Much has been made lately of a single Presidential Daily Briefing from August 6th 2001. During Condoleeza Rice's public testimony before the 9/11 trial -- sorry, I meant Commission -- Senator Bob Kerrey seemed absolutely fixated on its title, "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US." He didn't want her to elaborate on its contents, however. Apparently the title alone was supposed to cause President Bush to institute emergency measures before 9/11 that would absolutely have prevented the terrorist attacks that had been planned for several years. Somehow the Democrats want us all to believe that in the weeks before 9/11, with no definite warnings about any specific threat, they would gladly have accepted armed security on airplanes, public "terror alerts", racial profiling of young Middle Eastern men, constant jet fighter patrols over large American cities, and a pre-emptive strike on a terrorist-supporting sovereign nation before its terrorists could attack us.

Who do they think they're kidding? They don't accept those things NOW!

Let's take a look at this critical memo, and figure out exactly where it predicted 9/11 just weeks in advance.

Clandestine, foreign government, and media reports indicate bin Laden since 1997 has wanted to conduct terrorist attacks in the US. Bin Laden implied in U.S. television interviews in 1997 and 1998 that his followers would follow the example of World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef and "bring the fighting to America."
After U.S. missile strikes on his base in Afghanistan in 1998, bin Laden told followers he wanted to retaliate in Washington, according to a -- -- service. An Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ) operative told - - service at the same time that bin Laden was planning to exploit the operative's access to the U.S. to mount a terrorist strike.

It seems that for at least four years, everyone -- including the media -- had known that bin Laden planned to attack America at some point. He was fairly open about it in his 1998 interview with John Miller of ABC. However, the exact date planned for that coming attack doesn't seem to have been common knowledge. If President Bush had held a press conference to say "Terrorists plan to attack us, but we have no idea when," he would have been excoriated. Washington is mentioned, but in connection to what?

The millennium plotting in Canada in 1999 may have been part of bin Laden's first serious attempt to implement a terrorist strike in the U.S.
Convicted plotter Ahmed Ressam has told the FBI that he conceived the idea to attack Los Angeles International Airport himself, but that in ---, Laden lieutenant Abu Zubaydah encouraged him and helped facilitate the operation. Ressam also said that in 1998 Abu Zubaydah was planning his own U.S. attack.

  The "millenium plot" to blow up Los Angeles International Airport during the New Year's Eve celebrations at the end of 1999 was foiled by an alert border guard and pure luck. Nothing here addresses future terrorist attacks with anything like unambiguous specifics. Should President Bush have sealed the Canadian border to prevent terrorists like Ressam from crossing it? As we know, it still wouldn't have prevented 9/11.

Ressam says bin Laden was aware of the Los Angeles operation. Although Bin Laden has not succeeded, his attacks against the U.S. Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 demonstrate that he prepares operations years in advance and is not deterred by setbacks. Bin Laden associates surveyed our embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam as early as 1993, and some members of the Nairobi cell planning the bombings were arrested and deported in 1997.
Al Qaeda members -- including some who are U.S. citizens -- have resided in or traveled to the U.S. for years, and the group apparently maintains a support structure that could aid attacks.
Two al-Qaeda members found guilty in the conspiracy to bomb our embassies in East Africa were U.S. citizens, and a senior EIJ member lived in California in the mid-1990s.
A clandestine source said in 1998 that a bin Laden cell in New York was recruiting Muslim-American youth for attacks.

Nothing in any of the above paragraphs gives a clue as to al-Qaeda's plans for 9/11 that I can see. The fact that bin Laden prepares operations years in advance actually lessens any sense of urgency this briefing might have engendered.

We have not been able to corroborate some of the more sensational threat reporting, such as that from a ---- service in 1998 saying that Bin Laden wanted to hijack a U.S. aircraft to gain the release of "Blind Sheikh" Omar Abdel Rahman and other U.S.-held extremists.

