From The Washington Times:

A debate going nowhere
By Victor Davis Hanson

Citizens calling themselves the Minutemen patrol the border in an effort to stop illegal aliens from entering the U.S. Mexican President Vicente Fox says Mexican migrant workers in the U.S. "are doing jobs that not even blacks want to do."
    Meanwhile, many Republicans think President George W. Bush's guest-worker program either mocks the law or is unworkable. In California, a frustrated Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger blurts out, "Close the borders in California and all across Mexico and the United States."
    Illegal immigration is again in the headlines, but the debate isn't going anywhere. Instead, all the tired controversies are again being aired.
    Some believe illegal immigration is a win-win bargain: An impoverished Mexico obtains critical dollars, while job-hungry America receives industrious unskilled workers. Critics counter that millions of illegal workers undermine the sanctity of the law and only abet a corrupt Mexican government that uses remittances to avoid needed reform.
    Both sides agree that when newcomers arrive legally from Mexico in the thousands, rather than unchecked in the millions, they become some of our best citizens.
    The politics by now are surreal. Those of the corporate right want cheap labor. So they join the self-interested multicultural left in politics, journalism and academia who don't mind seeing a growth of unassimilated and dependent constituents.
    Contradictory statistics -- showing illegal immigration resulting in either a net gain or loss to the U.S. economy -- are used by both sides. Human-interest anecdotes circulate about both the amazing successes and abject failures of illegal entrants. Yet rarely mentioned are the illiberal aspects of millions coming to the United States in violation of the law.
    (1) For starters, take remittances. Billions of dollars are sent annually back to Mexico from its citizens who come to the United States -- one of the largest sources of foreign exchange for the Mexican economy.
    But that cash does not come out of thin air. If such transfers aid depressed parts of Mexico, they also drain capital from struggling immigrant communities here. Workers without high school diplomas who send back much of their wages often cannot pay for their heath care, education or housing here.
    Entire towns in the American Southwest are deprived of critical revenues that could be invested in infrastructure to alleviate the need for state and federal intervention to ensure some parity with American citizens.
    (2) When employers hire millions of young laborers from Mexico -- often paid off the books and in cash -- poorer American workers cannot organize and thus must watch their own static wages eaten up by rising costs.
    (3) What do we tell the millions of equally poor immigrants from Asia, Latin America and Africa who wait years to come here legally? It is not especially liberal to require an indigent Filipino or Ethiopian to learn English, find a sponsor, hire a lawyer and queue up for years, while others simply break the law and enter illegally.
    (4) Progressives are understandably proud of environmental legislation, zoning laws and the culture of recycling in states like California. But when millions in this country don't speak English, are impoverished and uneducated, and live outside the law, it is only natural they lack the money to worry about how many families live in a single house, whether cars meet emission standards, or discarded furniture is disposed in authorized landfills rather than on roadsides.
    (5) Concern for the underprivileged doesn't always seem to extend to our own citizens. California, for example has imprisoned more than 14,000 illegal aliens, costing yearly more than twentyfold the annual budget of the underfunded new University of California at Merced -- located where it could best serve the underrepresented poor and minorities.
    (6) Finally, there is something elitist in this new idea that American youth should no longer work summers and after-school hours in agriculture, hotels, restaurants and landscaping. These hard jobs were once seen as ways to gain experience and understand the nobility of physical work. An entire generation of Americans is growing up that has never mowed a lawn, pruned a bush or washed a dish.
    For too long the debate over illegal immigration has been demagogued on hot-button issues of economics, ethnicity and relations with Mexico. The subtext always has been that those who support open borders are somehow more caring or ethical than their purportedly insensitive opponents who wish a return to measured and legal immigration.
    In fact, the opposite is true. More often it is an uncaring elite -- among both Democrats and Republicans -- that advocates not enforcing immigration laws. It is past time for them to explain why it is moral or liberal, rather than only convenient, to import millions outside the law to do jobs we supposedly cannot.
    
    Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University and a nationally syndicated columnist.

From telegraph.co.uk:

Africa must learn the boring stuff
By Mark Steyn

'DJ Attacks Live 8 Line-Up As 'Too White'," ran the headline in the Independent on Sunday. No good turn goes unpunished, and the trouble with all the good turns lined up for the Rock Against Bush mega-bash is that they're overwhelmingly of the Caucasian persuasion.

That's the crux of the "row" that "broke out" over the weekend between Bob Geldof, Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire, and Andy Kershaw, Jockey of the Discs at the British Broadcasting Corporation.

"If we are going to change the West's perception of Africa, events like this are the perfect opportunity to do something for Africa's self-esteem," said Kershaw. "But the choice of artists for the Live 8 concerts will simply reinforce the global perception of Africa's inferiority." And when Midge Ure gives you an inferiority complex you know you've got a self-esteem problem.

In this epic clash between St Bob and DJ Andy, one recalls Henry Kissinger's observation on the Iran/Iraq war: it's a shame they both can't lose. I've always had a certain regard for Bob Geldof, and it's disappointing to see him lending his name to a feeble bit of poseur politics chiefly aimed at certain Western leaders who are entirely blameless for Africa's current woes and severely constrained in their ability to do anything to alleviate them. So I reckon Live 8 is a dud, with or without Midge Ure, Pat Boone and Val Doonican.

On the other hand, I've always quite liked those radio shows where Andy Kershaw takes a tape recorder to Niger or Mali and comes back with the latest groovy sounds. But come on, man, what a lame-o complaint.

Given that you and Bob and "Make Poverty History" and all the rest are as one in your indestructible conviction that Africa's such a hopeless case it needs to be put on an ever-more lavish drip feed of Western "aid", it's surely a bit late in the day to begin raising self-esteem issues. I'd have low self-esteem if I'd been taken on by Western do-gooders as a permanent poster child for the world's irredeemable losers.

Bob and Andy agree that paternalism and condescension are the only ways to deal with Africa, they're just quibbling over the particular form of condescension. After all, Kershaw's remedy for avoiding the "reinforcement" of "global perceptions" about Africa would surely reinforce the oldest stereotype of all - that say what you like about these darkies, but they've got the most marvellous sense of rhythm.

The point is we all know Africa can produce wild, vibrant, exciting jungle rhythms. What's unclear is whether it can produce anything boring, humdrum and routine. Accountancy firms, for example. I mentioned in The Spectator a few weeks ago the extraordinary number of US tax returns that are now prepared by accountants in India.

Small hospitals in America have their patients' CAT scans analysed overnight by radiologists in India. These and a thousand other niche businesses were not facilitated by government leaders meeting at international summits. That said, government leaders did not actively obstruct their creation and growth, as governments do all over the Dark Continent.

It's hardly news that Western pop stars are so deeply concerned about Africa that they're willing to climb into wacky gear and caterwaul geriatric rock hits in a stadium for a couple of hours every decade. But would they be prepared to outsource the book-keeping for their music publishing to a guy in Ouagadougou or Niamey?

That's tougher than another spasm of feelgood agitprop aimed at that brave band of guilt-ridden Western liberals who got such a frisson out of wasting their money on the tsunami appeal they're itching to waste a ton more. (One quarter of all the tsunami aid sent to Sri Lanka has been sitting on the dock at Colombo since January, unclaimed and/or unprocessed. Maybe St Bob could do Sitting on the Dock of the Bay for his next charity single.)

