From Chronicles magazine website:

The Enemy Inside the Gates
By Srdja Trifkovic

The story is by now grimly familiar. Some members of a Muslim community somewhere in the United States are arrested. They are suspected of links with Islamic terrorists. The local Muslim community responds with a mix,of indignation and denial, with the assurances of the suspects’ impeccable character and accusations of anti-Muslim bias.

Non-Muslim civic leaders then respond by reassuring the Muslim community that it is loved and appreciated in spite of this “isolated incident” and by calling on their fellow-citizens to be warm and supportive to their Muslim neighbors. The media report heart-rendering stories of the Muslim sense of sadness, rejection and alienation. The “experts” say that the domestic threat is exaggerated. CAIR screams “Islamophobia!” Nobody mentions immigration, or loyalty, or identity, or abuse of hospitality.

The latest replay of this, by now boringly predictable scenario comes from Lodi, California, situated in the fertile San Joaquin Valley some 30 miles south of Sacramento. It is now home to about a thousand Muslims, predominantly from Pakistan. Most of them came over the past two decades as grape pickers and fruit packers. One of them is 22-year-old Hamid Hayat, who was arrested by the FBI on Tuesday of last week.

According to a federal affidavit, young Hamid has admitted spending six months in 2003-2004 at a terrorist training camp near the Pakistani capital Islamabad, and attending classes that included instructions on “how to kill Americans.” The agents also arrested his father, Umer Hayat (47). Both are U.S. citizens. Three other men, including two clerics from the local mosque, were also taken into custody, for now only on suspicion of immigration violations. The FBI said the arrests were part of a long inquiry into possible Islamist activities in the area. Agents indicated that fresh arrests were possible as the bureau expands its investigation into the San Francisco Bay Area.

The media played on cue. “The two men had seemed to fit in well in the community, which to some observers raises anew the prospect of innocent Muslims arousing suspicion and fear among their neighbors,” agonized the CSM. The faithful at the mosque in Lodi—the place “where many in the Muslim community sought solace from the intrusion of agents and the swarm of news media,” according to the Boston Globe (June 12)—did not agonize. They reacted with indignation:

It’s making everybody upset. People are pointing fingers at us. I just want people to stop using the word ‘Muslim.’ This ain’t anything to do with being Muslim,’ said Mashin Mohammad, 22, as he and friends gathered in a park across from the mosque. ‘I’m tired of people blaming Middle Eastern people for everything,’ said Mohammad, who was born in Afghanistan. ‘We don’t know what the truth is. But all we’ve been hearing is lies. People talk about terrorists and Al Qaeda being here. Why would they come to Lodi?’

“It’s a question that has pervaded this city of 62,000, including a sizable Muslim community,” the paper commented, betraying either its stupidity or its mendacity. The answer is simple: Islamic terrorists and their sympathizers did not need to “come to Lodi” because they are there already. In any group of 1,000-plus Muslim immigrants centered around a mosque, it can be predicted with near-certainty (1) that some percentage will sympathize with the objectives of Al-Qaeda and its ilk, if not quite with all of their methods; and (2) that some smaller percentage of that group, especially among the Western-born young, will support those methods as well, and prove willing to apply them in practice.

This assertion is supported by substantial evidence. We shall mention but a few typical cases.

1. In Florida and New York, two U.S. citizens—Tarik Shah and Rafiq Abdus Sabir—were arrested in late May, just before Lodi hit the news. They stand accused of conspiring to provide material support to a terrorist organization. The pair belongs to the “second wave”: Sabir is an Ivy League-educated medical doctor who lived in an upscale gated community in Boca Raton—and yet he pledged his loyalty to al-Qaida by offering to treat terrorists. Shah, a jazz musician who often traveled with his base to divert suspicion, offered to use his skills in martial arts to train terrorists. A spokesman for the Islamic Center of Boca Raton called Sabir “a good Muslim,” the charges against him “absurd, absolutely unfounded,” and pledged the support of the Muslim community.

2. In Falls Church, VA, Maher Amin Jaradat was arrested on June 6 for fraudulently procuring U.S. citizenship, with federal agents alleging he failed to disclose ties to militant groups. The indictment said Mr. Jaradat failed to disclose he had been a member of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP); that he had studied bomb making and the use of small arms at a training camp in Syria; and that he had engaged in security duties in Lebanon.

3. American-born Yahiye Gadahn (25) a.k.a. Abu Suhayb Al-Amriki, Abu Suhayb, Yihya Majadin Adams, was named last year as a suspected al-Qaida operative sought by the FBI. Yahiye Gadahn, son of a halal butcher born and raised in California, has written of his religious experiences. His article can be found on the “Islamic Server” of the University of Southern California, courtesy of the taxpayers of the Golden State.

4. In March 2004 Indian-born U.S. citizen Ilyas Ali and his co-conspirator Muhamed Abid Afridi pleaded guilty to plotting to sell shoulder-held anti-aircraft missiles to al Qaeda. It is noteworthy that when a reporter visited Ali in a Hong Kong jail in January 2003, he claimed he was a victim of Attorney General John Ashcroft and his over-zealous Justice Department. American law enforcement “screwed up 9/11 and now they’re arresting innocent people for political purposes. I’m very, very sad that they got an innocent person and they don’t care . . . Ashcroft just used me.”

5. In December 2003 Mukhtar al-Bakri, a naturalized U.S. citizen, and five U.S.-born youths from upstate New York—Shafal Mosed, Faysal Galab, Yayha Goba, Yasein Taher, and Sahim Alwan—convicted of aiding Al-Qaeda and plotting attacks on Americans. The seven, known as the Lackawanna Cell, lived in a tight-knit Arab community, but to an outside observer, PBS claimed, “most were all-American teenagers who played soccer together and enjoyed going to parties.” All seven went to the Al Farooq training camp in Afghanistan in the summer of 2001; six returned to the U.S. When questioned after their return, four of them said they had attended religious seminars in Pakistan. Not one mentioned the trip to Afghanistan until Mukhtar al-Bakri was picked up by Bahraini police and questioned by FBI agents in Bahrain on September 11, 2002. They received sentences of between seven and 10 years in prison.

6. In 2003 “The Portland Seven,” including six Muslim U.S. citizens—Maher Hawash, Jeffrey Leon Battle, Patrice Lumumba Ford, Ahmed Ibrahim Bilal, Muhammad Ibrahim Bilal, Habis Abdulla al Saoub and Martinique Lewis—were convicted of plotting attacks against Americans. The cell called itself “Katibat Al-Mawt,” loosely translates to “Squad of Death.”

The list goes on and on. In 2003 U.S. Army Sergeant Asan Akbar went way beyond plotting when he threw a grenade into a tent with fellow soldiers in Kuwait, killing an officer and wounding 13. In 2001-2002, John Walker Lindh, Yaser Esam Hamdi and dozens of other U.S. citizens were captured in Afghanistan where they went to support the Taliban.

That there is a correlation between the presence of a Muslim population in a country and the danger that its citizens will be subjected to a terrorist attack is a demonstrable fact. A significant minority of Muslim immigrants and their American-born offspring wishes to transform the host-society by converting it, or else to inflict some harm on it. They are unsurprisingly the immigrant group least likely to identify with America: in response to a survey of newly naturalized citizens, 90 percent of Muslim immigrants said that if there were a conflict between the United States and their country of origin, they would be inclined to support their country of origin. In Detroit 81 percent of Muslims “strongly agree” or “somewhat agree” that Shari’a should be the law of the land.

This internal threat to America is increasing. In the aftermath of 9-11 various estimates of the Muslim population of United States have been made, ranging from two to nine million. According to the Census Bureau, in 1987-1997 8 percent of all immigrants—two million—came from Muslim countries. There were 10.6 million naturalized citizens in 2000, of which over one million were Muslims. Growth of overall immigration (legal and illegal) since 1970 has been 300 percent, but growth of immigration from the Middle East over the same period has been 700 percent—from under 200,000 in 1970 to 1.5 million in 2000. In 2010 the expected number of immigrants from the Middle East will be 2,500,000.

Well-financed by Saudi oil money, the jihadist infrastructure has come into being to cater to this large and growing community. The number of mosques and Islamic centers stands at around two thousand and keeps growing. The total number of mosques increased 42 percent between 1990 and 2000, compared with a 12 percent average increase for the evangelical Protestant denominations, and a two percent average increase among old-line Protestant, Roman Catholic and Orthodox groups.

The figures for immigration from the Middle East are matched and likely to be exceeded by the number of Muslim immigrants from the Indian Sub-Continent (Pakistan, India, Bangladesh). Currently Muslims account for close to one-tenth of all naturalizations, and their birth rates exceed those of any other significant immigrant group. Even a conservative estimate of their number of three million, or one-percent of the population, has alarming security implications and the potential for disproportionate growth.

This is madness that needs to be stopped before it is too late. A coherent long-term counter-terrorist strategy therefore must entail denying Islam the foothold inside the United States. The application of ideological and political criteria in determining the eligibility of prospective visitors or immigrants has been and remains an essential ingredient of any anti-terrorist strategy, whereby Islamic activism would be treated as eminently political rather than “religious” activity.

“We want people to know that Lodi is more than what the investigation is about” said Blair King, the city manager, following the arrests in California last week. “It doesn’t seem to me that we have a terrorist cell working out of Lodi. I don’t see any evidence of that,” opined the mayor, John Beckman. Appealing for calm, he warned against “inflamed passions.”

Such inanities indicate that ultimately the outcome of the war against terrorists will depend on our ability to define ourselves and to understand the nature of the threat. The idiotic would-be dhimmis inside the gates are as dangerous as the jihadist enemy.

From Chronicles magazine website:

Supreme Court Destroys Property Rights
By Thomas Fleming

It is sometimes difficult to make sense of the divisions on the US Supreme Court. Which of them is more important? It cannot be Republican v. Democrat, since liberal Republicans vote with the Democrats on most issues. Nor is it always Liberal v. Conservative (as if those terms meant anything today) or even strict v. loose constructionist: Justice Scalia’s theory of democratism is the very opposite of the “original intent” of the framers. But in today’s 5-4 ruling that local governments have the right to seize homes and property and give them to private developers, so long as there is some pretext of public good, makes it clear that there is, at least, a fundamental split between those who defend private private property—Justices Rehnquist, Scalia, Thomas, and (yes) O’Connor, and those who deny one of the fundamental civil rights on which the American system is based.