Finally, a future airplane hijacking is mentioned. Yet there's no indication what plane, which airport, when, or by whom. What could realistically have been done with this information? Put armed men and women on every flight in America for an indefinite period? Cause a panic by warning the public about a vague danger of terrorist activity with no specifics? Note that the presumed purpose of the possible future hijacking was wrong, although it may be what many of the hijackers themselves were told was the aim.

Nevertheless, FBI information since that time indicates patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York.

Note that this information, too, would have led nowhere. No Federal buildings in New York City were attacked by terrorists on 9/11. Since no terrorists had flown airplanes into buildings before, why would anyone derive from this briefing that anything other than a truck bomb or other explosive was being planned? Was the President expected to tell the public that a Federal building in New York City might get blown up soon, but that we had no further details? What would it have accomplished besides pointless fear-mongering (which the administration is accused of doing every time the terror alert level is changed post-9/11)?

The FBI is conducting approximately 70 full-field investigations throughout the U.S. that it considers bin Laden-related. CIA and the FBI are investigating a call to our embassy in the UAE in May saying that a group of bin Laden supporters was in the U.S. planning attacks with explosives.

Putting all the elements of this report together would have brought any reasonable person to two conclusions. First, al-Qaeda was planning to hijack an airplane to bargain for the release of Omar Abdel Rahman. Second, al-Qaeda might be planning to detonate a bomb at one of the Federal buildings in New York City.  Both conclusions would have been wrong. As the briefing contained no specifics regarding time and place, there was nothing that could reasonably have been done to prevent 9/11 based on this memo.

After reading the last paragraph of the briefing, no one could have said anything other than, "It sounds as though the FBI's on top of things. Keep me informed." The problem is that the FBI wasn't on top of things, even though they were warned in 1995 of an al-Qaeda plan to hijack planes and ram them into the CIA headquarters at Langley VA and the Pentagon, as well as "commercial towers" in NYC, Chicago and San Francisco. Instead of twisting the 9/11 Commission into a partisan witch hunt against the Bush administration, perhaps Richard Ben-Veniste (Clinton's defender during the Whitewater scandal), Jamie Gorelick (Clinton's deputy attorney general, who once said, "in a campaign year, Justice can't afford to be totally blind,") and Bob Kerrey should spend more time trying to find out why we didn't put the clues together to see 9/11 coming years in advance, and how we can improve our vision in the future more than President Bush has already done. Ms. Gorelick, in particular, turns out to have been partially responsible for putting up those intra-agency walls that prevented the information-sharing that might have prevented 9/11... putting her in the interesting position of having to sit in judgement of the consequences of her own actions. The Commission should focus on how to prevent future terrorist attacks, instead of wasting their time launching public attacks on members of the current administration.

However, that wouldn't fit their agenda of attacking President Bush during an election year in his greatest area of strength, an issue that should be in the forefront of all our minds -- fighting terrorism.

According to the Liberal school of economic thought, a free market economy is the worst thing for this country. They point to outsourcing of jobs as "proof" that President Bush is somehow a bad President, though it's been happening steadily since the signing of NAFTA by then-President Clinton in 1993. What they refuse to see is that free trade moves jobs both ways, and that the US is actually insourcing" more jobs from other countries than we send overseas... especially those manufacturing jobs that seem to be at the forefront of Democrat hand-wringing during the election campaign.

Even though the US economy is roaring like a river in full spate, the Democrats need to make it seem as though the economy is failing in some way in order to win the 2004 election. All gauges by which the economy can be measured have been indicating for months that everything was moving in the right direction, and that job growth (always the last thing to happen in a recovery) was on the way. The media complained about the "jobless recovery," as though the recovery was somehow over, not in progress. Now jobs have been created at a rate even the Left can't ignore -- 308,000 new jobs in March 2004 alone, and 205,000 during January and February (nearly double the original estimates). The Democrats have switched their arguments from "no jobs have been created" to "jobs are being sent overseas" and "the only jobs in America are burger-flipping."