As long as Western progressives are divided into those who wish to keep Africa in a backward subsistence agriculture economy and those who wish to keep Africa in a backward subsistence agriculture economy but if the rude fieldhands break into something catchy enough when Andy Kershaw's passing they'll be in with a shot as the warm-up to Bananarama at the next all-star charity gala, the do-gooders will have no useful contribution to make to Africa's future.

According to the World Bank's Doing Business report, in Canada it takes two days to incorporate a company; in Mozambique, it takes 153 days. And Mozambique's company law has been unchanged since 1888. In the midst of the unending demands that Bush do this, Blair do that, do more, do it now, would it be unreasonable to suggest that, after 117 years, the government of Mozambique might also be obligated to do something about its regulatory regime?

Meanwhile, next door in Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe's government is being given hundreds of thousands of tons of emergency supplies from the UN's World Food Programme. At the press conference, James Morris, head of the WFP, was at pains to emphasise that the famine was all due to drought and Aids, and certainly nothing to do with Mr Mugabe's stewardship of the economy. Some of us remember that during the 2002 G8 summit, also devoted to Africa, Zimbabwe's government ordered commercial farmers to cease all operations.

But still neither the UN nor his fellow African leaders will hear a word against Mr Mugabe. Listening to Mr Morris, the old monster must have laughed so hard his Chinese-made rubber penis fell off. (A popular Harare rumour, which I mention only in the hopes that old 1970s supergroups will organise a "Codpieces for Africa" fundraiser. It's outrageous that dictators should have to make do with these cheapjack Chinese models.)

The issue in Africa in every one of its crises - from economic liberty to Aids - is government. Until the do-gooders get serious about that, their efforts will remain a silly distraction. But, if you want some black music to cheer up the silly distraction, I recommend the lyrics of Andy Razaf, nephew of Queen Ranavalona III of Madagascar. If they ever clean up their kleptocratic act, Ain't Misbehavin' would make a great group anthem for Africa's heads of state. Until then, more than a few of their hapless peoples must wonder, "What Did I Do to be so Black and Blue?"

From The Rutherford Institue website:

Nat Hentoff: An American Classic
by John W. Whitehead

Ignoring the screams of the horrifically tortured doesn’t keep our hands from being stained with their blood.
—Nat Hentoff on the torture of prisoners worldwide

With eight decades to his credit and counting, journalist Nat Hentoff has had a long history of taking on controversial causes.

He has defended a woman rejected from law school because she is Caucasian; called into a talk show hosted by Oliver North to agree with him on liberal intolerance for free speech; was a friend to the late Malcolm X; and wrote the liner notes for Bob Dylan’s second album.

So it should have come as no surprise when Hentoff became involved in the Terri Schiavo case, bringing to light the facts that most journalists chose to ignore. In his Village Voice article calling the case judicial murder, judicial barbarism and the longest public execution in history, Hentoff sided with the many neurologists and radiologists who felt Schiavo was not in a “persistent vegetative state.” He has even criticized the media for their poor investigative reporting on the issue.

Hentoff, a lifelong leftist, has angered nearly every political faction around—including his own Village Voice editors. A self-proclaimed “Jewish atheist, civil libertarian, left-wing pro-lifer,” Hentoff is one of a few who has stuck to his principles through his many years of work, regardless of the controversy he may have provoked. Simply put, Hentoff says what he thinks and does so clearly.

Born in Boston on June 10, 1925, Hentoff received a B.A. with honors from Northeastern University and did graduate work at Harvard. From 1953 to 1957, he was associate editor of Down Beat magazine. He has written many books on jazz, biographies and novels, including children’s books, and he currently writes a weekly column for the Village Voice and for the United Media Syndicate, which reaches around 250 papers in the country. He writes on jazz and country music for the Wall Street Journal. Publications in which his work have appeared include the New York Times, Commonwealth, the New Republic, the Atlantic and the New Yorker, where he was a staff writer for more than 25 years. In 1980, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in Education and an American Bar Association Silver Gavel Award for his coverage of the law and criminal justice in his columns. In 1985, he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Laws by Northeastern University.

Although Hentoff has always considered himself to be a liberal, his pro-life position is hardly tolerated by fellow left-wingers. Arguing that a human not yet born still counts as one of our species, with all the genetic information that makes each human being unique, Hentoff is almost alone when he makes the case as a liberal that human life in the womb should not be exterminated. When he first declared himself a pro-lifer, women in his Village Voice office stopped speaking to him. And although Hentoff had been invited to speak at Nazareth College in Rochester (a secular institution), he was uninvited two weeks before the lecture. Members on the lecture committee at Nazareth apparently felt that his stance on abortion was outside the limit of what students could safely hear.

American Civil Liberties Union affiliates around the country had for years invited Hentoff to speak at fundraising dinners, but after declaring himself a pro-lifer—and even though he agrees with most other ACLU policies—all such invitations stopped. Hentoff later resigned from the ACLU in protest of their position on assisted suicide, as well as their position against revealing the results of HIV tests on newborn babies. He has since re-joined the ACLU, citing his appreciation for their efforts to alert the country to the dangers posed by the Bush administration’s post-9/11 policies.

Hentoff has even criticized the Democratic Party for its past practice of speaking about tolerance yet tolerating no dissent within its ranks on the abortion issue. Nevertheless, men and women from all over the country identify with Hentoff, writing that they thought themselves to be the solitary liberal pro-lifers in their office, at school and at home and were surprised to find Hentoff in the same position. Even some feminists are on his side—the Feminists for Life of America, for example. But with or without supporters, Hentoff’s opinions remain principled and without hypocrisy.

During Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign for the presidency, Hentoff set himself against the former President, saying that Clinton “has done more harm to the Constitution than any president in American history.” Hentoff defied liberals who defended Clinton, whom he considered “a serial violator of our liberties” during his presidency.

When I came under attack by the Clinton White House and was labeled part of the “vast right wing conspiracy” for being an attorney in the Paula Jones case, Hentoff came to my defense. Writing in the Washington Post, Hentoff called me a “conspirator for the Constitution,” citing my work on behalf of the Bill of Rights, and said the President could benefit from reading my weekly commentaries.

Recently, in response to Clint Eastwood’s Academy Award-winning movie Million Dollar Baby, Hentoff criticized Eastwood for “cluelessly encouraging the euthanization of some of the disabled.” A fierce proponent of disability rights, Hentoff has opposed assisted suicide and previously bashed the ACLU for supporting its legalization, saying it “ignores its effects on the severely disabled for whom that fatal decision would be made.” Although an acquaintance of Eastwood, Hentoff did not hesitate to criticize the message of Eastwood’s film, which Hentoff feels is “that the kindest response to someone struggling with the life changes brought on by a severe injury is, after all, to kill them.”

Hentoff’s views on the rights of Americans to write, think and speak freely are expressed in his columns, and he has come to be acknowledged as an authority on First Amendment defense, the Bill of Rights, the Supreme Court, student rights and education. Friends and critics alike describe him as the kind of writer, and citizen, that all should aspire to be—“less interested in ‘exclusives’ than in ‘making a difference.’” Critiquing Hentoff’s autobiography, Speaking Freely, Nicholas von Hoffman refers to him as “a trusting man, a gentle man, just and undeviatingly consistent.” Perhaps Hentoff describes himself best:

My lives as a radical (according to the FBI); an “enslaver of women” (according to pro-choicers); a suspiciously unpredictable civil-libertarian (according to the ACLU); a dangerous defender of alleged pornography (according to my friend Catherine MacKinnon); an irrelevant, anachronistic integrationist (according to assorted black nationalists); and, as an editor at the Washington Post once said, not unkindly—“a general pain in the …”

But make no mistake about it, Hentoff’s reputation as one of our nation’s most respected, controversial and uncompromising writers is undeniable.