As Justice O’Connor, in a somewhat surprising dissent wrote: “Any property may now be taken for the benefit of another private party, but the fallout from this decision will not be random. The beneficiaries are likely to to be those citizens with disproportionate influence and power in the political process, large corporations and development firms.” Supreme Court Rules Cities May Seize Homes
Justice O’Connor’s dissent puts the issue square on the table. The once free citizens of the United States are now to be subject of every government jurisdiction that can be bribed by a developer. The power of money, which has de facto controlled—for over a hundred years—our government, will now de jure dictate the terms on which we own our own homes and small businesses.

I have always been a critic of the Lockean rationalist theories of individual or human rights that invaded old republican discourse. At the same time, I have defended certain hard-won civil rights that are part of the Anglo-American tradition. Locke summed up the three most fundamental as the rights to life, liberty, and property. The Supreme Court has malevolently and consciously struck down all three. For symbolic purposes, one can cite Roe v. Wade as the death knell of the “right to life,” Brown v. the Board of Education as one of many decisions that stripped us of our liberties, and now Kelo et al. v. City of New London eliminates our right to property.

But this decision is even worse, in some respects, than either Brown or Roe. No law forces a woman to kill her child, and any family, even of the cost limited means, can send their children to a private school or teach them at home; but no one is now secure in his home and property.

The Americans who rebelled against Britain and whose representatives ratified the Constitution would rise up in arms at this decision. After all, the principal cause of the Revolution was the illegal invasion of shops, warehouses, and homes to search for smuggled or untaxed goods. When the Constitution was drafted, many intelligent and principled Americans remembered the abuses of the British excise collectors. Mercy Otis Warren, sister of the James Otis who in protesting the Stamp Act, declared that “taxation without representation is tyranny,” demanded a bill of rights “to save us from such a detestable instrument of arbitrary power, to subject ourselves to the insolence of any petty revenue officer to enter our houses, search, insult, and seize at pleasure.” Both New York and Virginia demanded inclusion of what would become the 4th amendment guaranteeing “the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures.”

American governments have killed citizens unjustly and deprived them of their liberty, but those offenses were, in principle at least, aberrations. But, if ever there had been a fundamental American right, it would be the security of private property against government predations. That right is gone, and the last pretense that we live in the Old Republic has been stripped away by five unelected judges: three appointed by Republicans, two appointed by Democrats—though the worse of them, Ruth Bader Ginzburg, had the enthusiastic support of conservative Republican Orrin Hatch. That is why I am supporting Condi Rice against Hillary CLinton: she’s the cuter of two evils.

The evidence mounts daily that George Bush is an idiot, and so are those of us who voted for him.

No, Not Gonzales!
By Robert Novak

WASHINGTON -- It was not merely a leak from the normally leak-proof Bush White House. For more than a week, a veritable torrent has tipped Attorney General Alberto Gonzales as President Bush's first nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court. It has sent the conservative movement into spasms of fear and loathing.

Gonzales long has been unacceptable to anti-abortion activists because of his record as a Texas Supreme Court justice. Beyond pro-lifers, he is opposed by organized conservative lawyers. Ironically, the same Bush supporters who have been raising money and devising tactics for the mother of all judicial confirmation fights are in a panic that Gonzales will be named. With the president's popularity falling among his conservative base as well as the general populace, a politically disastrous moment may be at hand.

The president will have to act quickly if the high court's current session ends today with a resignation. Justice Sandra Day O'Connor now is considered more likely to quit than ailing Chief Justice William Rehnquist. White House leaks describe Gonzales as the leading prospect for either vacancy. That creates a situation filled with irony, contradictions and questions.

For example, why the torrent of Gonzales leaks from a White House extraordinarily adept at holding back the president's intended nominations? It looks like a trial balloon, but there are also suspicions that Gonzales's name has been floated by critics in order to shoot him down.

If opposition to abortion is Bush's pre-eminent social conservative position, Gonzales is a most improbable choice. He could not bring himself to support parental notification on the Texas Supreme Court. While he professes to be anti-abortion, he maintains Roe v. Wade is inviolable -- a judicial version of John Kerry's formulation.

Conservatives fear Gonzales will be another in a long line of Supreme Court justices who have proved more liberal than the president who appointed them expected -- John Paul Stevens, Sandra Day O'Connor, Anthony Kennedy, David Souter. That is a view widely held inside the White House, but not by the occupant who counts most. George W. Bush loves Al Gonzales and would like his former chief counsel to head a "Gonzales Court."

Since Gonzales was confirmed as attorney general after a nasty debate over treatment of terrorist detainees, the argument he would be confirmed more easily than other prospects might seem dubious. But Senate Democrats may have expunged anti-Gonzales bile from their system and be willing to support somebody who is markedly less conservative than any other nominee.

Indeed, all other possibilities are conservative. They face trouble from Democratic senators who have led the campaign to block Bush's judicial nominees. Three of them, Sens. Edward M. Kennedy, Patrick Leahy and Charles Schumer, went on the Senate floor last Thursday morning to issue a virtual ultimatum. Underneath restrained rhetoric, they were telling the president: name justices acceptable to us or face a bitter battle. Gonzales might be the most acceptable name mentioned.

The White House has sent word that two favorites of the conservative movement -- Appellate Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson (4th Circuit, Richmond, Va.) and former Solicitor General Theodore Olson -- are ineligible because they are over 60. The two current favorites are Appellate Judges John Roberts (D.C. Circuit) and J. Michael Luttig (4th Circuit).

But sources report Rehnquist is not ready to resign and that O'Connor is readying the way for a return to Arizona with her invalid husband. While Bush would consider replacing one of the court's two women with its first Hispanic justice, neither Roberts nor Luttig for O'Connor would be politically correct.

Accordingly, White House judge-hunters are looking for a woman. They have interviewed Appellate Judge Edith Brown Clement (5th Circuit, New Orleans), a conservative who flies under the radar. She was confirmed as a Louisiana district judge in 1991, seven weeks after her nomination by the first President Bush, and was confirmed as an appellate judge in 2001, two and a half months after George W. Bush named her.

Clement would be subject to far more scrutiny as a Supreme Court nominee. So would any other conservative named by Bush, though Democrats may have exhausted scrutinizing Gonzales. The president must choose between a fierce confirmation fight or the alienation of his political base.

Don't worry, Old Glory can take the heat
By Mark Steyn

The House of Representatives passed a constitutional amendment on flag burning last week, in the course of which Rep. Randy ''Duke'' Cunningham (Republican of California) made the following argument:

''Ask the men and women who stood on top of the Trade Center. Ask them and they will tell you: Pass this amendment."

Unlike Congressman Cunningham, I wouldn't presume to speak for those who died atop the World Trade Center. For one thing, citizens of more than 50 foreign countries, from Argentina to Zimbabwe, were killed on 9/11. Of the remainder, maybe some would be in favor of a flag-burning amendment; and maybe some would think that criminalizing disrespect for national symbols is unworthy of a free society. And maybe others would roll their eyes and say that, granted it's been clear since about October 2001 that the federal legislature has nothing useful to contribute to the war on terror, and its hacks and poseurs prefer to busy themselves with a lot of irrelevant grandstanding with a side order of fries, but they could at least quit dragging us into it.

And maybe a few would feel as many of my correspondents did last week about the ridiculous complaints of ''desecration'' of the Quran by U.S. guards at Guantanamo -- that, in the words of one reader, ''it's not possible to 'torture' an inanimate object.''

That alone is a perfectly good reason to object to a law forbidding the "desecration" of the flag. For my own part, I believe that, if someone wishes to burn a flag, he should be free to do so. In the same way, if Democrat senators want to make speeches comparing the U.S. military to Nazis and the Khmer Rouge, they should be free to do so. It's always useful to know what people really believe.

For example, two years ago, a young American lady, Rachel Corrie, was crushed by an Israeli bulldozer in Gaza. Her death immediately made her a martyr for the Palestinian cause, and her family and friends worked assiduously to promote the image of her as a youthful idealist passionately moved by despair and injustice. ''My Name Is Rachel Corrie,'' a play about her, was a huge hit in London. Well, OK, it wasn't so much a play as a piece of sentimental agitprop so in thrall to its subject's golden innocence that the picture of Rachel on the cover of the Playbill shows her playing in the backyard, age 7 or so, wind in her hair, in a cute, pink T-shirt.

There's another photograph of Rachel Corrie: at a Palestinian protest, headscarved, her face contorted with hate and rage, torching the Stars and Stripes. Which is the real Rachel Corrie? The "schoolgirl idealist" caught up in the cycle of violence? Or the grown woman burning the flag of her own country? Well, that's your call. But because that second photograph exists, we at least have a choice.

Have you seen that Rachel Corrie flag-burning photo? If you follow Charles Johnson's invaluable Little Green Footballs Web site and a few other Internet outposts, you will have. But you'll look for it in vain in the innumerable cooing profiles of the "passionate activist" that have appeared in the world's newspapers.

One of the big lessons of these last four years is that many, many beneficiaries of Western civilization loathe that civilization -- and the media are generally inclined to blur the extent of that loathing. At last year's Democratic Convention, when the Oscar-winning crockumentarian Michael Moore was given the seat of honor in the presidential box next to Jimmy Carter, I wonder how many TV viewers knew that the terrorist ''insurgents'' -- the guys who kidnap and murder aid workers, hack the heads off foreigners, load Down's syndrome youths up with explosives and send them off to detonate in shopping markets -- are regarded by Moore as Iraq's Minutemen. I wonder how many viewers knew that on Sept. 11 itself Moore's only gripe was that the terrorists had targeted New York and Washington instead of Texas or Mississippi: ''They did not deserve to die. If someone did this to get back at Bush, then they did so by killing thousands of people who DID NOT VOTE for him! Boston, New York, D.C. and the plane's destination of California -- these were places that voted AGAINST Bush!"

In other words, if the objection to flag desecration is that it's distasteful, tough. Like those apocryphal Victorian matrons who discreetly covered the curved legs of their pianos, the culture already goes to astonishing lengths to veil the excesses of those who are admirably straightforward in their hostility.

If people feel that way, why protect them with a law that will make it harder for the rest of us to see them as they are? One thing I've learned in the last four years is that it's very difficult to talk honestly about the issues that confront us. A brave and outspoken journalist, Oriana Fallaci, is currently being prosecuted for ''vilification of religion,'' which is a crime in Italy; a Christian pastor has been ordered by an Australian court to apologize for his comments on Islam. In the European Union, ''xenophobia'' is against the law. A flag-burning amendment is the American equivalent of the rest of the West's ever more coercive constraints on free expression. The problem is not that some people burn flags; the problem is that the world view of which flag-burning is a mere ritual is so entrenched at the highest levels of Western culture.