Professor Michael L. Walden of N.C. State University has a slightly different perspective to offer, one that doesn't get a lot of play in the US media for some reason. "Consider what's happened in heavy manufacturing, which includes the manufacturing of vehicles, computers, electronics and other machinery. Since the mid-1990s, foreign companies have added 400,000 jobs in these industries in the U.S. Over the same time period, U.S. companies moved 300,000 jobs to foreign countries in the same sectors. The insourced jobs in these industries are also high-paying, with average compensation per employee of over $65,000." From the media soundbites, one would think that millions of jobs have been "sent overseas" with no jobs coming to American shores. Instead, the facts show that the US has increased overall jobs by a net 100,000 due to free trade. 

"Any way you slice it, the world is creating or transferring more jobs to the U.S. than we are doing to the rest of the world," said Daniel T. Griswold, a trade specialist at the Cato Institute, a research organization in Washington.
India's Essel Propack Ltd., Taiwan's Teco Electric & Machinery Co. and Denmark's Vestas Wind Systems A/S all have built plants in the United States in the last year and a half.
Other non-U.S. companies announced plans to increase hiring in the United States last year including Japan's Nissan Motor Co., with 3,350 jobs in Canton, Miss.; DaimlerChrysler AG of Germany, with 2,000 at a new Mercedes-Benz plant in Vance, Ala.; German appliance distributor BSH Bosch and Siemens Hausergate GmbH, with 1,300 in New Bern, N.C.; and Magna International Inc. of Canada, with as many as 800 in Bowling Green, Ky.

What outsourcing does is move the point of manufacture closer to the consumer. Among other things, this cuts international shipping costs, risks and time. Since the US is the world's largest consumer nation, goods destined to be sold here can be cheaper -- despite the increased cost of manufacturing -- to make here. If more people are buying Mercedes-Benz SL600 Roadsters here than in Germany, then by all means let Daimler-Chrysler employ Americans to make them in Alabama.

Passing laws to stop outsourcing is protectionism, which never works. "If anyone in our policy making framework thinks that by cutting off our outsourcing, we are going to encourage more insourcing and more investments in the United States, they are crazy," said Ernest Bower, president of the US-ASEAN Business Council (the largest US business group in Asia). President Bush tried protectionism in the steel industry for a short time by placing tariffs on foreign steel imports. He quickly removed the tarrifs when it became apparent that the worst part of the crisis had passed (and that they made our allies extremely unhappy).

Presidential hopeful John Kerry claims that he'll stop outsourcing of jobs (which would harm not only the US economy, but that of the entire world) by closing mysterious "tax loopholes" that give credits to "Benedict Arnold" companies for outsourcing what Kerry refers to as American jobs. The problem is that these loopholes remain largely a myth, according to James Hines, who teaches tax policy at the University of Michigan. US corporations owe the US government taxes on all profit, no matter where in the world they earn it, at the same rate of 35 percent. Companies can take a credit for taxes they pay to foreign governments, but still owe the remainder to the US. Companies can also defer taxes on foreign earnings that they invest abroad. That's a much smaller incentive than other countries' tax laws offer their corporations. For instance, German, Dutch, Canadian and Australian companies don't pay taxes on any money they earn outside their home countries. Since all those countries invest in the US, Americans are gaining about as many jobs from "tax loophole" insourcing as we lose to "tax loophole" outsourcing.

The biggest problem with this idea of altering the tax laws to stop companies from creating jobs overseas is the blind assumption that those companies would create those same jobs here in the US. The most likely outcome would be that the bulk of those jobs would never be created at all, for any workers, anywhere. Is it better to get a percentage of tax money from the overseas operations of some companies, or none at all? Is is better for US companies to employ some foreign workers, or none at all?

The real "Benedict Arnold" companies are those that move their headquarters overseas -- in the form of a rented office in Bermuda -- to avoid paying US taxes, not US-based companies with manufacturing centers in other countries. Those are the real tax cheats.