Nat Hentoff is a true American classic.

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute and author of the award-winning Grasping for the Wind. He can be contacted at johnw@rutherford.org.

From The LA Times:

Who's Really Abusing the Koran?
At Gitmo, the prisoners, not the guards, were the worst offenders.

By Max Boot

All the headlines about "Abuse of the Koran at Gitmo" are absolutely accurate. Brig. Gen. Jay Hood's internal investigation has uncovered some shocking incidents. On at least six occasions, Korans were ripped up. They were urinated on three times, and attempts were made to flush them down the toilet at least three other times.
Why aren't millions of Muslims rioting in response to these defilements? Because the perpetrators were prisoners, not guards. As John Hinderaker notes on weeklystandard.com, the most serious desecrations of the Koran at the Guantanamo Bay detention facility were committed by the Muslim inmates themselves.
You'd never know this from the news coverage, which pounced on Hood's finding of five confirmed incidents of Koran abuse as proof that Newsweek was on to something with its phony-baloney report about guards flushing a Koran down the toilet.
Far from confirming accusations of American depravity, what the report actually shows is that Guantanamo is the first gulag in history run on the principle that no sensibility of the inmates should be offended, no matter how inadvertently.
All inmates are furnished a Koran at U.S. government expense. Since they're imprisoned because they are suspected of being violent religious extremists, some might object that this adds fuel to the fire. But that's not the view of the "Stalinists" who run the Defense Department. For some nefarious reason, they have issued guidelines that call for the utmost respect for the sacred scripture of their enemies.
At Gitmo, personnel receive instructions: "Do not disrespect the Koran (let it touch the floor, kick it, step on it)." They must "handle the Koran as if it were a fragile piece of delicate art." This means ensuring "that the Koran is not placed in offensive areas such as the floor, near the toilet or sink, near the feet, or dirty/wet area." Only Muslim chaplains and interpreters are actually supposed to touch a Koran, and then only if wearing clean latex gloves. Moreover: "Two hands will be used at all times when handling the Koran in a manner signaling respect and reverence."
The Hood report suggests that, for the most part, this elaborate etiquette is obeyed. The worst lapse, splashed (so to speak) across front pages around the world, occurred March 25, when a guard urinated outside an air vent and some of his urine blew into a cell and onto an inmate and his Koran. Human rights absolutists should be relieved (sorry, can't help myself) to know that the detainee received a fresh uniform and a new Koran, and the guard was reprimanded and reassigned.
That's the most heinous case of Koran abuse by Gitmo personnel. The four other verified incidents involved an interrogator kicking a Koran, guards accidentally getting a Koran wet with water, an interrogator (subsequently fired) stepping on a Koran and a "two-word obscenity" mysteriously appearing on the inside cover of a Koran.
Some of the most inflammatory allegations, such as guards flushing a Koran, appear to be the result of unsubstantiated rumors spread by inmates who may have been following Al Qaeda instructions to falsely claim mistreatment. Or maybe they were simply trying to deflect blame for all the Korans they were mutilating on their own.
More serious incidents of Koran abuse by Americans conceivably could come to light, but it is clear that anyone who did so would be acting against orders. Reading the Hood report — which is by one count the 189th (no kidding) Defense Department investigation of how prisoners in the war on terrorism are treated — I couldn't help but think: Too bad Muslims don't show the same exquisite concern for the sensibilities of others.
Too bad Islamic states such as Saudi Arabia, far from handing out Bibles at government expense, make it a crime to possess that holy book. Too bad Islamic fanatics have no compunction about blowing up churches and synagogues and slaughtering Christians and Jews. Too bad the murderous intolerance of Sunni terrorists extends to Shiite "idolaters" as well.
All the bombings of Shiites in Iraq have resulted not only in the deaths of thousands of Muslims but also, I imagine, the destruction of quite a few Korans.
It would be nice if the global Islamic community, the news media and assorted human rights agitators could display the same level of outrage about the real atrocities perpetrated by our enemies as they do about the imaginary horrors of the American Gulag.

From the News & Observer: a good summary of last night's outstanding Ryan Adams show. I thought more of the first half of the show than Menconi seems to have done, but otherwise the review is on the money.

Adams takes his time before hometown crowd
By David Menconi

RALEIGH -- Here's a theory about Ryan Adams that explains almost everything: The guy just can't help himself. Whether it's putting out three albums a year when one would do or running a bad joke into the ground, he gives voice to every thought that pops into his head, seemingly incapable of editing himself. That attention-deficit-disorder paradigm goes for Adams' live show as well as his recording career.

Wednesday night, Adams and his new band the Cardinals played a homecoming show at Meymandi Hall, the former Whiskeytown leader's first show in his old hometown in nearly five years. There was some tension in the air, but most of the crowd was with him. When someone yelled out "I love you" after the first song, Adams replied, "Then I apologize in advance."

Throughout the evening, Adams spent his time between songs pacing and flitting around the stage, taking drags from a couple of different smoldering cigarettes and gulps from multiple bottles and cups. He fussed endlessly with his guitar tuning, the height of his microphone, his glasses. He hovered around bassist Catherine Popper so much that she lectured him to stay out of her space. And he babbled endlessly, frequently off the microphone, as his bandmates stood around waiting him out. More than once, drummer Brad Pemberton cut him off by starting another song.

"Where's that clown I ordered?" Adams muttered at one point. "Wait a minute, I'm already here." Later, he cracked to guitarist J.P. Bowersock that they were playing for "an audience hologram" rather than actual people.

A friend likened it to watching Dennis Hopper coming unhinged in "Apocalypse Now." While Adams played a generous set of 26 songs in a bit less than three hours, his between-song self-indulgences kept the show from building up any momentum and flow. And that was a shame, because there were many spectacular moments.

The opening stretch included most of the high points from Adams' new double-album, "Cold Roses" (Lost Highway Records), in rocked-up arrangements. The more forceful onstage versions served as cool counterpoints to the mellower studio versions, more like the Allman Brothers than the Grateful Dead on the jam-band continuum. Adams also threw in a bunch of songs from the other two albums he's putting out this year, which were fine as far as they went. But the unreleased songs had no context, and none registered as anything stronger than pleasant.

While the sold-out crowd was generally well-behaved, its frustration at all the unfamiliar songs grew palpable. People began to yell for songs they wanted to hear, and Adams got a little testy.

"I'll get you there," he said. "You get three hours, I can have two seconds to be a narcissistic bastard ... Hey, I'm three frets away from working at a gas station here."

Fortunately, Adams and his band finally hit their stride the second half of the show with four songs from his 2000 solo debut, "Heartbreaker." "My Winding Wheel" was almost unrecognizable, closer to a sprint than a shuffle. "To Be Young (is to be sad, is to be high)" had some of Adams' and Bowersock's best guitar interplay of the night. "Oh My Sweet Carolina," Adams' love letter to his home state, was almost too pretty for words. And Adams jacked up "Shakedown on 9th Street" with the Bo Diddley backbeat from Buddy Holly's "Not Fade Away," thrashing the bejesus out of his guitar and doing everything but setting it on fire.

