Archive for October, 2006
Last year Tony Shaffer was a media sensation, as the spy in from the cold with his riveting account of what a secret military unit called Able Danger had uncovered long before the Sept. 11 attacks. But recently, the Pentagon's Inspector General's office released a report that basically whitewashes Shaffer's account.
All the insiders who supported Shaffer's account have since changed their minds and are calling Schaffer a liar. One example of leaving Tony Shaffer to hand is Navy Capt. Scott Phillpott.
The goal of Able Danger, established at U.S. Special Operations Command in October 1999, was to track al-Qaeda operatives using data-mining techniques. Phillpott served as the unit's operations officer.
Shortly after Shaffer went public in mid-August of 2005, Phillpott, by then working at the Pentagon, issued a brief statement backing him.
"My story has remained consistent. Atta was identified by Able Danger in January/February 2000," Phillpott said.
That story would unspool when he was questioned by the inspector general's office.
During the first interview, Phillpott, whose name is redacted from the report, said he was "100 percent [certain]" there was a chart with Atta's photograph. During the second interview, he wavered, saying he was not sure he'd seen Atta.
By the third interview, he was convinced Atta was not on the chart. (TBO.com)
The Able Danger story surfaced last year, and most readers of the media do have short memories. The new report which whitewashes the Able Danger findings made cloud the memory of even more readers.
Recently, 7-Eleven convenient stores has decided to discontinue selling Citgo gas at their pumps. Citgo is owned and operated by Chavez, the dictator in Venezuela. Instead they will be buying their fuel from American owned company, Valero.
Chavez has being saber rattling giving strong anti-American speeches, including his last one at the UN two weeks ago. He has called President Bush the devil and an alcoholic and has threaten to dispose of our country's heritage. He has nurtured a strong alliance with the terrorist group Hezbollah which operates out Venezuela for over the last ten years.
7-Eleven spokesman Margaret Chabris said that, "Regardless of politics, we sympathize with many Americans' concern over derogatory comments about our country and its leadership recently made by Venezuela's president Hugo Chavez." (Breitbart.com)
And recently, Florida State Rep. Adam Hasner has expressed strongly that he doesn't think CITGO should be selling gasoline on the Florida Turnpike system.
Last month, Susser Holdings Corp of Corpus Christi, Texas, is radically downsizing its 18-year relationship with CITGO. And like 7-Eleven, they will be getting their gas from an American owned Valero.
Republican George Pataki, a potential 2008 presidential candidate, said he has had more than enough with the Venezuelan leader bad mouthing the American commander-in-chief.
"This person has no right coming to our country to criticize our president. He can take his cheap oil and do something for the poor people of Venezuela," said Pataki during an interview with Fox News.
When asked if he would patronize Citgo, the gas company owned by Petroleus de Venezuela, the state-run oil company, Pataki told Fox News, "I have no plans to." (CNSNews.com)
By Alan Caruba
http://www.anxietycenter.com
Let me tell you the story of two women in Afghanistan.
Safia Ama Jan was the provincial director for the Ministry of Women’s Affairs when she was murdered in late September by the Taliban outside of her home in Kandahar. She was a woman of immense courage. Her killers, two men on a motorbike who gunned her down and then sped away, were the kind of scum we are fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq.
The Associated Press reported that, “Ama Jan was known as an active proponent of women’s rights in the former Taliban stronghold.” The attack on her was one of “increasingly brazen attacks by militants on government officials and schools in Afghanistan.” I do wish the AP would more accurately use the word “terrorists.” Killing a woman in her 60’s, wearing a full burqa, is the work of murderers intent on spreading terror.
Even during the years the Taliban ruled Afghanistan, Ama Jan secretly conducted classes for young girls. She did so every day at the risk of death. She had been a teacher for thirty years when they killed her. When the United States rid Afghanistan of these murderous thugs, we laid the groundwork for a modern nation.
Last year Taliban, who see themselves as the exemplars of Islam, burned or attacked 146 schools and they have picked up the pace, attacking 158 schools so far this year according to an advisor to Afghanistan’s education minister. Perhaps this is due to the fact that these schools teach girls or perhaps there simply is no room for competition with the madrasses that limit “education” to the Koran and teach only boys.