There can be no doubt that there's something phenomenally wrong with the Left, when they seem to be obsessed with the only war the United States could ever be said to have lost. Their fascination with America's moment of disillusionment, defeat, and disgrace -- despite the fact that we actually won, militarily speaking -- has discolored their political stance for over thirty years. Any time there's an American in uniform with a gun anywhere in the world, it seems as though Democrats just cannot wait to begin asking the inevitable question, "Is it Vietnam yet?"

Within days of our attack on the Taliban in Afghanistan, the Left was already rushing to compare it to Vietnam. "It's been nearly two months since the September 11 mass-slaughters, and the U.S. response more and more resembles that period when America was beginning its long slide into Vietnam," wrote Bernard Weiner, a professor of government and international politics at Western Washington University and San Diego State University. Kabul, the capital city of Afghanistan, fell just two days after that anniversary. (So much for Vietnam.) On 1 April 2003, he wrote about Iraq -- only two weeks after the fight began -- using nearly identical words: "Is it just me or is there a smell of Vietnam in the desert air?" Baghdad fell just over a week later. (Answer: it was just you.) The every-war-is-Vietnam meme has spread throughout the Left like a malevolent virus, until every minor setback facing our troops anywhere in the world is almost gleefully hailed as "the new Vietnam," though most of our armed forces weren't even born when Vietnam ended.

Why the fascination with Vietnam? Simple: it's the only war the LEFT ever won. And they did it -- intentionally or not -- by propping up our enemy and demoralising our own troops with vehemently anti-American rhetoric. In his book Telltale Hearts: The Origins and Impact of the Vietnam Anti-War Movement, Adam Garfinkle of the Foreign Policy Research Institute detailed how the anti-war protesters actually prolonged the Vietnam War. Their strident and visible attacks on American resolve both damaged the morale of American troops and spurred the North Vietnamese to fight on. In his 1985 memoir about the war, North Vietnamese General Vo Nguyen Giap credited protest groups -- like John Kerry's Vietnam Veterans Against the War -- for helping him achieve victory, according to Marine Lt. Col. Oliver North (Ret.). Now, the Left is doing it again.

Once again, the spectre of Vietnam is being raised -- and the memory those who fought and died there is being ruthlessly exploited -- by those who want to ignore America's successes in Iraq and see us fail, all in the name of political gain. Senator Ted Kennedy (D-Ma) stated that "Iraq is George Bush's Vietnam, and this country needs a new president." It's no coincidence that it's an election year, and that Kennedy is John Kerry's biggest supporter. Given the fact that Kennedy's brother JFK sent 15,000 troops into Vietnam to preserve democracy in 1961, it's surprising that he would use such a comparison as an insult. Senator Robert Byrd (D-WVa), quavered, "Surely I am not the only one who hears echoes of Vietnam in this development." What's most disturbing to me, however, is the fact that Muqtada al-Sadr, leader of the small but violent group of Iranian-backed anti-American religious fanatics attacking Coalition troops in Baghdad, made a statement which eerily echoed those of Senators Kennedy and Byrd, and on the same day.

"I call upon the American people to stand beside their brethren, the Iraqi people, who are suffering an injustice by your rulers and the occupying army, to help them in the transfer of power to honest Iraqis," al-Sadr said in a statement from his office in the southern city of Najaf. "Otherwise, Iraq will be another Vietnam for America and the occupiers."

Meanwhile, John Kerry attacked President Bush for shutting down al-Sadr's revolution-inciting newspaper Hawza, calling it "a legitimate voice in Iraq" (before taking back the word "legitimate"). Kerry then went on to say of al-Sadr, "he has clearly taken on a far more radical tone in recent days and aligned himself with both Hamas and Hezbollah, which is a sort of terrorist alignment." Sort of?

When the Democrats and Islamo-fascist terrorists are singing from the same hymn book, and the Democratic candidate for President can't even recognise terrorist groups as terrorists, how can anyone help but wonder who's really on America's side?

Muqtada al-Sadr, the radical anti-American cleric who has been preaching hatred and violence against Americans since Saddam fell, may reap what he's been sowing. His fanatical devotion to creating a theocracy in Iraq -- though he really doesn't have a very large following -- will hopefully come to an end at last, leaving the Iraqis better off than they would have been if we'd cut and run the way most Liberals have been demanding we do.