Banning flag desecration flatters the desecrators and suggests that the flag of this great republic is a wee delicate bloom that has to be protected. It's not. It gets burned because it's strong. I'm a Canadian and one day, during the Kosovo war, I switched on the TV and there were some fellows jumping up and down in Belgrade burning the Stars and Stripes and the Union Jack. Big deal, seen it a million times. But then to my astonishment, some of those excitable Serbs produced a Maple Leaf from somewhere and started torching that. Don't ask me why -- we had a small contribution to the Kosovo bombing campaign but evidently it was enough to arouse the ire of Slobo's boys. I've never been so proud to be Canadian in years. I turned the sound up to see if they were yelling ''Death to the Little Satan!'' But you can't have everything.

That's the point: A flag has to be worth torching. When a flag gets burned, that's not a sign of its weakness but of its strength. If you can't stand the heat of your burning flag, get out of the superpower business. It's the left that believes the state can regulate everyone into thought-compliance. The right should understand that the battle of ideas is won out in the open.

More great news from Bush's brilliant excursion in force-feeding "democracy" to Muslims.

FEMALE CASUALTIES [Kate O'Beirne]

This morning's New York Times reports: "At least four women serving in the American military, including three marines, are among the six known dead in a suicide car bombing in Falluja on Thursday. . . . Eleven women were also among the 13 marines wounded in the strike. . . . [that] military officials suspect was carefully planned and might have been aimed at the women." The Washington Post reports: "According to a Marine statement, female Marines 'play a vital role providing security at the entry control points' of Fallujah. 'They search female Iraqi moving through checkpoints. Female Marines are employed in this role in order to be respectful of Iraqi cultural sensitivities.'"

Why must American cultural sensitivities be demolished in order not to offend Iraqi ones? We obviously aren't buying a reciprocal respect.

The Pentagon dismisses the unprecedented number of female casualties in Iraq as a consequence of a lethal environment without clear battlelines where our women in uniform are necessarily vulnerable. We're told that women might as well be deployed on dangerous missions because they're not entirely safe anywhere near the violent provinces. Yet over 250 contractors have been killed in Iraq and women and children have been indiscriminately targeted, and we're not resigned to civilians' being fair game. During the Vietnam War, 11 women in the U.S. military serving in non-combatant positions were killed. We didn't conclude that women in uniform should therefore serve in forward positions.

About a dozen years ago, although it seems like far longer, when asked whether women should serve in combat, one of the service chiefs said, "I don't think old men should send young women to war." A different crop of old men is running things now.

FEMALE CASUALTIES, CTD. [Kate O'Beirne]

Would we be less concerned with the fate of Natalee Holloway if she had been manning a checkpoint outside Fallujah along with other 18-year-old American girls rather than gone missing from a high school graduation celebration in Aruba?

Posted at 09:53 PM

Soundtrack for another '60s
By David Menconi

A classic 1960s-vintage Magnavox home-entertainment system dominated our family room when I was growing up. Television screen on the front, hi-fi record changer on the top -- it seemed the size of an aircraft carrier.

Leaning against the stern was a row of vinyl records, all from the center stripe of the middle of the road. My parents had the popular soundtracks of the day and multiple titles by Glen Campbell, Burt Bacharach, Henry Mancini. They also had at least half a dozen albums by Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass.

The one I remember best was 1965's "Whipped Cream & Other Delights," recently reissued on compact disc by Shout Factory Records after being out of print for five years. But the cover is still best appreciated in the full-size vinyl splendor of the original: a young woman who looked like the late Anne Bancroft, covered in cream, holding a rose and licking a finger with an eyebrow arched ever so suggestively. Both naughty and more than a little goofy, it is the "Mona Lisa" of album covers. And for people of a certain age, this album's music has been almost as omnipresent as the cover.

Phyllis Gordon of Raleigh remembers doing seventh-grade choreography routines to Alpert's "A Taste of Honey" 40 years ago. Jeff Hart of Durham used to turn knitting needles and pillows into a makeshift drum kit to play along with "Whipped Cream." And Alex Howard of Mebane has come to regard the "Whipped Cream" album as a talisman during his many shopping trips for used records.

"That was one of the first albums I bought after I discovered my dad's old records and started paying regular visits to the Burlington Goodwill in high school," Howard says. "Wherever old vinyl can be found, I've always found a Herb Alpert album -- and it's usually 'Whipped Cream.' It might be beat all to pieces. But every time I've gone rifling through vinyl records at Goodwill, Salvation Army, the antique mall, flea market or a yard sale, there's always a Herb Alpert album. They'd be at most a dollar, so I started picking them up."

Howard has an old copy of "Whipped Cream," purchased for a dollar, framed on the wall behind his desk. He listens to the music on MP3 files on his computer.

Herb Alpert's legacy

In 1994, Evolution Control Committee deejay Mark Gunderson combined the "Whipped Cream" instrumental "Bittersweet Samba" with the rap from Public Enemy's "Rebel Without a Pause" to create one of the earliest bootleg mash-ups. It's a freakish piece of studio wizardry, contrasting Chuck D and Flavor Flav's angry declaiming with Alpert's relentlessly perky music. But it makes perfect sense, given the stark contrast between Alpert's sunny music and the times that produced it.

Forty years past his commercial peak, it's easy to forget how omnipresent Alpert was for a few years in the 1960s. I've always thought of Alpert's Tijuana Brass recordings as the secret history of that decade's mainstream culture, hidden in plain sight -- the soundtrack to America, the elevator. He is rarely cited as an influence, but only Elvis Presley, the Beatles and Frank Sinatra outsold Alpert in the '60s.

A consummate journeyman entertainer, Alpert produced the surf-rock duo Jan & Dean and co-wrote Sam Cooke's "Only Sixteen" and "Wonderful World." He also had a bit part in 1956's "The Ten Commandments," playing drums as Charlton Heston's Moses came down from Mount Sinai. Alpert's own recording career began in 1962, when he recast Sol Lake's "Twinkle Star" as a bullfight fanfare to make "The Lonely Bull." Alpert and Jerry Moss put "The Lonely Bull" out on their own label, A&M Records, and it cracked the top 10.

By mid-decade, Alpert was cranking out three albums a year, surpassing Motown's "The Sound of Young America" to claim the title of "The Sound of All America." Even as racial strife and unrest over the Vietnam War convulsed the country, Alpert's breezy "Ameriachi" was everywhere. In the spring of 1966, the cutting edge was the Beach Boys' "Pet Sounds" and Bob Dylan getting called "Judas" onstage in England. Alpert, meanwhile, had five albums in Billboard's top 20 simultaneously -- a feat unmatched before or since.

Alpert was all over television, too, thanks to commercial spots for Teaberry gum, Phillips 66, Sego and, of course, Taco Bell: "Taco Bell's five delicious food items are as authentic as the pinata and the mariachi band, yes, as authentic and exciting as Mexico itself." He did movie themes for "Zorba the Greek" and "Casino Royale." And as the theme to "The Dating Game," the "Whipped Cream" title track, originally written by New Orleans piano legend Allen Toussaint under a pseudonym, remains a game-show staple.

Forty years on, "Whipped Cream & Other Delights" still stands as the best example of Alpert's perfect summertime music. It sounds like music for some strange ethnic wedding ceremony, or a remake of "Casablanca" as a light-hearted romantic comedy set in a Mexican border town -- an easy-listening hybrid of mariachi-style horn arrangements, show tunes and then-current popular hits. Light-hearted and sly, it's as easy to like as a frozen banana daiquiri.

Still, "Whipped Cream" probably wouldn't be nearly as iconic if it didn't have That Cover.

'Who knew?'

Dolores Erickson, the model pictured on "Whipped Cream," was a logical choice to be the album's cover girl. She was a professional model and part of a circle of entertainment industry friends that included Alpert. Erickson was in Alpert's garage studio during the recording of "The Lonely Bull," and she introduced Alpert's record label partner to his wife.

By 1965, Erickson was enough of a pro that it didn't faze her when she walked into the photo studio and heard the "Whipped Cream" cover concept explained -- even though she was three months pregnant at the time. The art director covered her in a blanket, slathered shaving cream on her torso, put a dab of whipped cream on her head, gave her a rose to hold and snapped away. Near as she can remember, she was paid a few thousand dollars for her work.

"I've had sillier jobs, really," says Erickson, who now lives in Longview, Wash. "Like a cigarette commercial on a catamaran where a storm blew up and everything kept disintegrating in the weather. But this one was fun, just another job. Who knew? No one thought it would take off like it did."

But take off it did. Released in May 1965, "Whipped Cream & Other Delights" stayed on the Billboard charts for more than 3 1/2 years, won multiple Grammy Awards and sold millions. The music still turns up in high-profile places, such as the 2001 movie "Shrek." And the cover has been endlessly parodied, most infamously by the Minneapolis rock band Soul Asylum on 1988's "Claim Dip & Other Delights," with bassist Karl Mueller (who died of cancer June 17) mimicking Erickson's original pose.

Erickson appeared on 17 other album covers, but "Whipped Cream" remains her signature image. That used to embarrass her, though it was less about the image than the fact that the cover seemed to be getting more attention than the music.

By now, Erickson, who spends most of her time painting, has enough of a sense of humor about the cover to call her Web site www.whippedcreamlady.com. She sells her paintings from the site, as well as autographed copies of the "Whipped Cream" album and even outtakes from the photo session. She finally decided to embrace it after starring at a 2002 event about classic album-cover art called "The LP Show" at Seattle's Experience Music Project Museum.

"I had to make a speech, and they said it was the biggest turnout they've ever had at the Experience Music Project," Erickson says. "And I came around to thinking, 'Gosh, this is neat.' And then I looked at it again and thought, 'Gosh, that is a good cover.' There are so many stories about how people had that record, or their parents had it. Everybody knew it. When I was at the ceremony, these two girls came up, and they were just darling. 'Oh, Dolores,' they said, 'we hope we can be just like you!' I was so confused, and I asked them, 'What are you talking about?'

"But obviously," she concludes, "they wanted to be covered in whipped cream."

Staff writer David Menconi can be reached at 829-4759 or dmenconi@newsobserver.com.