The enemies of knowledge know how dangerous it can be to a so-called religion that believes it encompasses the only knowledge a Muslim need know or, for that matter, everyone else in the world. The enemies of knowledge are, by definition, the enemies of freedom in Afghanistan and everywhere else.
The other woman was Army Sgt. First Class Merideth Howard of Waukesha, Wisconsin.
By Thomas E. Brewton
Progressive educators today proudly declare that they don't warp students' minds by teaching specific bodies of knowledge, by teaching to the test; they teach students how to think. That concept is a meaningless and dangerous abstraction.
Commenting upon a recent posting, a reader wrote:
"…. Now, if you go to college, you learn how to analyze information critically as opposed to reeling with whatever gut, emotional response you get. You learn not "What to think," but "How to think." The only way that education will ever succeed in our times is if it raises a generation of children who can not only read, but read between the lines."
No one would disagree with the sentiment that children should be able to understand the context of what they read and have a sufficient breadth of knowledge to bring critical judgment to what they read.
But the concept of learning how to think, as a stand-alone pedagogy, is meaningless. One has to think about something, and, in order to understand what one is thinking about, is is necessary to learn a great many facts about that something. In many cases understanding comes only with much practice and drill.
One might as well hand an oboe to an untutored music student and lecture him on how to think about playing the oboe, without benefit of being able to read music and without practice to master the mechanics of producing correct notes from the instrument.
This is particularly true, for example, in mathematics. When a teacher presents a concept with a blackboard demonstration, keener students may be able to follow each step of the process. But only later, working alone at home on assignments, will the student discover what he doesn't know and in the process learn the concept sufficiently well to solve similar problems in the future.
When students are allowed to use electronic calculators to solve problems, their minds are not engaged in any meaningful way with mathematics itself. They might as well be playing a video game.
But they are learning how to think about mathematical problems. They just don't really understand what they are thinking about.
Even teachers' unions dominated by progressive liberalism have begun to admit that the various genres of new math fail to teach mathematics to students. When it doesn't matter whether students can solve problems and get correct answers, when it is believed sufficient for students to have some conceptual idea about a problem, we have a nation of students falling each year farther behind Indian, Chinese, Japanese, and other Asian students in real scientific accomplishment.
By Thomas E. Brewton
Democrats, dominated by their liberal-socialist wing, have swallowed whole the socialistic and pragmatist philosophy doctrine that truth is simply whatever opinion wins in the media marketplace. Whether it is right or wrong is immaterial.
Daniel Henninger's editorial page article in Friday's Wall Street Journal, "Can the Democrats Beat Bush's Beliefs With Poll Politics?" captures the unreality that has become the Democrat's policy position on foreign affairs.
Mr. Henninger writes: "Democrats want voters to view the November election through the fogged and bloody prism of the war in Iraq…. It is difficult to imagine that the U.S. soldiers in Iraq would regard the political debate back home as measuring up to the seriousness of what they do every day. How would you like to roll out of your bunk in al Anbar province, Mosul or Baghdad on a Sunday morning and read across the top of the local U.S. paper that everything you've done in Iraq for three years has merely made the terrorism threat worse? You just might lose heart a notch, a dangerous thing when fighting a war.
"But at this late stage of the campaign, Iraq-as-failure has become the central narrative in the Democrats' strategy. A memo sent out to Democrats last week by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner, a strategy group led by former Clinton pollster Stan Greenberg, discusses Mr. Bush's 'failure in Iraq, which energized Democrats and dispirited Republicans.' It urges Democrats: 'On Iraq, stress Bush/GOP 'mismanagement' and need for a 'new direction.' "
Advertisers of consumer products often structure advertisements to associate their products with a mood or a sense of pleasure, often without providing specifics about the product. Advertisers appear to believe that image, at least in the Baby Boomer world, is everything.
Basing their campaign strategy on the sort of focus-group polling employed by consumer-goods advertisers, Democrats just want voters to associate their party with peace and opposition to anything that might require our military forces to enter dangerous combat. The declared intent of Islamic jihadists to subjugate or destroy all non-Muslim societies must be ignored, as it would conflict with the nebulous image that fighting back is the root cause of terrorism. Appeasement, aka "negotiating" via the UN, is the Democrat's Ned-Lamont socialist answer.