That's not going to happen. All of America's detractors, at home and abroad, really ought to have figured that out by now.

It's possible that closing his hate-spewing newspaper Hawza and arresting his aide Mustafa al-Yacoubi (accused of knifing al-Sadr's rival Abdel-Majid al-Khoei to death) were specifically done to drive al-Sadr into action now. It's critically important to remove these disruptive elements from Iraq while we still hold overall power and have the freedom to act, not to mention that we have fresh soldiers on hand from the ongoing troop rotation. Large military operations should be completed before the heat of the Iraqi summer sets in if possible, and when we have the freedom to set the timetable we should do so. We've got to clean out this extremist rat's nest and the one in Fallujah before we turn power over to the Iraqi people at the end of June. Carving out a place in the Middle East will be difficult enough for a fledgling democracy to do without this sort of internal strife erupting. Even the other main religious leaders in Iraq have asked al-Sadr to halt the violence, which he has refused to do. Neutralising this threat to Iraq's future won't be easy, and will give the media more ammunition with which to attack President Bush, but it must be done. (Watch the pious hand-wringing at ABC, CBS, NBC and CNN over the possibility of a widespread "Shi'a uprising" and "civil war".) 

The fact that an Iraqi judge, backed by the Governing Council, issued the arrest warrant for al-Sadr sends two important messages, though the American media isn't recieving, as usual. First, no one in the new Iraq should be above the law -- not even powerful clerics. Second, a plurality of the Iraqi people (49%) want a democracy, not a theocracy (21%). Certainly they don't want a government imposed by a gang of fanatical thugs controlled by a man who declared himself the "striking arm" of Hamas and quotes the leader of Hezbollah. That alone puts al-Sadr squarely in the terrorists' camp... and on the wrong side of US policy toward terrorists and their supporters.

Was al-Sadr actually behind the waves of terrorist violence the media has reported so gleefully of late? We may never find out for certain. It's good policy, either way, to turn the governance of Iraq over to its people as free of terrorism and violent thugs as possible. Arresting Muqtada al-Sadr, like toppling Saddam Hussein, would ultimately serve the Iraqi people and give them a better, cleaner new start in the world. Removing a self-proclaimed terrorist who incites violence against Americans and is trying to institute an Iranian-style theocracy can't hurt us any, either.

Removing al-Sadr from power is a win-win solution for everyone except those who want to see America fail, in fact.

PLEASE CONSIDER MY EXPERIENCE WHEN VOTING IN 2004.

Oh, yes, I hope everyone does. And I hope they consider John Kerry's record too... but that's another email.

For the past year, Iraq has been under the gentlest occupation in the history of warfare. Most Iraqis have responded well to that, genuinely grateful to have been liberated from the decades-long dictatorship of Saddam Hussein and his Ba'athist thugs. The rape rooms and torture chambers are closed for business, and the mass graves are being exhumed instead of filled. Most Iraqis, according to a recent poll conducted by Oxford Research, have a better life now without Saddam, and look forward to even more improvements in the future, including the chance to participate in a democratic form of government for the first time. However... one area of Iraq, known as the "Sunni Triangle," has never felt nor acted as though they were "liberated." This is the area in which Saddam was born, and one which he never brutalised as he did the rest of the country. Since the day Saddam abandoned Iraq to crawl into a spider hole and pull it in after himself, Coalition forces have treated the Sunni Triangle with kid gloves. They have even gone so far as to stay out of the town, allowing Fallujah more autonomy than any other area except the Kurdish territories. It's time for that to end.