Then came the perfect capper, a cameo appearance by Adams' old Whiskeytown bandmate Caitlin Cary. They did five songs together, all in the key of ragged but right. They clearly hadn't rehearsed, yet it was genuinely moving to see them together again after so long. It felt just like those old Whiskeytown shows at the Brewery way back when, right down to the mistakes. It's been so long since Adams and Cary have sang together that they needed a prompt from someone in the crowd to remember the last verse of "The Battle."

After that, a voice rang out from the crowd: "Same as it ever was!"

From The Washington Post:

Amnesty's Amnesia
By Anne Applebaum

A few years ago I spent several days sitting in the back of a library in London, reading through newsletters, pamphlets and other accounts of Soviet prison conditions published in the 1970s and '80s by Amnesty International. Sometimes these reports were remarkably detailed, testifying to the extraordinary ability of prisoners to smuggle out their stories. One included the memorable observation that on Sept. 13, 1979, the prisoner Zhukauskas "found a white worm" in his soup. A more harrowing 1987 news release told the story of the hunger strike and prison death of dissident writer Anatoly Marchenko. His widow, denied a death certificate or a proper funeral, wrote his name in ballpoint pen on his makeshift grave.

But Amnesty also published more general information about the Soviet political system, the whole of which -- the state-run media, the courts, the secret police -- was geared to the suppression of political dissent. This was important work, not least because most Soviet citizens were too frightened to do it. After all, during Joseph Stalin's lifetime, still a recent memory, some 25 million people had been arrested in the Soviet Union, mostly arbitrarily, and placed in thousands of forced-labor camps and exile villages all over the country. Millions died of starvation and overwork. This prison camp system, known as the gulag, cast such a horrific shadow that people were still afraid of it, 30 years after Stalin's death.

Amnesty, in other words, was an organization that once knew the meaning of the word "gulag." Amnesty also once knew the importance of political neutrality. On its Web site, the organization still describes itself as "independent of any government, political ideology, economic interest or religion." In the Cold War era, this neutrality was important, since it prevented the organization's publications, whether on prison food or prison deaths, from being seen as propaganda for one side or another.

I don't know when Amnesty ceased to be politically neutral or at what point its leaders' views morphed into ordinary anti-Americanism. But surely Amnesty's recent misuse of the word "gulag" marks some kind of turning point. In the past few days, not only has Amnesty's secretary general, Irene Khan, called the U.S. prison for enemy combatants at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, "the gulag of our times," but Amnesty's U.S. director, William Schulz, has agreed that U.S. prisons for enemy combatants are "similar at least in character, if not in size, to what happened in the gulag." In an interview, Schulz also said that foreign governments should prosecute U.S. officials, as if they were the equivalent of the Soviet Union's criminal leadership.

Thus Guantanamo is the gulag, President Bush is Generalissimo Stalin, and the United States, in Khan's words, is a "hyper-power" that "thumbs its nose at the rule of law and human rights" just like the Soviet Union. In part, I find this comparison infuriating because in the Soviet Union it would have been impossible for the Supreme Court to order the administration to change its policies in Guantanamo Bay, as it has done, or for the media to investigate Abu Ghraib, as they has done, or for Irene Khan to publish an independent report about anything at all.

Like Khan and Schulz, I am appalled by this administration's detention practices and interrogation policies, by the lack of a legal mechanism to judge the guilt of alleged terrorists, and by the absence of any outside investigation into reports of prison abuse. But I loathe these things precisely because the United States is not the Soviet Union, because our detention centers are not intrinsic to our political system, and because they are therefore not "similar in character" to the gulag at all.

Most of all, though, I hate them because they are counterproductive. Like the Cold War, the war on terrorism is an ideological war, one that we will "win" when our opponents give up and join us, just like the East Germans who streamed over the Berlin Wall. But if the young people of the Arab world are to reject radical Islam and climb that wall, they will have to admire what they see on the other side. Almost never before have we so badly needed neutral, credible, human rights advocates who can investigate the U.S. detention policy in context, remembering that we live in a system whose courts, legislature and media can all effect change.

Amnesty, by misusing language, by discarding its former neutrality, and by handing the administration an easy way to brush off "ridiculous" accusations, also deprives itself of what should be its best ally. The United States, as the world's largest and most powerful democracy, remains, for all its flaws, the world's best hope for the promotion of human rights. If Amnesty still believes in its stated mission, its leaders should push American democratic institutions to influence U.S. policy for the good of the world, and not attack the American government for the satisfaction of their own political faction.

From Opinion Journal:

'Throat' the Bums Out
Hero or not, Mark Felt did America a great service.
By Brendan Miniter

Tuesday, June 7, 2005

This is an open memo to those on the right who've spent the past week chastising their counterparts on the left for calling Mark Felt, a k a "Deep Throat," a hero. It's true that the recently outed Watergate supersource might have acted for his own interests, and that real heroes pay the price for their heroism instead of hiding in the shadows of a parking garage. It is therefore difficult to laud his personal character or portray him as someone young people should emulate.
But if Mr. Felt isn't personally a hero, his actions look a lot more heroic than the actions of those who've had the most biting words for the now 91-year-old man who at the time was the No. 2 official at the FBI. Pat Buchanan, a former speechwriter for Richard Nixon, called Mr. Felt a "snake." Charles Colson, another Nixon aide, who served seven months in prison for obstruction of justice, said Mr. Felt was "violating his oath to keep this nation's secrets." Watergate conspirator turned radio personality G. Gordon Liddy, who also served time, is quoted as saying bluntly that Mr. Felt "violated the ethics of the law enforcement profession."

These are valid points, though they ring rather hollow coming from the defenders of a corrupt administration, two of whom spent time behind bars for their crimes. And in any case, even if Mr. Felt acted for the wrong reasons, his actions helped pull the nation out of a moral downward spiral.

At the time of Watergate, the nation had just suffered through the moral upheaval of the 1960s: antiwar activism, the hippy rebellion, political assassinations. It's notable here that the first story Mr. Felt helped Bob Woodward on was an assassination attempt on George Wallace. Earlier Mr. Felt had tipped Mr. Woodward off that Vice President Spiro Agnew had accepted a bribe--a charge Mr. Woodward had been unable to corroborate, but that ultimately led to Agnew's resignation.

In this period of bullets, beads and rule bending, corruption in government had become rampant. In part that corruption was allowed to grow to touch the highest reaches of government because, whether it was the War on Poverty or the Cold War, there was always a bigger battle to be fought--much for the same reason the Democratic Party a quarter century later never repudiated the Clinton administration for its long list of scandals. The irony was that a nation that lacked moral self-confidence was also a nation that would be unprepared to wage what were ultimately moral struggles against the demons of poverty and communism. This is something Richard Nixon never seemed to understand as he spent more money than LBJ did on the welfare state, embraced Keynesian economics, and otherwise tried to placate critics on the left by co-opting much of their domestic agenda, even as he fought on in Vietnam.

Perhaps the nation's moral slide downhill began with the 1960 presidential election. Nixon had graciously conceded, but many were left grumbling about a "stolen election" that put John F. Kennedy in the White House. Regardless, by the time Nixon won the presidency in 1968 he was ready to get his hands dirty in the rough game of hardball politics. And why not? J. Edgar Hoover had been using the bat as director of the FBI for years, feeling free to open files on everyone from gangsters to Martin Luther King. Hoover was feared, and he was tolerated because he got his share of high-profile collars, even as he occasionally ran roughshod over civil liberties.