Damaging 'Deference'
By George F. Will

The country is bracing for a bruising battle over filling a Supreme Court vacancy, a battle in which conservatives will praise "judicial restraint" and "deference" to popularly elected branches of government and liberals will praise judicial activism in defense of individual rights. But consider what the court did yesterday.

Most conservatives hoped that, in the most important case the court was to decide this term, judicial activism would put a leash on popularly elected local governments and would pull courts more deeply into American governance to protect the rights of individuals. Yesterday conservatives were disappointed.

The case came from New London, Conn., where the city government, like all governments, wants more revenue and has empowered a private entity, New London Development Corp., to exercise the awesome power of eminent domain. It has done so to condemn an unblighted working-class neighborhood in order to give the space to private developers whose condominiums, luxury hotel and private offices would pay more taxes than do the owners of the condemned homes and businesses.

The question answered yesterday was: Can government profit by seizing the property of people of modest means and giving it to wealthy people who can pay more taxes than can be extracted from the original owners? The court answered yes.

The Fifth Amendment says, among other things, "nor shall private property be taken for public use , without just compensation" (emphasis added). All state constitutions echo the Constitution's Framers by stipulating that takings must be for "public use." The Framers, who weighed their words, clearly intended the adjective "public" to circumscribe government's power: Government should take private property only to create things -- roads, bridges, parks, public buildings -- directly owned or primarily used by the general public.

Fighting eviction from homes one of them had lived in all her life, the New London owners appealed to Connecticut's Supreme Court, which ruled 4 to 3 against them. Yesterday they lost again. The U.S. Supreme Court issued a 5 to 4 ruling that drains the phrase "public use" of its clearly intended function of denying to government an untrammeled power to dispossess individuals of their most precious property: their homes and businesses.

During oral arguments in February, Justice Antonin Scalia distilled the essence of New London's brazen claim: "You can take from A and give to B if B pays more taxes?" Yesterday the court said that the modifier "public" in the phrase "public use" does not modify government power at all. That is the logic of the opinion written by Justice John Paul Stevens and joined by justices Anthony Kennedy, David Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer.

In a tart dissent, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, joined by Chief Justice William Rehnquist, Justice Clarence Thomas and Scalia, noted that the consequences of this decision "will not be random." She says it is "likely" -- a considerable understatement -- that the beneficiaries of the decision will be people "with disproportionate influence and power in the political process, including large corporations and development firms."

Those on the receiving end of the life-shattering power that the court has validated will almost always be individuals of modest means. So this liberal decision -- it augments government power to aggrandize itself by bulldozing individuals' interests -- favors muscular economic battalions at the expense of society's little platoons, such as homeowners and the neighborhoods they comprise.

Dissenting separately, Thomas noted the common-law origins and clearly restrictive purpose of the Framers' "public use" requirement. And responding to the majority's dictum that the court should not "second-guess" the New London city government's "considered judgment" about what constitutes seizing property for "public use," he said: A court owes "no deference" to a legislature's or city government's self-interested reinterpretation of the phrase "public use," a notably explicit clause of the Bill of Rights, any more than a court owes deference to a legislature's determination of what constitutes a "reasonable" search of a home.

Liberalism triumphed yesterday. Government became radically unlimited in seizing the very kinds of private property that should guarantee individuals a sphere of autonomy against government.

Conservatives should be reminded to be careful what they wish for. Their often-reflexive rhetoric praises "judicial restraint" and deference to -- it sometimes seems -- almost unleashable powers of the elected branches of governments. However, in the debate about the proper role of the judiciary in American democracy, conservatives who dogmatically preach a populist creed of deference to majoritarianism will thereby abandon, or at least radically restrict, the judiciary's indispensable role in limiting government.

Conspiracy Theories
If you liked The Da Vinci Code, you'll love the Downing Street Memo.
By Christopher Hitchens

A few weeks ago, at an airport in Europe, I saw Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code staring at me across the bookstore bins. I had seen it many times before and averted my gaze, but I was facing a long delay, and I suddenly thought: May as well get it over with.

Well, of course I knew it would be bad. I just didn't know that it would be that bad. Never mind for now the breathless and witless style, or the mashed-paper characters, or the lazy, puerile reliance on incredible coincidence to flog the lame plot along. What if it was all true? What if the Nazarene had had issue, in fleshly form, with an androgynous disciple? The Catholic Church would look foolish but, then, it already looks foolish enough on the basis of the official story. "Opus Dei," according to Brown, is a sinister cult organization. Excuse me, but I already knew this, so to speak, independently.

Over the past month, I have hardly been able to open my e-mail without a flood of similarly portentous tripe concerning the "Downing Street Memo(s)." This time, it is not the interior of a Templar Church but the style of a clerk in the British Foreign Office that furnishes "the key to all mythologies." A former CIA hand named Ray McGovern has challenged me to debate about the "smoking gun" contained in the Downing Street palimpsests, and I have agreed, in principle. Other correspondents have helpfully added other "smoking guns" as e-mail attachments. A man named Morgan Reynolds, a former chief economist at the Bush Labor Department and now an instructor at Texas A&M, has proof that the World Trade Center was laid low by a "controlled demolition" and not by the hijacked planes. This is a refreshing change from the Gore Vidal view that the Bush administration knowingly grounded all military aircraft in order to give the al-Qaida teams a clear shot. But perhaps both those theories are congruent: One wouldn't want to exclude any options if one were a Republican seeking to incinerate the downtown business HQ of capitalist globalization.

I am not one of those who uses the term "conspiracy theory" as an automatic sneer of dismissal. Conspiracies do occur. I spent a lot of my life at one point trying to show that William Casey of the Reagan-era CIA had made a private deal with the Iranian hostage-takers in 1979, inducing them to keep their prisoners until the Carter administration had been defeated, and I still firmly believe that something of the sort (which eventually culminated in the Iran-Contra underworld) was at least attempted. So do many senior members of both parties in Washington, with whom I am still in touch.

But the main Downing Street document does not introduce us to any hidden or arcane or occult knowledge. As Fred Kaplan wrote in Slate last week, it explains no mystery. As protagonist Jim Dixon observes in another context in Lucky Jim, it is remarkable for "its niggling mindlessness, its funereal parade of yawn-enforcing facts, the pseudo-light it threw upon non-problems." On a visit to Washington in the prelude to the Iraq war, some senior British officials formed the strong and correct impression that the Bush administration was bent upon an intervention. Their junior note-taker committed the literary and political solecism of saying that intelligence findings and "facts" were being "fixed" around this policy.

Well, if that doesn't prove it, I don't know what does. We apparently have an administration that can, on the word of a British clerk, "fix" not just findings but also "facts." Never mind for now that the English employ the word "fix" in a slightly different way—a better term might have been "organized."

We have been here before. In an interview with Sam Tanenhaus for Vanity Fair more than two years ago, Paul Wolfowitz allowed that, though there were many reasons to seek the removal of Saddam Hussein, the legal minimum basis for it was to be sought, inside the U.S. government bureaucracy and at the United Nations, in the unenforced resolutions concerning WMD. At the time, this mild observation was also hailed as a full confession of perfidy.

I am now forced to wonder: Who is there who does not know that the Bush administration decided after September 2001 to change the balance of power in the region and to enforce the Iraq Liberation Act, passed unanimously by the Senate in 1998, which made it overt American policy to change the government of Iraq? This was a fairly open conspiracy, and an open secret. Given that everyone from Hans Blix to Jacques Chirac believed that Saddam was hiding weapons from inspectors, it made legal sense to advance this case under the banner of international law and to treat Saddam "as if" (and how else?) his strategy of concealment and deception were prima facie proof. The British attorney general—who has no jurisdiction in these 50 states—was worried that "regime change" alone would not be a sufficient legal basis. One appreciates his concern. But the existence of the Saddam regime was itself a defiance of all known international laws, and we had before us the consequences of previous failures to act, in Bosnia and Rwanda, where action would have been another word for "regime change."

Many in the British Foreign Office, like many in the American State Department and the CIA, felt more comfortable with the status quo as they knew it (which might explain the hapless references elsewhere in the memos to Iraq's "Sunni majority"). But theirs is only one opinion among many. How odd that the American left, when it is not busy swallowing the unpunctuated words of the CIA, follows this with another helping of wisdom from the most reactionary institution of the British state.

If such a "left" is not careful, it will end up consoling itself in futile bitterness and resentment in the way that the Old Right used to do: by brooding on the hellish manner in which FDR told the Japanese to "bring it on" at Pearl Harbor. (The anti-war right of today, led by Pat Buchanan, was raised and nurtured on this very fantasy, as were Gore Vidal and the other Charles Lindbergh fans.) I am in favor of taking such theories at face value, as a thought experiment, to see how they pan out. It is clear that Roosevelt hoped that the Japanese empire would make a mistake and furnish a pretext for war: The plain evidence of this hope is what keeps the conspiracy theory alive. I myself rather doubt that he would have wanted to start such a war with the loss of the Pacific Fleet, but still, he did think a confrontation was inevitable, as indeed it was. And William Casey may have seen the chance for a double coup: taking credit for the release of the Iranian hostages and discrediting Jimmy Carter into the bargain. But if it had all come out at the time, and been proven, would this change my attitude to Japanese imperialism or to Iranian hostage-taking theocracy? Certainly not. The demand would be to impeach those responsible in Washington and to form a national bipartisan alliance to fight even harder against our enemies, and in defense of our friends.

Full circle, then: The outrage about the nondisclosures in the Downing Street memos has led Congressman Walter Jones of North Carolina to demand that we tell the al-Qaida forces in Iraq exactly when we intend to give up. Jones is the right-wing bigmouth who once wanted to rename French fries "freedom fries." He was a moral and political cretin when he did that and, not to my surprise, he has been unable to stop being a moral and political cretin since. He and his new friends are welcome to each other. They illustrate exactly how the credulous search for Da Vinci codes is the sign of feeble minds.

Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair. His most recent book is Thomas Jefferson: Author of America.

From The Chicago Sun-Times:

Durbin slanders his own country
By Mark Steyn

Throughout the last campaign season, senior Democrats had a standard line in their speeches, usually delivered with righteous anger, about how "nobody has a right to question my patriotism!" Given that nobody was questioning their patriotism, it seemed an odd thing to harp on about. But, aware of their touchiness on the subject, I hasten to add that in what follows I am not questioning Dick Durbin's patriotism, at least not for the first couple of paragraphs. Instead, I'll begin by questioning his sanity.

