed oil purchases from Iraq and the associated kickbacks for the son of a French MP shortly after the company’s founder received a controversial pardon from President Clinton. One assumes that this...

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Why, oh why are we continuing to fund this joke of an organization, the corrupt author of the largest scam in human history, the Iraq 'oil-for-food' program, whose latest absurdity is a speech by none other than Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe, who had the collosal stones to call Tony Blair and George W. Bush "unholy men" and "international terrorists". This, from the man whose policies have taken productive land from its rightful owners because of the color of their skin, and plunged his country into famine...

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...just traveling for more than a week, then recovering from same. In the "news of the weird" vein, apparently UNICEF thinks that bombing Smurfs is an excellent fundraising tool. You can't make this stuff up. Apparently reality isn't "real" enough, so the folks responsible thought it would be more disturbing to show Smurfs being bombed to smithereens. All this in an effort to prevent "let[ing] war affect the lives of children." Which I suppose I'd find less absurdly hypocritical if it wasn't coming...

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Yesterday, in one of the more ugly political hatchet jobs I've seen recently, the L.A. Times asserted in an editorial entitled "Bolton's Mischief" that actions by U.N. Ambassador John Bolton "would be a death sentence for millions." This remarkable assertion comes because among the hundreds of amendments the U.S. has proposed to a draft reform document, "[h]is most odious change was to delete all references to the Millennium Development Goals, which commit industrialized nations to cutting world...

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The money quote:

I think that calling for "more troops" is a way to criticize while not sounding weak, and that it thus has an appeal that overcomes its uncertain factual foundation.

Pretty much what I've been thinking. Read the whole thing, which also includes some on-target quotes from Kevin Drum.

UN Peacekeepers sexually abusing young girls in the Congo, some as young as 13.

Between this and the oil-for-food scandal, I'm wondering why no one other than Norm Coleman is calling for Kofi Annan to resign. He's been singularly ineffective in preventing suffering around the world, and has clearly presided over myriad abuses by UN functionaries and peacekeepers. Time to go, Kofi...

Take a look at all of the obnoxious cartoons linked from The Democracy Project , and tell me that there isn't something terribly wrong with the American left today. The President of the United States nominates as Secretary of State an enormously qualified woman, someone who rose up from poverty, who became one of the youngest university provosts ever, at Stanford University, who in addition to her foreign policy expertise is an accomplished classical pianist, and who happens to be both female and...

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That's the conclusion of a study by Harvard professor of Public Policy Alberto Abadie, of the John F. Kennedy School of Government. Some interesting points in the article: Before analyzing the data, Abadie believed it was a reasonable assumption that terrorism has its roots in poverty, especially since studies have linked civil war to economic factors. However, once the data was corrected for the influence of other factors studied, Abadie said he found no significant relationship between a nation...

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That's the title of a CD due in stores today, according to a story in the Washington Post Style section (link may require registration). I'm sure that the timing of the article is coincidental and has nothing to do with the election (yes, that was sarcasm), but what's particularly striking about the article, and indeed the CD itself, is what it illustrates about the worldview of those who oppose President Bush. The basics of the story are that a Norwegian music producer heard Bush's “Axis of...

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If the statement quoted here is accurate, then Jimmy Carter has demonstrated himself to be completely and totally blinkered, out-to-lunch, and a few cups shy of a tea set. Apparently, in an appearance on Hardball with Chris Matthews, Carter made the extraordinary statement that the American Revolution was “unnecessary” and could've been avoided if only the Brits had been more “sensitive” to the demands of the colonials. Well, duh! And as one of the commenters at LGF noted...

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...at least more forcefully: Kerry and Edwards have a demonstrated track record of treating foreign policy as a popularity contest. Cheney hit on this somewhat in his discussion of their Iraq policy in the face of the anti-war views of Howard Dean, but he did not adequately make the connection with Kerry's current statements on Iraq and the “global test” and Edward's insistence on defending this silliness. Despite both Kerry and Edwards' claims that they would not provide another country...

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...allies don't set you up with faked documents (something that Dan Rather should be thinking about these days). From Ed Morrissey over at Captain's Quarters , a report from the London Telegraph on the source of the fake Niger documents that were initially part of the case for war with Iraq: The Italian businessman at the centre of a furious row between France and Italy over whose intelligence service was to blame for bogus documents suggesting Saddam Hussein was seeking to buy material for nuclear...

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I'm practically speechless. Moments ago, I watched former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright claim (with a straight face, no less) that the Bush administration was responsible for North Korea getting nuclear weapons. The claim came in response to a question from Meet the Press host Tim Russert. Albright claimed that the responsiblity lies with the Bush administration because, according to her, they failed to continue the negotiations that the Clinton administration had been conducting with the...

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French lawyer 'to defend Saddam' That’s just too rich…first, the French accept bribes from the U.N. oil-for-food program, and threaten vetos in the Security Council to keep their sugar daddy Saddam in power, and now this. Do the French know no shame where this monster is concerned? Yes, I know it’s unfair to tar all the French with the brush of a single loathsome lawyer willing to defend a mass murderer, but doesn’t it sort of figure he’d be French? via Drudge...

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Those are the words reportedly spoken to Italian PM Sylvio Berlusconi by none other than Gaddafi, according to the UK Telegraph: A spokesman for Mr Berlusconi said the prime minister had been telephoned recently by Col Gaddafi of Libya, who said: "I will do whatever the Americans want, because I saw what happened in Iraq, and I was afraid." Assuming the report is true, that's an even clearer indicator that Bush's policy of pre-emption has paid dividends well beyond eliminating the threats posed by...

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CNN is carrying a story about a new audio tape said to be from al Qaeda. Nothing new there, we seem to get these on a regular basis. But what is new, and very interesting, is that the voice on the tape is not that of Osama bin Laden. Rather, the voice is said to be that of al Qaeda's #2 man, Ayman al-Zawahiri. Now I can think of a few possible explanations for this off the top of my head: Given the recent capture of Saddam Hussein, OBL is laying low. OBL is dead, captured, or otherwise incapacitated...

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In a front-page editorial...oh, sorry...” analysis ”, the Washington Post completely misreads the recent announcement by Libya that they will voluntarily give up their WMD programs. The subhead for the analysis piece reads “ Two Decades of Sanctions, Isolation Wore Down Gaddafi ”. While it may be true that sanctions and isolation played some small part in motivating Gaddafi to admit the existence of, and pledge to dismantle, his WMD programs, one would have to be rather short-sighted to miss the...

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