Mr. Felt himself participated in this rule bending. He was a Hoover protégé and he was later convicted of conducting illegal searches aimed at dismantling the domestic terror group the Weather Underground. (Ronald Reagan pardoned him in 1981.) When Hoover died in 1972, Mr. Felt was miffed that he was not handed the top job at the Bureau. Instead of resigning, he started leaking information to Mr. Woodward.

Going to a grand jury or the voters before the 1972 elections would have been much more honorable. Nonetheless, Mr. Felt effectively became the pressure valve we needed to let corrupt air out of the government. He could not have known that his leaks would eventually bring down the president. Nor could he foresee the negative impact the collapse of a presidency would have across the country and across the world. The subsequent loss of the war in Vietnam and the political and economic disarray of the 1970s were not his fault. They were the price the nation paid for the moral turpitude of the political class.

Three decades ago it would have also been impossible to foresee how long the road back would be for the nation. That road, however, had to begin with the repudiation of President Nixon, the highest officer implicated in the scandals. In Nixon's wake came Jimmy Carter and then Ronald Reagan. Mr. Carter, by all accounts a good man at heart, proved ineffective. But by shifting foreign policy toward an emphasis on human rights, he helped lay the groundwork to make the moral stand that eventually brought down the Soviet empire.

It would have been impossible for Reagan to make that stand if the nation hadn't first repudiated the corruption of the 1970s. Nixon was given a chance in 1968 to provide the nation with moral leadership along with the right domestic and foreign policies. That he chose to undermine his own administration with what was at heart a petty break-in, reveals how nonchalant he was about moral leadership. That, of course, is what made it possible for Mr. Felt's leaks to Mr. Woodward in a deserted parking garage to bring down the most powerful man in the free world.

Mr. Miniter is assistant editor of OpinionJournal.com. His column appears Tuesdays.

Knockout

Cinderella Man.
By Frederica Mathewes-Green

He's the Bulldog of Bergen, the Pride of New Jersey, the Hope of the Irish: James J. Braddock, has-been, might-have-been, and struggling breadwinner. As Russell Crowe portrays this real-life figure from the Depression era in Cinderella Man, he lopes down the sidewalk with his eyebrows tented in mild surprise and his mouth hanging slightly ajar. This Cinderella still has dust behind his ears.

Braddock is no ball of fire. He's not motivated by a passion for boxing, like Maggie in last fall's hit, Million Dollar Baby. He doesn't even have the horsy competitiveness of Seabiscuit, subject of Hollywood's last inspirational-underdog-of-the-Depression venture. If Braddock is an underdog, he wears it well: He's doglike in his loyalty, gentleness, and nobility of spirit. When life gives him a kick in the pants, he accepts it uncomplainingly; When it tosses him a bone, he's sincerely grateful.

How grateful is shown by a scene midway through. Things have gotten so tough for Jim and his wife Mae (Renee Zellwegger) that they can no longer keep their three children at home; without money for grocery and heating bills, the kids are getting sick. (In an earlier scene, we had seen Mae stretching a bottle of milk by adding water.) The children are farmed out to live with extended family. Regretfully, Braddock goes down to the relief office and signs up for the dole so he can bring them home. But then he wins a fight, and returns to the same office. He plops down a roll of bills in front of the cashier. Later, when a reporter asks him about this, he shrugs it off. "This is a great country, a country that helps a man when he's in trouble. I thought I should return it."

It's exactly this mildness, this simplicity, that makes Cinderella Man such a knockout. Director Ron Howard controls the elements so masterfully that the film is deeply emotionally satisfying. In itself, the story was dangerously sweet: one-time promising boxer slips from the spotlight, then gets another chance, and, fighting to save his family from poverty, rises to win the championship. If Braddock had been a bright-eyed, stalwart hunk, spouting off about justice and courage, the film would have been unbearably tedious. Self-effacing Crowe, on the other hand, draws you in; there always seems to be some further secret in the character of this quiet, curiously solitary, man. And a wife who was a quick-witted glamour gal, badly disguised under a 30's hat, would have torpedoed credibility. Zellwegger balances Crowe perfectly, with her pinched expression and Fran Drescher accent.

But the linchpin of this terrific cast is Paul Giamatti as renowned trainer Joe Gould. The standard order calls for an outwardly abrasive cigar-chewing grumpas, who in a late scene gets teary-eyed and reveals a heart of gold. No such folderol for Giamatti. He looks like he's been molded out of Play-Doh, his domed head pinched and pulled upward, and bringing everything along with it, indomitably buoyant. As usual, he's irresistibly watchable, yet without overwhelming Crowe's quiet guilelessness; the two seem a perfect match.

And when he pounds on the canvas, shouting instructions to Braddock during the fight, boy, it sure sounded like good advice to me. I hadn't before seen that a good trainer is primarily an analyst of movement, continually evaluating the strengths of each fighter as the bout progresses. Giamatti showed how active a trainer has to be during a fight, not just by his delivery of sharp-eyed coaching, but by his own tense physicality. And the lines he gets! As a wealthy promoter says, after he's been overcome by Gould's silver-tongued persuasion, "They oughta put your mouth in the circus."

Howard doesn't short-change us emotionally, however; his restraint has its limits. When Braddock is failing during a fight, he sees blurry images — a bread line, his kids' empty beds, a stack of bills stamped "Past Due" — and begins to recover his strength. Likewise, when Mae is taunted by a fighter who has killed two men in the ring, she sees images of a coffin spattered with dirt, and a lone widow walking across a cemetery. You might think this kind of overly literal depiction would be too broad but, actually, it turns out to be just about right.

The character of this bad-guy fighter, Max Baer (Craig Bierko), is not overly subtle; he sports two floozies, openly signals his plan to kill Braddock like he did the others, and in the clinches murmurs in Braddock's ear, "Does your wife call my name at night?" Of course, this only makes Braddock fight harder, which is obvious and inevitable and not a bit less effective for that. There are 35,000 in attendance at this fight, and every single one is rooting for Braddock; apparently, Baer the World Champion has no fans. During the big fight Mae goes to church and finds it full of people praying for her husband; the priest explains, "They all think that Jim's fighting for them." Well, that's O.K. too. You need a little bit of ham with the mashed potatoes.

It's often observed that it's easy to depict evil in stories; what's difficult is depicting good. The Phantom of the Opera is fascinating, and Prince Charming is a bore. But Cinderella Man accomplishes that difficult task, giving us in Jim Braddock a character who is genuinely and believably good. It does this, not by showing dark sides to "balance" his character (the usual gambit) but by depicting him as humble. Braddock does extraordinarily heroic things, but in a way that communicates that it's just the normal way a man should act.

Cinderella Man is not really a movie about boxing, it's a movie about what it means to be a man. In the character of Jim Braddock, we can read what today's audiences are wistful for: a man who works hard to support his wife and kids, who teaches his kids to be honest, who communicates his delight in his wife with every glance. As Mae says to Jim in a late scene, "You're the Bulldog of Bergen, the Pride of New Jersey, you're everybody's hope, you're your kids' hero, and the champion of my heart." Do they make them like that any more?