Last Tuesday, Senator Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, quoted a report of U.S. "atrocities" at Guantanamo and then added:

"If I read this to you and did not tell you that it was an FBI agent describing what Americans had done to prisoners in their control, you would most certainly believe this must have been done by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime -- Pol Pot or others -- that had no concern for human beings."

Er, well, your average low-wattage senator might. But I wouldn't. The "atrocities" he enumerated -- "Not only was the temperature unbearably hot, but extremely loud rap music was being played in the room" -- are not characteristic of the Nazis, the Soviets or Pol Pot, and, at the end, the body count in Gitmo was a lot lower. That's to say, it was zero, which would have been counted a poor day's work in Auschwitz or Siberia or the killing fields of Cambodia.

But give Durbin credit. Every third-rate hack on every European newspaper can do the Americans-are-Nazis schtick. Amnesty International has already declared Guantanamo the "gulag of our times." But I do believe the senator is the first to compare the U.S. armed forces with the blood-drenched thugs of Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge. Way to go, senator! If you had a dime for every crackpot Web site that takes up your thoughtful historical comparison, you'd be able to retire to the Caribbean and spend the rest of your days torturing yourself with hot weather and loud music, as well as inappropriately provocative women and insufficient choice of hors d'oeuvres and all the other shameful atrocities committed at Guantanamo.

Just for the record, some 15 million to 30 million Soviets died in the gulag; some 6 million Jews died in the Nazi camps; some 2 million Cambodians -- one third of the population -- died in the killing fields. Nobody's died in Gitmo, not even from having Christina Aguilera played to them excessively loudly. The comparison is deranged, and deeply insulting not just to the U.S. military but to the millions of relatives of those dead Russians, Jews and Cambodians, who, unlike Durbin, know what real atrocities are. Had Durbin said, "Why, these atrocities are so terrible you would almost believe it was an account of the activities of my distinguished colleague Robert C. Byrd's fellow Klansmen," that would have been a little closer to the ballpark but still way out.

One measure of a civilized society is that words mean something: "Soviet" and "Nazi" and "Pol Pot" cannot equate to Guantanamo unless you've become utterly unmoored from reality. Spot the odd one out: 1) mass starvation; 2) gas chambers; 3) mountains of skulls; 4) lousy infidel pop music turned up to full volume. One of these is not the same as the others, and Durbin doesn't have the excuse that he's some airhead celeb or an Ivy League professor. He's the second-ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee. Don't they have an insanity clause?

Now let us turn to the ranking Democrat, the big cheese on the committee, Patrick Leahy of Vermont. Leahy thinks Gitmo needs to be closed down and argues as follows:

"America was once very rightly viewed as a leader in human rights and the rule of law, but Guantanamo has drained our leadership, our credibility, and the world's good will for America at alarming rates."

So, until Guantanamo, America was "viewed as a leader in human rights"? Not in 2004, when Abu Ghraib was the atrocity du jour. Not in 2003, when every humanitarian organization on the planet was predicting the deaths of millions of Iraqis from cholera, dysentery and other diseases caused by America's "war for oil." Not in 2002, when the "human rights" lobby filled the streets of Vancouver and London and Rome and Sydney to protest the Bushitler's plans to end the benign reign of good King Saddam. Not the weekend before 9/11 when the human rights grandees of the U.N. "anti-racism" conference met in South Africa to demand America pay reparations for the Rwandan genocide and to cheer Robert Mugabe to the rafters for calling on Britain and America to "apologize unreservedly for their crimes against humanity." If you close Gitmo tomorrow, the world's anti-Americans will look around and within 48 hours alight on something else for Gulag of the Week.

And this is where it's time to question Durbin's patriotism. As Leahy implicitly acknowledges, Guantanamo is about "image" and "perception" -- about how others see America. If this one small camp of a few hundred people has "drained the world's good will," whose fault is that?

The senator from Illinois' comparisons are as tired as they're grotesque. They add nothing useful to the debate. But around the planet, folks naturally figure that, if only 100 people out of nearly 300 million get to be senators, the position must be a big deal. Hence, headlines in the Arab world like "U.S. Senator Stands By Nazi Remark." That's al-Jazeera, where the senator from al-Inois is now a big hero -- for slandering his own country, for confirming the lurid propaganda of his country's enemies. Yes, folks, American soldiers are Nazis and American prison camps are gulags: don't take our word for it, Senator Bigshot says so.

This isn't a Republican vs Democrat thing; it's about senior Democrats who are so over-invested in their hatred of a passing administration that they've signed on to the nuttiest slurs of the lunatic fringe. It would be heartening to think that Durbin will himself now be subjected to some serious torture. Not real torture, of course; I don't mean using Pol Pot techniques and playing the Celine Dion Christmas album really loud to him. But he should at least be made a little uncomfortable over what he's done -- in a time of war, make an inflammatory libel against his country's military that has no value whatsoever except to America's enemies. Shame on him, and shame on those fellow senators and Democrats who by their refusal to condemn him endorse his slander.

Losing their heads over Gitmo
By Ann Coulter

I guess Bush should have backed Katherine Harris, after all. Sen. Mel Martinez, the Senate candidate Bush backed instead of Harris, has become the first Republican to call for shutting down Guantanamo. Martinez hasn't said where the 500 or so suspected al-Qaida operatives currently at Gitmo should be transferred to, but I understand the Neverland Ranch might soon be available.

Maybe Sen. Arlen Specter – the liberal Republican Bush backed instead of conservative Pat Toomey, which still didn't help Bush in Pennsylvania – will step forward to defend the Bush administration. That Karl Rove is a genius.

Martinez explained his nonsensical call for the closing of Guantanamo by asking: "Is it serving all the purposes you thought it would serve when initially you began it, or can this be done some other way a little better?"

There are Arabs locked up at Guantanamo, no? Admittedly, not enough. (And not under what any frequent flier would describe as "harsh conditions.") Still and all, Arabs are locked up there. That is what we call a "purpose."

By becoming a focus of evil for human-rights groups, Martinez suggested, Guantanamo has become a recruiting tool for al-Qaida: "It's become an icon for bad stories," Martinez said, "and at some point you wonder the cost-benefit ratio." (I've been wondering the same thing about Mel Martinez.)

This is preposterous. NBC's "The West Wing" is an icon for bad stories; Gitmo is a place where we keep an eye on evil, dangerous people who want to kill us.

Martinez was borrowing a point from Sen. Joe Biden – which is always a dangerous gambit because you never know who said it originally. The "Biden" version was: "I think more Americans are in jeopardy as a consequence of the perception that exists worldwide with its existence than if there were no Gitmo."

So if people around the world believe that if they try to kill Americans they might go to a bad, scary place called Guantanamo, that will make them more likely to kill Americans? How about doing a cost-benefit ratio on that analysis?

Let's also pause to ponder the image of the middle-of-the-road, "centrist" jihadist who could be "recruited" to jihad by reports about abuse at Guantanamo. You know – the kind of guy who just watches al-Jazeera for the sports and hits the "mute" button whenever they start in about the Jews again, already.

Liberals want us to believe such a person exists and that he is perusing newspaper articles about Guantanamo trying to decide whether to finish his coffee and head off to work or to place a backpack filled with dynamite near a preschool.

Note to liberals: That doesn't happen.

What happens is this: There are thousands of Muslim extremists literally dying to slaughter Americans, and only three proven ways to stop them: (1) Kill them (the recommended method), (2) capture them and keep them locked up, or (3) convince them that their cause is lost. Guantanamo is useless for No. 1, but really pulls ahead on No. 2 and No. 3 (i.e., a "purpose").

Let's just hope aspiring jihadists are not reading past the headlines and discovering that what Amnesty International means by "the gulag of our time" is: No Twinkie rewards for detainees!

That's not a joke. As described in infuriating detail by Heather MacDonald in the Winter, 2005, City Journal, interrogators at Guantanamo are not allowed to:


* yell at the detainees, except in extreme circumstances and only after alerting Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld – and never in the ears;
* serve the detainees cold meals, except in extreme circumstances;
* poke the detainees in the chest or engage in "light pushing" without careful monitoring and approval from the commander of the U.S. Southern Central Command in Miami;
* reward detainees (for example, for not throwing feces at the guards that day) with a Twinkie or a McDonald's Filet-O-Fish sandwich in the absence of express approval from the secretary of defense. (I suppose it goes without saying, "supersizing" their order is strictly forbidden under any circumstances.)

Without careful monitoring, interrogators aren't even allowed to subject the detainees to temperature changes, unpleasant odors or sleep cycle disruptions. But on the bright side, they are allowed to play Christina Aguilera music and feed the savages the same food our soldiers eat rather than their usual orange-glazed chicken. That isn't sarcasm; these are the rules.

No cold meals, sleep deprivation or uncomfortable positions? Obviously, what we need to do is get the U.S. Army to serve drinks on commercial airlines and get the airlines to start supervising the detainees in Guantanamo.

American soldiers make do with C-rations. Dinner on an America West flight from New York to Las Vegas consists of one small bag of peanuts. Meanwhile, one recent menu for suspected terrorists at Guantanamo consisted of orange-glazed chicken, fresh fruit crepe, steamed peas and mushrooms, and rice pilaf. Sounds like the sort of thing you'd get at Windows on the World – if it still existed.

It's about time some Republicans started calling Bush to account for his incoherent policies.

Tancredo Says Patriot Act Must Be Tied To Border Security
10 Congressmen Call on President Bush to Secure our Borders

WASHINGTON, D.C. - Congressman Tom Tancredo (R-CO) called on President Bush to take specific steps to increase border security as part of the USA PATRIOT Act's renewal. In a letter sent today, Tancredo said that he would have "grave reservations" about supporting the reauthorization of the Patriot Act without increased border security. A total of 10 Congressmen signed the letter.

"Up to this point, I have supported extending all provisions of the Patriot Act," said Tancredo. "But I find it difficult to justify increased anti-terrorism powers when the Bush administration hasn't done enough to stop terrorists from getting here in the first place."