In a brutal yet cowardly attack, a mob of Fallujah inhabitants murdered and mutilated four American civilians who were setting up security for a food shipment to the town. Shouting defiance of the Coalition, they dismembered, disgraced and burned the bodies -- all violations of Islamic law, incidentally. Many Iraqis were shocked at the barbarity. The bodies were dragged through the streets, obviously intended to invoke memories of Mogadishu. On 3 October 1993, 18 American servicemen were killed in the capital city of Somalia in an incident which inspired the film "Black Hawk Down." The result was that the ragged citizens of Mogadishu were able to force the United States of America to run away when then-President Clinton ordered them to evacuate rather than suffer more casualties. As Osama bin Laden said in 1998, "The youth were surprised at the low morale of the American soldiers and realized more than before that the America soldiers are paper tigers. After a few blows, they ran in defeat..." Dan Rather told Larry King, "I know that Saddam Hussein -- this is not speculative -- I know that Saddam Hussein's favorite movie was 'Black Hawk Down.' He watched it several times a week in the period preceding the American attack, because he was saying to himself, this is not made up, he was saying to himself, that's what we can do here." That is precisely what Saddam Hussein taught his people, and precisely what must NOT happen ever again. In the Arab world, it is fatal to be percieved as weak.

The only possible response to this atrocity is to make Fallujah into an example for the rest of the Sunni Triangle. The Coalition must engage in a full military occupation of the town, including martial law, zero-tolerance curfews, and the systematic, house-by-house search for and arrest of every single adult seen in those horrible photographs and videos. Those who attack Coalition forces -- not to mention civilians both Iraqi and American -- must be removed from circulation altogether, no matter what the rest of the world may think. If the inhabitants of Fallujah want to continue the war, we should give them what they ask for. If we ignore their attacks, turn the other cheek, and give in to their demands, we only prove Saddam and Osama right, and embolden the murderers further.

Thirty years of ruling Iraq as part of a totalitarian dictatorship have hardened the Saddam loyalists and molded them to scorn weakness. We can only show these insurgents mercy after showing them our strength -- strength is all that they respect. Any other course of action will only "prove" to them that they can continue their attacks with impunity.

The Sunni Triangle is the source of most of the internal strife in Iraq. If we don't pacify that area before we hand over power to the new Iraqi government, how are they supposed to deal with it?

The United Nations was founded in 1948 upon a flawed premise: that all nations would willingly work together for the betterment of the entire world. In the past few years alone, we have seen the consequences of believing that falsehood we told ourselves for over fifty years. Perhaps the time has come at last to examine the UN and its role, and how well -- if at all -- it functions in the real world.

Possibly the worst failing of the UN is its insistence that any group which can claim a territory should receive all the benefits and deference due a nation as old as Great Britain, as powerful as the United States, as populous as China or as large as the former Soviet Union.  This has given gangs of thugs -- Saddam Hussein and his Ba'ath party, for instance -- the assurance that if they could just hold a nation hostage, by whatever means, they would be treated as its legitimate government. No one would be allowed to invade them. UN peacekeepers might even help to quell internal uprisings. In the same way that members of the Mafia would use their ill-gotten wealth to "go legit" as honest businessmen, any gang leader who managed to fix an election or cow the populace of a small country could be treated as the equal of the President of the United States. The United Nations itself has given hope to the ambitions of the world's most ruthless dictators.

How ridiculous is it for Libya, while itself under stricture for human rights abuses, to head the UN Human Rights Committee? Did it make any sense for -- of all places in the world -- Saddam Hussein's Iraq to chair the UN Disarmament Conference in 2003? Yet this is precisely how matters stood a year ago. Apologists for the UN say that everything is equal, that all committee chairs move among the members in alphabetical rotation, and that their "fitness" to head various offices is never questioned. That's precisely my point! Perhaps a nation's worthiness to head UN committees or conferences should be questioned before they are handed such responsibilities.

Liberals, in general, love the United Nations for three reasons. First, they consider it a "world government", although I certainly never got the chance to vote for my representative. (As a citizen of a Republic, however, I still have more of a say than would residents of Cuba, Iran, North Korea, or any of the dozens of dictatorships that populate the UN.) Second, the UN gives France unearned power that they would never have on the world stage of their own merit, in the form of a permanent seat on the Security Council and a veto. Third, if the UN was a world government, the pow