— Frederica Mathewes-Green writes regularly for NPR's Morning Edition, Beliefnet.com, Christianity Today, and other publications. She is the author of Gender: Men, Women, Sex and Feminism, among other books.

Washington Is the Source of Terror
By Paul Craig Roberts

The U.S. government gave the slave trade a boost by offering money for Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters. Afghan and Pakistani warlords simply rounded up people who looked Arab or foreign and sold them to the Americans as captured fighters. The “fighters” apparently included relief workers, refugees and Arab businessmen. The tribunals looking into the classification of Guantanamo prisoners as “enemy combatants” have uncovered numerous examples of hapless victims of a naive U.S. government too flush with money.

The Bush administration, of course, denies that it bought its detainees, as it denies everything. On May 31, 2005, however, Michelle Faul of The Associated Press reported that in March 2002, leaflets and broadcasts from helicopters in Afghanistan enticed Afghans to “Hand over the Arabs and feed your families for a lifetime.”

One leaflet said: “You can receive millions of dollars. This is enough to take care of your family, your village, your tribe for the rest of your life, pay for livestock and doctors and school books and housing for all your people.”

Najeeb al-Nauimi, a former Qatar justice minister, leads a group of lawyers representing 100 detainees who were sold to the naive Americans. He says a consortium of wealthy Arabs are buying back fellow citizens kidnapped by Pakistani gangs before they can be sold to the Americans.

More is going on here than merely unintended consequences of a hairbrained policy. The Bush administration has proven itself to be utterly irresponsible in the use of power. And it keeps demanding more power, including the suspension of our civil liberties in order to better fight “terrorism.”

Aside from Sept. 11, an event of several years ago, the only terrorism the United States has experienced is the terrorism Bush created by invading Iraq. Why are we worried about Osama bin Laden when the moronic Bush administration is so adept at creating terrorism?

Notice the pattern. Bush creates terrorism and then suspends our civil liberties in the name of his war on terror.

The real terror Americans experience comes from their own government. Indeed, consider the terror the accounting firm, Arthur Anderson, and its 85,000 worldwide employees experienced as a result of the gestapo tactics of federal prosecutors. Prosecutors used a stupid jury and a weak-minded judge to convict an entire accounting firm for the actions of the few accountants who handled the Enron account.

It was completely clear at the time that whereas a case existed against a few individual accountants, no case existed against the firm itself. Arbitrary and capricious prosecutors grabbed power. The American public was so whipped up in a frenzy over Enron that it didn’t care whose blood was spilled.

Just as someone had to pay for Sept. 11—even if it is our own troops and tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis who had no more to do with the attack than the U.S. troops who are losing their lives and limbs—someone had to pay for Enron. So the prosecutors destroyed Arthur Anderson, one of the top 10 companies in the world ranked by market value and one of America’s greatest assets.

Now, the U.S. Supreme Court has reversed the conviction. The highest court says Arthur Anderson was not guilty. But how do we bring Arthur Anderson back to life and restore the reputations and careers of its many thousands of employees? Federal prosecutors effectively executed the firm and destroyed the highly valuable asset.

Don’t expect Bush, who admits no mistake, to make restitution for the criminal actions of his U.S. Department of Justice (sic). The remedy is a civil suit by all the partners and employees of Arthur Anderson against the U.S. government for damages. I think $1 trillion is a good number. It is a figure demanded by justice. And it will serve the cause of peace by bankrupting the war-mongering Bush administration and applying the brake to Bush’s wars of empire.

Speech Commemorating the 40th Anniversary of D-Day

Delivered by President Ronald Reagan
June 6, 1984

Pointe Du Hoc, Normandy, France

We're here to mark that day in history when the Allied armies joined in battle to reclaim this continent to liberty. For four long years, much of Europe had been under a terrible shadow. Free nations had fallen, Jews cried out in the camps, millions cried out for liberation. Europe was enslaved, and the world prayed for its rescue. Here, in Normandy, the rescue began. Here, the Allies stood and fought against tyranny, in a giant undertaking unparalleled in human history.

We stand on a lonely, windswept point on the northern shore of France. The air is soft, but forty years ago at this moment, the air was dense with smoke and the cries of men, and the air was filled with the crack of rifle fire and the roar of cannon. At dawn, on the morning of the 6th of June, 1944, 225 Rangers jumped off the British landing craft and ran to the bottom of these cliffs. Their mission was one of the most difficult and daring of the invasion: to climb these sheer and desolate cliffs and take out the enemy guns. The Allies had been told that some of the mightiest of these guns were here, and they would be trained on the beaches to stop the Allied advance.

The Rangers looked up and saw the enemy soldiers at the edge of the cliffs, shooting down at them with machine guns and throwing grenades. And the American Rangers began to climb. They shot rope ladders over the face of these cliffs and began to pull themselves up. When one Ranger fell, another would take his place. When one rope was cut, a Ranger would grab another and begin his climb again. They climbed, shot back, and held their footing. Soon, one by one, the Rangers pulled themselves over the top, and in seizing the firm land at the top of these cliffs, they began to seize back the continent of Europe. Two hundred and twenty-five came here. After two days of fighting, only ninety could still bear arms.

Behind me is a memorial that symbolizes the Ranger daggers that were thrust into the top of these cliffs. And before me are the men who put them here. These are the boys of Pointe du Hoc. These are the men who took the cliffs. These are the champions who helped free a continent. These are the heroes who helped end a war. Gentlemen, I look at you and I think of the words of Stephen Spender's poem. You are men who in your "lives fought for life and left the vivid air singed with your honor."

I think I know what you may be thinking right now -- thinking "we were just part of a bigger effort; everyone was brave that day." Well, everyone was. You remember the story of Bill Millin of the 51st Highlanders? Forty years ago today, British troops were pinned down near a bridge, waiting desperately for help. Suddenly, they heard the sound of bagpipes, and some thought they were dreaming. Well, they weren't. They looked up and saw Bill Millin with his bagpipes, leading the reinforcements and ignoring the smack of bullets into the ground around him.

Lord Lovat was with him -- Lord Lovat of Scotland, who calmly announced when he got to the bridge, "Sorry, I'm a few minutes late," as if he'd been delayed by a traffic jam, when in truth he'd just come form the bloody fighting on Sword Beach, which he and his men had just taken.

There was the impossible valor of the Poles who threw themselves between the enemy and the rest of Europe as the invasion took hold, and the unsurpassed courage of the Canadians who had already seen the horrors of war on this coast. They knew what awaited them there, but they would not be deterred. And once they hit Juno Beach, they never looked back.

All of these men were part of a roll call of honor with names that spoke of a pride as bright as the colors they bore; The Royal Winnipeg Rifles, Poland's 24th Lancers, the Royal Scots Fusiliers, the Screaming Eagles, the Yeomen of England's armored divisions, the forces of Free France, the Coast Guard's "Matchbox Fleet," and you, the American Rangers.

Forty summers have passed since the battle that you fought here. You were young the day you took these cliffs; some of you were hardly more than boys, with the deepest joys of life before you. Yet, you risked everything here. Why? Why did you do it? What impelled you to put aside the instinct for self-preservation and risk your lives to take these cliffs? What inspired all the men of the armies that met here? We look at you, and somehow we know the answer. It was faith and belief. It was loyalty and love.