Tancredo's letter outlines several steps that President Bush should take. First, the letter calls for the deployment of military technology and manpower to the border. Second, the letter says the President should fully staff Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the Border Patrol as provided by Congress' authorization. Congress authorized an increase of 800 ICE and 2000 Border Patrol agents in December, yet the President's budget only included 143 ICE and 210 Border Patrol agents above the current level.
Third, it asks the President to direct the Department of Homeland Security to enter absconders and illegal aliens into the National Crime Information Database so that police can be aware of immigration violations. Fourth, it calls on the President to require ICE to respond to all state and local requests for immigration enforcement assistance. Finally, it urges the President to direct the Justice Department to take action against local governments that have illegal alien sanctuary policies. President Bush can take all steps outlined in the letter without further action by Congress.
The letter notes, "asking for such advanced tools as roving wiretaps while ignoring basic border security is like asking for the installation of a state-of-the-art video surveillance system in a house without door locks - it simply doesn't make sense. At best, it will improve security only nominally, and at worst it may only serve to lull Americans into a false sense of security."

Tancredo said, "The American people elected President Bush to a second term largely because of the War on Terror. If the President disregards border security, he's disregarding part of his mandate."

From The Washington Post:

Jackson's Biggest Hurdle Will Be Bryant's Ego
By Sally Jenkins

The days of swaggering isolationist stars who pull whole NBA franchises out of shape and into ruin with the tractor beams of their egos may finally be over. If San Antonio and Detroit turn this championship series into something viewable, a good taut thriller, then maybe great teams, teams mind you, can become the chief entertainment of the league again, as opposed to the shallow, Paris Hilton-like celebrity of Kobe Bryant.

The NBA is experiencing a market correction. For the last several years, the league has sold itself as a game of one-on-one, on the backs of large or notorious personalities, and it's paying for it. Ever since Michael Jordan's first retirement in 1993, it's looked for one-man solutions, and turned itself over to individuals at the expense of the game, to an extent that no other league has. Now it's a hostage to it: The Spurs and the Pistons are superb teams but they don't have "branding," and the league can only blame itself for that, and for falling TV ratings. If you care about seeing the game played the right way, do yourself a favor: Turn on the TV, and rescue it.

The Lakers have already made a correction of sorts, by rehiring Phil Jackson. It's interesting that they've brought back Jackson at the very moment that teamwork, as exemplified by the Spurs and Pistons, is the new competitive chic. Jackson's return is a major repudiation of Bryant, and his too-large role with the Lakers. Who knows what Bryant was playing these last couple of years, but it wasn't basketball.

Let's say that you cussed your boss, threw a basketball at his feet, and tried to get him fired. And it worked: He was pushed out. Only, a year later, he's been rehired and is the boss again. I'm thinking that Bryant has lost his leverage. I'm thinking the Lakers will be doing things Jackson's way from now on. I'm thinking the Lakers aren't paying Jackson a reported $30 million to $35 million over three years to undermine his authority again. I'm thinking that Bryant can get on board with that and lose his haughty and insubordinate ways, or he can get out of town. I'm thinking the Lakers could get a point guard and a big man for Bryant.

That's right. I'm thinking a Bryant trade could be the healthiest thing to happen to the Lakers -- and to the league as a whole, if it cures NBA management of its addiction to one-man solutions.

Two smart businessmen, owner Jerry Buss and General Manager Mitch Kupchak, allowed themselves to be sucked into the riptide of Bryant's egocentrism, to such an extent that they ran off arguably the best coach in history, and traded the best big man in the game, Shaquille O'Neal. Without them, Bryant was revealed for what he is, and what he is not. And what he is not, is the next Jordan and the savior of the league or even his team. So now the Lakers have turned back to Jackson.

The funny thing is, of the central figures in the Lakers' saga, Bryant is the guy who has yet to prove that he can win something without Jackson or O'Neal. Jackson has nine championships. All Shaq did this season -- hurt -- was get his team, the Miami Heat, to the conference finals. Bryant and the Lakers, meanwhile, had some bad luck with injuries and the deteriorating health of Rudy Tomjanovich. Alone, Bryant was a solitary scorer making gloriously difficult shots on a 34-48 lottery team.

Lest we forget, the Pistons are coached by a guy, Larry Brown, who had the guts to walk away from another great but ungovernable young player, Allen Iverson. Brown's reward was the 2004 NBA title at the expense of the Lakers, followed by a repeat appearance in this championship series. His team must be a pleasure to coach, between Ben Wallace's selfless dirty work, and the willingness of Chauncey Billups and Rip Hamilton to share.

And then there are the Spurs, so complete, with seemingly indispensable players at all five positions. And whose reserves include Robert Horry, a player who serves as a reminder that the Lakers at their best were never all about Bryant in the first place.

Think back on those three titles the Lakers won in five years, and the funny thing is, you remember the performances of Horry, as well as Derek Fisher and Brian Shaw and Rick Fox, as much as you do those of Bryant. Of course Bryant had some huge games, made some huge shots. But in 2001-2002, Horry was the hero of the playoffs, when he hit that magnificent three-pointer with 2.1 seconds left, to give the Lakers a 92-91 victory at Portland. And who then knocked down another huge three with 0.6 on the clock to give the Lakers a 100-99 win over the Sacramento Kings in Game 6 of the Western Conference Finals. And who got a playoff-career-high 20 rebounds against Sacramento, too.

Horry has five championship rings and is seeking a sixth. And on Tuesday night, Horry surpassed Jordan for first place in career three-pointers in the NBA Finals, with 43. Horry trails only Reggie Miller for the most three-pointers in postseason history.

The Lakers need a few more players like that, the Horrys, the Shaws, the Fishers and Foxes. Jackson himself has said that the Lakers' roster, so lopsided and tilted toward Bryant, "is not appealing." They have too many players at some positions and not enough at others. You think Jackson doesn't remember the value of the Horrys and Fishers? You think he doesn't have the guts or sang-froid to shuck Bryant, if he thinks it's in the interests of better collaboration on the floor?

In all the puzzling over Jackson's motive for returning as head coach, what's forgotten is the competitiveness of the man -- he hates losing and he hasn't done much of it and he can't have liked losing his job. There is iron in him, beneath the juju and the guru stuff. The richness of his contract is surely a factor in his decision to return, but surely another factor is gut satisfaction. You have to wonder if Jackson just couldn't live with the way things ended in L.A. a year ago.

Last year, Bryant was good for ratings -- but he was bad for the Lakers and bad for the game. This year, the Spurs and the Pistons are bad for ratings. But they're good for game. So do the game a favor: Turn on the TV, and rescue it from Kobe Bryant.

From World Net Daily:

Mexico's blind eye
to al-Qaida activity

Intel sources see porous border
posing major terror threat to U.S.

Posted: June 13, 2005

© 2005 WorldNetDaily.com

Al-Qaida "communities," like the one busted in Lodi, Calif., have direct ties to other networks in Mexico and Central America, where jihadi terrorists are not viewed as a local threat, reports Joseph Farah's G2 Bulletin.

"South of the Rio Grande Valley there exists a dire situation," said an intelligence researcher who took part in an academic meeting in west Canada.

Intelligence sources and researchers agree there is hardly any effective cooperation between the Department of Homeland Security and the intelligence establishment of Mexico's President Vicente Fox.

Mexican agencies charged with intelligence and counter-terrorism, such as the Office of Coordination of the Presidency and the Center for Research on National Security, CISEN, do little more than offer half-hearted monitoring of militant Islamic activity, say G2 Bulletin sources.

Mexico is facing a national crisis in dealing with drug lords who are killing elected officials, police chiefs and innocent civilians. Officials there have little interest and fewer resources to devote to law enforcement and intelligence activities that threaten the U.S., not Mexico.

As WND reported last week, Islam is on the move in Mexico and throughout Latin America, making dramatic gains in converting the native population, increasing immigration, establishing businesses and charities and attracting attention from U.S. government officials who have asked their neighbors to the south to keep an eye on foreign Muslim groups.

While Mexico has pledged to monitor these activities on behalf of the U.S., those familiar with the recruitment practices and the Mexican government's oversight say the U.S. has reasons for concern.

For instance, Gen. Jorge Serrano, the head of the Attorney General Office's special terrorism investigation unit, says no Muslim terrorists have been found living in Mexico.

Yet intelligence sources in the U.S. and Canada say Islamic jihadists have been working with zealots in Mexico for more than 20 years. Early activities were sponsored by Iran. Later, the recruitment activities got support from the Egyptian, Pakistani and Saudi embassies. It is known the Egyptians paid the rent for a prayer hall and allocated funds for students who wanted to study at the Islamic al-Azhar University in Cairo. The Pakistanis organized Muslim converts and others to visit madrassas in Pakistan, a golden opportunity offered to the Taliban and al-Qaida to reach a larger pool of recruitment candidates. Saudi funds created a range of activities linked to Hajj or studies in Saudi Arabia where young zealots established contacts with Sufi and Wahabi activists one way or another connected to master terrorist Osama bin Laden.

Mexican authorities revealed in 2002 they knew Spanish Muslim converts of Basque origin were present in Chiapas state preaching the ideas of Islam and jihad as they mingled with local aboriginals. At least in two cases Mexican authorities, unable to determine the whereabouts of Basque Muslims, sent letters to their last known address informing them their stay in the country was illegal. According to a CISEN official, most Basque and Spanish Muslims were linked to the North African-based al-Murabitun World Tzotzil Movement, known for its blend of socialism and Islam. Information on Basque activity in Mexico is regularly collected by the Spanish government, but is not shared with the U.S. by the Mexicans.

Small, sometimes clandestine Islamic clubs in Mexico, usually disguised as cultural groupings, are on the increase. Information on ways to cross the U.S. and Mexican border and where to go, including recommended U.S. states and so-called asylum cities has actually already reached all corners of the jihadi Khalifat world. Some documents found in Pakistan, and more information from Iraq and Lebanon, proves jihadists are aware they are in danger of being detected when they use legitimate ports of entry to the U.S. Therefore they prefer to reach their sympathizers in Mexico and then penetrate the U.S. together with hundreds of thousands of Mexicans, drug lords and gang members.

As one Royal Canadian Mounted Police officer familiar with the situation in Mexico said: "What’s the point of having old ladies remove their shoes at airport security checks, when all it takes to carry a small package of the potent ricin poison into the U.S. is a friendly Mexican jihadist escorting you on a dark moonless night across the porous U.S.-Mexican border."

From The Washington Post:

'It's a Hard Feeling, Not to Be a Violent Man Anymore'
By Michael Wilbon

Midnight came and went, so did 1 o'clock Sunday morning. And Mike Tyson sat in the underbelly of MCI Center almost casually unburdening himself at the end of an extraordinarily bizarre night, even by his standards, one during which we got to see the extended range of Tyson's emotions.

After twice trying to break the arm of Kevin McBride, intentionally swinging his head like a ram in an attempt to crack open his opponent's skull, then quitting on his stool at the end of six rugged and bloody rounds, Tyson was more defeated than he had ever been in 20 years of boxing. And afterward, for 2 1/2 hours beginning at about 10:45 Saturday night, he seemed to rampage through the various states of being that have made Tyson probably the most complex and compelling figure in sports over the last 20 years. Beginning with the opening bell, Tyson went from determined to desperately bloodthirsty to beaten to resigned to remorseful to introspective to philosophical.

He quit on the night, pronounced repeatedly he is quitting boxing for good, then talked about his life with such stunning candor that he convinced a few of us he truly feels he is done forever, such is his disdain for the game that made him the world's first and longest-running reality show.

"I just don't have it in me anymore. . . . My career's over," Tyson said. "It's been over since 1990. "

Asked why it took him so long to get off the canvas and to his corner after a shove from McBride sent him through the ropes at the end of the sixth round, Tyson said: "I didn't want to get up. I was tired. I looked like I was 120 years old. . . . I was like Rip Van Winkle."

When Rock Newman, the promoter for the event, told Tyson at the post-fight news conference that he was going to applaud the former champion for his career achievements and would encourage others to do so as well, the standing ovation was quickly stopped by Tyson himself, who screamed: "No, no, no, no. . . . Sit down. Sit down, please. People have given me enough applause in my life. When I hear B.S., I've got to call it. I'm as hard and as cold as they get."

As always with Tyson, his sycophants were in denial about what had happened. Women at ringside cried as Tyson was being pummeled during the fifth and sixth rounds. Tyson knew he needed to address them, too, to ask in effect that they let go of the long-playing drama and the excuse-making that follows everything from a critical review to a criminal conviction.

"My fans are so sensitive," he said. "Save your tears. You embarrass me when you cry because I don't know what to do or say. Don't cry. . . . When I was younger, I felt life was about acquiring things. But as I get older, I know life is totally about losing everything."

Tyson flashed back to his childhood, when he got a visit from Muhammad Ali, who was attempting to make some kind of positive impression on Tyson, already as troubled as he was talented.

"Smart too late and old too soon," Tyson said of himself. "This is just my ending."

But, of course, it wasn't the end of the evening. He needed to purge, and this was the time and the place. Handlers asked him if he wanted the questions to stop, and Tyson said, no, he wanted to talk until there were no more questions, until all the good anecdotes were exhausted. There were boxing writers present, from the United States and Europe, he has known for years. And like the opponents he often tries to kill one minute and hug the next, Tyson wanted to talk to the people who had been there chronicling his life for 20 years, the ones he had come to despise one month and seek out for conversation the next. The next hour-plus was part confession, part purge. Tyson should have been on his back, on a couch. It must have been cathartic, though who can be entirely certain of anything with Tyson.

He talked about going to Bosnia and Rwanda to help with aid and food for people in need because he wants to do something good with his life but carries too much baggage to ever be truly productive in the United States.

"I may be bizarre sometimes," Tyson said, "but I'm very rational. I know my situation."

While Tyson will be remembered for being a ferocious fighter of great skill when he was young, he never defeated anybody who wasn't afraid of him, who stood up to him and kept fighting back. He couldn't beat Buster Douglas, couldn't beat Evander Holyfield, couldn't beat Lennox Lewis. Now, at 38, his skill and desire have eroded to the point that he can't beat anybody, not even club fighters -- as long as they stand their ground and fight back. Nobody is afraid of him anymore, not even a journeyman such as McBride, whom Tyson said he was going to "gut like a fish."

So the question now is obvious: Will Tyson fight again? The easy answer is, yes, especially because he owes millions in taxes. Even fighters who hang on to their money, such as Sugar Ray Leonard, almost always come back. Of the great ones still bankable, only Marvin Hagler in recent memory has walked away and stayed away. Tyson admitted after the fight that, while his children are wealthy, he is broke.

Tyson said he hasn't been able to adopt the killer frame of mind since he left jail following his rape conviction in 1992, and that he hates the smell of the gym now, whereas he used to love training and sparring. "I just don't have it in me any more," he said. "I can't even kill the bugs in my house. It's a hard feeling, not to be a violent man anymore. . . . I don't know that guy anymore."

But he does have six children, expenses that won't stop, IRS bills piled high. In a few months, after the swelling over his left eye is long gone and the pain and embarrassment from this latest defeat have faded, somebody is going to try to convince Tyson not only that he can fight again, but do so successfully and for a decent payday. And while Tyson, 39 years old soon, is now officially done as a marquee attraction, there is always another pug, another payday, and another round of a brutal, vicious cycle. Yes, he's done, but perhaps not gone

How Liberty Dies: The Patriot Reauthorization Act
by John W. Whitehead

Do our representatives understand how we feel? Or don’t they care? The recent approval by the Senate Intelligence Committee to reauthorize and expand the Patriot Act’s powers leaves one wondering if Congress listens to the American people anymore. Equally worrisome is the fact that the critical discussions and decisions surrounding expansion of the Act are taking place in secret, behind closed doors. What do our government representatives have to hide?

Since the passage of the Patriot Act six weeks after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, 378 local and county governments and seven state legislatures representing millions of Americans have passed resolutions or ordinances opposing aspects of the Patriot Act that they believe to be at odds with the United States Constitution. One City Council member from Arcata, Calif., described his town’s ordinance as “a nonviolent preemptive attack” on the federal government’s revision of the Bill of Rights. Yet our government continues to ignore these concerns and push through its own agenda.

At a massive 342 pages, the Patriot Act violates at least six of the ten original amendments known as the Bill of Rights—the First, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Seventh and Eighth Amendments—and possibly the Thirteenth and Fourteenth as well.

The Patriot Act was rushed through Congress, even though the majority of our representatives admitted to not reading it, reassured perhaps by the inclusion of a five-year sunset provision. But that sun does not seem to be setting on this chilling piece of legislation. Instead, the Senate Intelligence Committee is not only working to make the Patriot Act permanent, but also to expand its reach.

Among some of the widely cited concerns about the Patriot Act are that it redefines terrorism so broadly that many non-terrorist political activities such as protest marches or demonstrations and civil disobedience can be considered a terrorist act; grants the FBI the right to come to your place of employment, demand your personal records and question your supervisors and fellow employees, all without notifying you; allows the government access to your medical records, school records and practically every personal record about you; allows the government to secretly demand to see records of books or magazines you’ve checked out in any public library and Internet sites you’ve visited (at least 545 libraries received such demands in the first year following passage of the Patriot Act); and most egregious of all, it allows the FBI to enter your home through the use of a special warrant, search your personal effects and confiscate your personal property without informing you that they have done so.

Yet despite the many objections to these disturbing provisions within the Patriot Act, the Senate Intelligence Committee has wholeheartedly embraced the Patriot Reauthorization Act (PAREA), which takes government intrusion into the lives of average Americans to a whole new level.

For example, one “administrative authority” provision within PAREA, which would allow the FBI to write and approve its own search orders, represents a direct assault on the Fourth Amendment’s prohibitions against unreasonable search and seizure. Yet if Congress acts to approve what critics have termed “carte blanche for a fishing expedition,” the FBI will be in a position to conduct warrantless searches on people without having to show any evidence that they may be involved in criminal activities. This provision would also lift one of the last restrictions on special warrants for the FBI—namely, that the information be related to international terrorism or foreign intelligence.

Yet while government officials insist that the FBI needs additional tools to fight terrorism, a recent report suggests that all the FBI really needs to do is its job. A Justice Department report reveals that the same FBI that wants to do an end-run around our Constitution passed up on at least five chances in the months before 9/11 to locate two terrorist hijackers as they prepared for attacks on our country. The oversights were attributed to communication breakdowns, lack of urgency and bureaucratic obstacles, among other things. “What we found were sufficient deficiencies in the way the FBI handled these issues,” said Inspector General Glenn Fine. In other words, if the FBI and other intelligence agencies had simply done their jobs and followed up on leads, then there wouldn’t have been a need for the Patriot Act—and there certainly wouldn’t be a need for warrantless searches.

While it remains questionable whether the Patriot Act has really succeeded in protecting Americans against future acts of terrorism, these highly controversial additions to the Act will unquestionably succeed in gutting the Fourth Amendment. Of all the protections found in the Constitution, the Fourth Amendment stands as the final barrier between the privacy rights of Americans and the potential for government abuse of power. But if law enforcement officials can search your home and your records without having to go through a judge, then the concept of a man’s home being his castle will become as antiquated as the Model T.

Despite the fact that an increasing number of Americans are voicing their concerns about intrusions on their privacy, President Bush continues to express his support for extending the Patriot Act. One day after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Bush declared, “We will not allow this enemy to win the war by changing our way of life or restricting our freedoms.” Yet if Congress succeeds in continuing to pass legislation that is at odds with our Constitution, we will have handed a definitive victory to our enemies by allowing unchecked police power to triumph over individual rights and the rule of law in this country. At that point, our government will be no better than the dictatorships we have for so long opposed on principled grounds.

In a Jan. 2003 interview with the Los Angeles Times, constitutional law professor Jonathan Turley remarked, “Since 9/11, the Constitution has gone from an objective to be satisfied to an obstacle to national defense. . . As these changes mount, at what point do we become something other than a free and democratic nation?” Americans would do well to heed the warning behind Turley’s words: with every piece of Patriot Act-type legislation that Congress passes, our basic constitutional protections are being undermined and we are, indeed, moving further away from being a free and democratic nation.

To quote a recent editorial, “Is this how liberty dies?” For the sake of this great nation, I hope not.

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.

A blast from National Review past. Especially appropriate with all the news lately about Tom Cruise.

Scientology Chic
The bizarro force behind Tom and Nicole’s split.

By Andrew Stuttaford
 
So, was the kooky cult to blame? We will likely never know what went wrong between Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, but a recent article in the New York Post suggests that Tom Cruise's Scientology was a big part of the problem. Apparently, Ms. Kidman is disenchanted with the controversial religion, and does not want her children to be reared in it.