The men of Normandy had faith that what they were doing was right, faith that they fought for all humanity, faith that a just God would grant them mercy on this beachhead, or on the next. It was the deep knowledge -- and pray God we have not lost it -- that there is a profound moral difference between the use of force for liberation and the use of force for conquest. You were here to liberate, not to conquer, and so you and those others did not doubt your cause. And you were right not to doubt.

You all knew that some things are worth dying for. One's country is worth dying for, and democracy is worth dying for, because it's the most deeply honorable form of government ever devised by man. All of you loved liberty. All of you were willing to fight tyranny, and you knew the people of your countries were behind you.

The Americans who fought here that morning knew word of the invasion was spreading through the darkness back home. They fought -- or felt in their hearts, though they couldn't know in fact, that in Georgia they were filling the churches at 4:00 am., in Kansas they were kneeling on their porches and praying, and in Philadelphia they were ringing the Liberty Bell.

Something else helped the men of D-day; their rock-hard belief that Providence would have a great hand in the events that would unfold here; that God was an ally in this great cause. And so, the night before the invasion, when Colonel Wolverton asked his parachute troops to kneel with him in prayer, he told them: Do not bow your heads, but look up so you can see God and ask His blessing in what we're about to do. Also, that night, General Matthew Ridgway on his cot, listening in the darkness for the promise God made to Joshua: "I will not fail thee nor forsake thee."

These are the things that impelled them; these are the things that shaped the unity of the Allies.

When the war was over, there were lives to be rebuilt and governments to be returned to the people. There were nations to be reborn. Above all, there was a new peace to be assured. These were huge and daunting tasks. But the Allies summoned strength from the faith, belief, loyalty, and love of those who fell here. They rebuilt a new Europe together. There was first a great reconciliation among those who had been enemies, all of whom had suffered so greatly. The United States did its part, creating the Marshall Plan to help rebuild our allies and our former enemies. The Marshall Plan led to the Atlantic alliance -- a great alliance that serves to this day as our shield for freedom, for prosperity, and for peace.

In spite of our great efforts and successes, not all that followed the end of the war was happy or planned. Some liberated countries were lost. The great sadness of this loss echoes down to our own time in the streets of Warsaw, Prague, and East Berlin. Soviet troops that came to the center of this continent did not leave when peace came. They're still there, uninvited, unwanted, unyielding, almost forty years after the war. Because of this, allied forces still stand on this continent. Today, as forty years ago, our armies are here for only one purpose: to protect and defend democracy. The only territories we hold are memorials like this one and graveyards where our heroes rest.

We in America have learned bitter lessons from two world wars. It is better to be here ready to protect the peace, than to take blind shelter across the sea, rushing to respond only after freedom is lost. We've learned that isolationism never was and never will be an acceptable response to tyrannical governments with an expansionist intent. But we try always to be prepared for peace, prepared to deter aggression, prepared to negotiate the reduction of arms, and yes, prepared to reach out again in the spirit of reconciliation. In truth, there is no reconciliation we would welcome more than a reconciliation with the Soviet Union, so, together, we can lessen the risks of war, now and forever.

It's fitting to remember here the great losses also suffered by the Russian people during World War II: 20 million perished, a terrible price that testifies to all the world the necessity of ending war. I tell you from my heart that we in the United States do not want war. We want to wipe from the face of the earth the terrible weapons that man now has in his hands. And I tell you, we are ready to seize that beachhead. We look for some sign from the Soviet Union that they are willing to move forward, that they share our desire and love for peace, and that they will give up the ways of conquest. There must be a changing there that will allow us to turn our hope into action.

We will pray forever that someday that changing will come. But for now, particularly today, it is good and fitting to renew our commitment to each other, to our freedom, and to the alliance that protects it.

We're bound today by what bound us 40 years ago, the same loyalties, traditions, and beliefs. We're bound by reality. The strength of America's allies is vital to the United States, and the American security guarantee is essential to the continued freedom of Europe's democracies. We were with you then; we are with you now. Your hopes are our hopes, and your destiny is our destiny.

Here, in this place where the West held together, let us make a vow to our dead. Let us show them by our actions that we understand what they died for. Let our actions say to them the words for which Matthew Ridgway listened: "I will not fail thee nor forsake thee."

Strengthened by their courage, heartened by their valor and borne by their memory, let us continue to stand for the ideals for which they lived and died.

Thank you very much, and God bless you all.

From The New York TimesL

June 5, 2005

The Case Against Coldplay
By Jon Pareles

There's nothing wrong with self-pity. As a spur to songwriting, it's right up there with lust, anger and greed, and probably better than the remaining deadly sins. There's nothing wrong, either, with striving for musical grandeur, using every bit of skill and studio illusion to create a sound large enough to get lost in. Male sensitivity, a quality that's under siege in a pop culture full of unrepentant bullying and machismo, shouldn't be dismissed out of hand, no matter how risible it can be in practice. And building a sound on the lessons of past bands is virtually unavoidable.

But put them all together and they add up to Coldplay, the most insufferable band of the decade.

This week Coldplay releases its painstakingly recorded third album, "X&Y" (Capitol), a virtually surefire blockbuster that has corporate fortunes riding on it. (The stock price plunged for EMI Group, Capitol's parent company, when Coldplay announced that the album's release date would be moved from February to June, as it continued to rework the songs.)

"X&Y" is the work of a band that's acutely conscious of the worldwide popularity it cemented with its 2002 album, "A Rush of Blood to the Head," which has sold three million copies in the United States alone. Along with its 2000 debut album, "Parachutes," Coldplay claims sales of 20 million albums worldwide. "X&Y" makes no secret of grand ambition.

Clearly, Coldplay is beloved: by moony high school girls and their solace-seeking parents, by hip-hop producers who sample its rich instrumental sounds and by emo rockers who admire Chris Martin's heart-on-sleeve lyrics. The band emanates good intentions, from Mr. Martin's political statements to lyrics insisting on its own benevolence. Coldplay is admired by everyone - everyone except me.

It's not for lack of skill. The band proffers melodies as imposing as Romanesque architecture, solid and symmetrical. Mr. Martin on keyboards, Jonny Buckland on guitar, Guy Berryman on bass and Will Champion on drums have mastered all the mechanics of pop songwriting, from the instrumental hook that announces nearly every song they've recorded to the reassurance of a chorus to the revitalizing contrast of a bridge. Their arrangements ascend and surge, measuring out the song's yearning and tension, cresting and easing back and then moving toward a chiming resolution. Coldplay is meticulously unified, and its songs have been rigorously cleared of anything that distracts from the musical drama.

Unfortunately, all that sonic splendor orchestrates Mr. Martin's voice and lyrics. He places his melodies near the top of his range to sound more fragile, so the tunes straddle the break between his radiant tenor voice and his falsetto. As he hops between them - in what may be Coldplay's most annoying tic - he makes a sound somewhere between a yodel and a hiccup. And the lyrics can make me wish I didn't understand English. Coldplay's countless fans seem to take comfort when Mr. Martin sings lines like, "Is there anybody out there who / Is lost and hurt and lonely too," while a strummed acoustic guitar telegraphs his aching sincerity. Me, I hear a passive-aggressive blowhard, immoderately proud as he flaunts humility. "I feel low," he announces in the chorus of "Low," belied by the peak of a crescendo that couldn't be more triumphant about it.