All this has subsequently been denied, but if it is true, who would blame her? Even if one ignores the number of fairly sinister stories told about Scientology, some of its precepts reflect the sort of ideas that put it squarely in the lunatic fringe. Founded half a century ago by pulp writer L. Ron Hubbard, Scientology's roots lie in a mixture of junkyard sci-fi and bargain-basement psychoanalysis. Not too bargain basement, mind you. Unlike most faiths, Scientology charges admission. To progress ever closer to enlightenment, devotees pay to go through a series of sessions that are part confessional, part therapy. These encounters are designed to reveal (and remove) past traumas called "engrams" (don't ask) and are helped along by the use of an electro-psychometer ("E-Meter" to the cognoscenti), a specially designed instrument which can supposedly locate areas of spiritual distress or travail. This is part of a process known as "auditing," the real reason, perhaps, that the IRS chose in 1993 to recognize Scientology as a religion.

It is difficult not to laugh. Scientology, after all, is an easy target — with its oddball technology, goofy jargon, and, reportedly, a secret creation myth that revolves around the activities of the wicked intergalactic ruler, Xenu. Now, many religions include a bizarre legend or two, and we probably should not worry too much about the Xenu saga. After all, it has, apparently, been 75 million years since the old boy was last seen, and he does not seem to figure prominently in the lives of most Scientologists. Nevertheless, if there really is such a tale, it is yet another reminder that the intellectual origins of this creed appear to be, well, a little flaky.

Scientologists, of course, should be free to believe whatever they want, but it does not say a lot for the state of this nation's critical faculties that their philosophy has won as much acceptance as it has. Given some of Hubbard's teachings, you would expect his followers to be a little embarrassed, a little low key, content, perhaps, to twiddle their E-meters in some tumble-down Appalachian shack.

But the reverse is true. Scientology is rich, increasingly prominent, and unashamedly proselytizing. Check out its websites and you will see all the good things that Scientology claims it can do both for society, and for you. It is a message of enlightened self-interest, typical of our age, and it uses the jazzy marketing techniques of the PowerPoint era, statistics, graphs, and charts. Scientologists, they reveal, are prone to marriage, but not to auto accidents. Half do not drink, more than two-thirds read more than five books a year, and 39 percent work out every day. Scientology can even boast celebrity support. Travolta! Cruise! Kirstie Alley! The voice of Bart Simpson!

In part, this success reflects the group's indubitable organizational skills, and its willingness to defend itself through aggressive litigation. It is also the case, however, that the growth of Scientology, and many other such philosophies, is an almost inevitable byproduct of a society that, over the years, has lost the art of religious argument, reasoning, and debate — and the ability or the inclination to resist the blandishments of our zanier sects.

Ask most Americans, and they will tell you about their respect for the spiritual, but it is a sloppy and uninformed devotion, a pastiche piety with no intellectual force behind it, more Hallmark than holy, the perfect background for a new cult recruit. Ironically, Nicole Kidman herself provided an example of this mindset in a 1998 interview with Newsweek. Asked about her religious beliefs, the actress replied, "there is a little Buddhism, a little Scientology. I was raised Catholic, and a big part of me is still a Catholic girl."

Hand in hand with such an attitude is an unwillingness to debate the religious beliefs of others. Such debate is now believed to be insensitive at best, bigoted and hateful at worst. These days everyone is meant to be a little bit Buddhist, Catholic, Scientologist , whatever. A sappy ecumenicism is now America's civic religion, and it appears to include just about everyone (other, interestingly, than atheists and agnostics). We are taught that such supposedly inclusive tolerance is the hallmark of a tolerant society, when, in fact, it is precisely the opposite. True religious tolerance is the acceptance of the right of others to follow a different creed. In our ersatz, contemporary version, however, it is denied that there are any different creeds. Instead, we are encouraged to think that all religions are basically the same, just different routes to the same transcendental Truth.

In the name of "diversity," we try to erase difference. When it comes to religious belief, this is a country chary of controversy and anxious about argument. In the interest of fraudulent civility and soi-disant "respect" we have removed the right of the religious to disagree with each other. On the face of it, traditional religious distinctions remain, but all too often they have been trivialized and shrunk down to the superficial, reduced to a matter of folklore or ethnic heritage, nothing more consequential, say, than a choice of headgear: Yarmulke, or turban?

This is a mistake. Old-style rigorous religious debate was bruising, tough, and frequently impolite, but it served a function. Homo Sapiens is a credulous creature, ready to believe just about anything, but, fortunately, he has an innate love of argument. Controversy sharpened our great faiths and pushed them, however painfully, towards some form of intellectual coherence. More than that, it acted as a filter for the worst of the nonsense that people would otherwise be tempted to accept. Now that filter has disappeared. The more established religions are gutted, sunk into PC blandness, or, ironically, introspective fundamentalism. In their intellectual retreat they have left behind a spiritual landscape in which anything goes.

The Scientologists are not the only ones to have seized this opportunity. We are becoming a nation of nitwit necromancers, idiot Astrologers, and suburban shamans. Others prefer to fool around with crystals, commune with UFOs, or worship the Earth.

And that is their right, but we should not be afraid to say that it is also their mistake. Somehow I suspect that, these days, Nicole Kidman might just agree.

Quran desecration crock a win for Jihad spin docs
By Mark Steyn

Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe's kleptocrat strongman, destroyed a mosque the other day. It was in Hatcliffe Extension, a shantytown on the edge of Harare razed by the "police." Mugabe is an equal-opportunity razer: He also bulldozed a Catholic-run AIDS center. The government destroyed the town in order to drive the locals out into the countryside to live on the land stolen from white farmers. Quite how that's meant to benefit any of the parties involved or the broader needs of Zimbabwe is beyond me, but then I'm no expert in Afro-Marxist economic theory.


The point is the world's Muslims seem entirely cool with Infidel Bob razing a mosque. Unlike the fallout over Newsweek's fraudulent story about the Quran being flushed down a toilet, no excitable young men went bananas in Pakistan; no western progressives berated Mugabe for his "cultural insensitivity." And sadly most of the big shot Muslim spokespersons were still too busy flaying the Bush administration to whip their subjects into a frenzy over Hatcliffe Extension's pile of Islamic rubble.

Last week, Ambassador Atta el-Manan Bakhit of the Organization of the Islamic Conference called on Washington to show "no leniency" to the "perpetrators" of "this despicable crime." "This disgraceful conduct of those soldiers reveal their blatant hatred and disdain for the religion of millions of Muslims all over the world," said His Excellency. The Egyptian foreign minister was also in a tizzy. "We denounce in the strongest possible terms what the Pentagon confirmed about the desecration of the Qu'ran," said Ahmed Aboul Gheit, calling for strong measures, heads to roll, etc.

And what was it the Pentagon "confirmed"? That since Gitmo became the global center of U.S. Quran Desecration operations, there have been five verifiable instances of official minor "disrespect" for the holy book, three of which may have been intentional, which averages out at one incident per year. The same report also turned up 15 documented instances of "disrespect" by Muslim detainees. "These included using a Quran as a pillow, ripping pages out of the Quran, attempting to flush a Quran down the toilet and urinating on the Quran."

When three times as many detainees "desecrate" the Koran as U.S. guards do, it seems clear that the whole Operation Desecration ballyhoo is yet another media crock and the Organization of the Islamic Conference and all the rest are complaining about nothing. Or is Quran desecration one of those things like Jews telling Jewish jokes or gangsta rappers recording numbers like "Strictly 4 My Niggaz"? Are only devout Muslims allowed to desecrate the Quran? No doubt that's why the Egyptian foreign minister and company had no comment on the recent suicide bombing at a mosque in Kandahar, which killed 20, wounded more than 50 and presumably desecrated every Quran in the building.

Yet, as is often the way, the Muslim world's whiny spokespersons have been effortlessly topped by the old hands of the anti-American left. Thus, according to Amnesty International, Gitmo is the "gulag of our time."

Well then, these are diminished times for gulags. According to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, some 15 million to 30 million prisoners died in the Soviet gulags. By comparison, Guantanamo at its peak held 750 prisoners; currently, there are 520; none have died in captivity, and, as I wrote 3-1/2 years ago, it has the distinction of being "a camp where the medical staff outnumber the prisoners." You'll get swifter, cleaner and more efficient treatment than most Canadians do under socialized health care. It's the only gulag in history where the detainees leave in better health and weighing more than when they arrive. This means they're in much better shape when they get back to their hectic schedule of killing infidels: Of the more than 200 who've been released, around 5 percent -- that's to say, 12 -- have since been recaptured on the battlefield.

Why would an organization in the human rights business want to trivialize the murder of millions in totalitarian death camps by comparing them with a non-death camp that flatters every aspect of the inmates' culture? If Gitmo's a gulag, what words are left for the systemic rape being practiced by the butchers of Darfur? Or is it because they've so exhausted the extremes of their vocabulary on Guantanamo that the world's progressives have so little to say about real horrors like Sudan?

No serious allegation of torture at the camp has been substantiated, and in the al-Qaida training manual found in Manchester, England, a couple of years back Rule 18 couldn't be more explicit: When held captive by the infidel, members must "complain to the court of mistreatment while in prison" and say that "torture was inflicted on them." A healthy skepticism would thus seem to be advisable. Instead, Thomas Friedman of the New York Times runs around shrieking like a hysterical ninny that Washington needs to shut down Guantanamo right now -- not because of anything that actually occurred there -- but because of negative "perceptions" of the camp in the overseas press.

And would caving in to those negative perceptions lead to any better press? Nobody got killed in Gitmo, so instead America's being flayed as the planet's No. 1 torturer for being insufficiently respectful to the holy book of its prisoners, even though the Americans themselves supplied their prisoners with the holy book, even though Americans who fall into the hands of the other side get their heads hacked off, even though the prisoners' co-religionists themselves blow up more mosques and Qurans than the Pentagon ever does, even though the preferred holy book of most Americans is banned in the home country of many of the prisoners, where respect for other faiths is summed up in the headline, "Seven Christians Released In Saudi Arabia On Condition They Renounce Private Religious Practice."

That was in the British Catholic newspaper, the Universe, last week, by the way. Sadly, no U.S. newspaper found room for the story due to pressures of space caused by all the "Al-Qaida Press Secretary Denounces Insufficient Respect For Koran By Rumsfeld" front page splashes. But sure, go ahead, close Gitmo and wait for the rave reviews from the media -- right after the complaints that it's culturally insensitive to rebuild the World Trade Center when it's the burial site of 10 revered Muslim martyrs.

Guantanamo will be remembered not as a byword for torture but for self-torture, a Western fetish the jihad's spin doctors understand all too well.