In its early days, Coldplay could easily be summed up as Radiohead minus Radiohead's beat, dissonance or arty subterfuge. Both bands looked to the overarching melodies of 1970's British rock and to the guitar dynamics of U2, and Mr. Martin had clearly heard both Bono's delivery and the way Radiohead's Thom Yorke stretched his voice to the creaking point.

Unlike Radiohead, though, Coldplay had no interest in being oblique or barbed. From the beginning, Coldplay's songs topped majesty with moping: "We're sinking like stones," Mr. Martin proclaimed. Hardly alone among British rock bands as the 1990's ended, Coldplay could have been singing not only about private sorrows but also about the final sunset on the British empire: the old opulence meeting newly shrunken horizons. Coldplay's songs wallowed happily in their unhappiness.

"Am I a part of the cure / Or am I part of the disease," Mr. Martin pondered in "Clocks" on "A Rush of Blood to the Head." Actually, he's contagious. Particularly in its native England, Coldplay has spawned a generation of one-word bands - Athlete, Embrace, Keane, Starsailor, Travis and Aqualung among them - that are more than eager to follow through on Coldplay's tremulous, ringing anthems of insecurity. The emulation is spreading overseas to bands like the Perishers from Sweden and the American band Blue Merle, which tries to be Coldplay unplugged.

A band shouldn't necessarily be blamed for its imitators - ask the Cure or the Grateful Dead. But Coldplay follow-throughs are redundant; from the beginning, Coldplay has verged on self-parody. When he moans his verses, Mr. Martin can sound so sorry for himself that there's hardly room to sympathize for him, and when he's not mixing metaphors, he fearlessly slings clichés. "Are you lost or incomplete," Mr. Martin sings in "Talk," which won't be cited in any rhyming dictionaries. "Do you feel like a puzzle / you can't find your missing piece."

Coldplay reached its musical zenith with the widely sampled piano arpeggios that open "Clocks": a passage that rings gladly and, as it descends the scale and switches from major to minor chords, turns incipiently mournful. Of course, it's followed by plaints: "Tides that I tried to swim against / Brought me down upon my knees."

On "X&Y," Coldplay strives to carry the beauty of "Clocks" across an entire album - not least in its first single, "Speed of Sound," which isn't the only song on the album to borrow the "Clocks" drumbeat. The album is faultless to a fault, with instrumental tracks purged of any glimmer of human frailty. There is not an unconsidered or misplaced note on "X&Y," and every song (except the obligatory acoustic "hidden track" at the end, which is still by no means casual) takes place on a monumental soundstage.

As Coldplay's recording budgets have grown, so have its reverberation times. On "X&Y," it plays as if it can already hear the songs echoing across the world. "Square One," which opens the album, actually begins with guitar notes hinting at the cosmic fanfare of "Also Sprach Zarathustra" (and "2001: A Space Odyssey"). Then Mr. Martin, never someone to evade the obvious, sings about "the space in which we're traveling."

As a blockbuster band, Coldplay is now looking over its shoulder at titanic predecessors like U2, Pink Floyd and the Beatles, pilfering freely from all of them. It also looks to an older legacy; in many songs, organ chords resonate in the spaces around Mr. Martin's voice, insisting on churchly reverence.

As Coldplay's music has grown more colossal, its lyrics have quietly made a shift on "X&Y." On previous albums, Mr. Martin sang mostly in the first person, confessing to private vulnerabilities. This time, he sings a lot about "you": a lover, a brother, a random acquaintance. He has a lot of pronouncements and advice for all of them: "You just want somebody listening to what you say," and "Every step that you take could be your biggest mistake," and "Maybe you'll get what you wanted, maybe you'll stumble upon it" and "You don't have to be alone." It's supposed to be compassionate, empathetic, magnanimous, inspirational. But when the music swells up once more with tremolo guitars and chiming keyboards, and Mr. Martin's voice breaks for the umpteenth time, it sounds like hokum to me.

Islam's double standard
By Cal Thomas

The Pentagon has acknowledged five instances in which guards or interrogators at the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, detention facility handled the Koran in a way that would offend some who believe it the revealed word of Allah. Three cases are said to have been deliberate and two unintentional.
    Amnesty International has put the United States high on the list of countries it says are guilty of prisoner and human-rights abuses because of its treatment of suspected terrorists. Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Richard Myers rebutted the notion of inappropriate treatment of detainees last weekend when he told Fox News Sunday these people would "slit our throats, our children's throats" if they were set free.
    Islamic countries apply a double standard on treatment of "holy books" and people who differ in faith and practice from Islamic dogma. While Islamic groups in the United States are engaged in "sensitivity training" sessions for non-Muslims that have included federal workers, the Ohio National Guard and U.S. Air Force Academy, there are no such sessions for Muslims to teach them tolerance for non-Islamic faiths. Quite the contrary.
    The least verbal or physical slight of any Muslim in America is immediately condemned by activist groups and sometimes the U.S. government. But the denigration of Jews and Christians throughout much of the Islamic world is theological and political business as usual. Jews are regularly referred to as "apes and pigs," mostly because that is what the Koran calls them.
    According to the MEMRI-TV Monitor Project, which observes the way Jews, especially, are portrayed throughout the Middle East, a Jordanian produced program titled "Stories From Before the Verses Came Down" was aired in February on Saudi Iqra TV.
    The soap opera included familiar anti-Semitic stuff, such as blaming ancient Jews for distorting their own Torah to make it seem Mohammed could not be the "true prophet" and having a Jewish character say, "We are the slayers of prophets, and we live off their blood. We live for destroying them."
    According to a report authored by former CIA Director James Woolsey for Freedom House, the Saudi government has made it a practice to disseminate propaganda about Jews, Christians and America through mosques in the U.S. and through schools, many funded by the extremist Wahhabi Islamic sect.
    The 89-page report titled, "Saudi publications on hate ideology fill American mosques," finds propaganda collected from U.S. mosques shows a "totalitarian ideology of hatred that can incite to violence." Such mosques, it says, are in the minority. But how many are needed to train terrorists who might attack the U.S. with biological, chemical or nuclear weapons?
    Throughout much of the Islamic world, the practice of Christianity and Judaism is severely restricted, if not outlawed. The Freedom House report said Saudi publications "state that it is a religious obligation for Muslims to hate Christians and Jews" and that, under Saudi law, Muslims who convert to any other faith "are to be put to death."
    In a column four years ago, The Washington Post's Richard Cohen wrote: "The Arab world is the last bastion of unbridled, unashamed, unhidden and unbelievable anti-Semitism. Hitlerian myths get published in the popular press as incontrovertible truths. The Holocaust either gets minimized or denied.... How the Arab world will ever come to terms with Israel when Israelis are portrayed as the devil incarnate is hard to figure out." Little, if anything, has changed since he wrote those words.
    Despite the Western diplomatic talk about Arabs and Palestinians living in peace with even a geographically reduced Israel, the Arab world demonstrates no intention of coming to terms with Israel or the Jewish (or Christian) people, unless it involves their complete subjugation to Islam or deaths.
    The State Department acknowledged for the first time during the Clinton administration that Christians -- from China, to the Sudan, to the Middle East -- have become the most persecuted faith group in the world. Yet those persecutors are not pressured into the kind of sensitivity training Muslim groups in America demand at the slightest slight, whether actual, imagined or concocted.
    Acceptance of this Islamic double standard creates a significant threat to the United States.
    
    Cal Thomas is a nationally syndicated columnist.