26 February 2005 @ 7:17AM >> A number of people have asked me about the movie Weapon of Mass Destruction: The Murderous Reign of Saddam Hussein, which contains some footage from my videos. (I thought I had posted about it a while back, but I looked into the archives and realized that I hadn’t.)

When Brad Maaske contacted me during the production stage of his film, it sounded like a very important project. I was happy to let him use what I could.

Since then, in addition to releasing the film to the public and selling DVDs online, the filmmakers have sent over 10,000 copies to our soldiers in Iraq. And, according to their website:

The effort to raise morale was so successful that officers in Iraq have asked the USO for additional copies of the movie for those serving. Working with the USO and a major sponsor we expect to provide 500,000 more copies to send to every member of the U.S. military serving overseas in the coming months!

That’s good to hear. Our media has done a terrible job at informing us in any detail about the horrific nature of the Saddam regime. I’m glad someone’s working to get the truth out.

25 February 2005 >> Washington Post reporter Dana Milbank was kind enough to give some of his time for this interview with Brain Terminal. I solicited questions from the public, wrote some of my own, and assembled a list of 18 questions, which were then e-mailed to Mr. Milbank. His replies appear within. More >>

24 February 2005 @ 5:13AM >> After seeing Hotel Rwanda this weekend, it’s quite sad to think that it’s happening all over again in the Sudan:

The photo at the upper left was taken in the village of Hamada on Jan. 15, right after a Sudanese government-backed militia, the janjaweed, attacked it and killed 107 people. One of them was this little boy. I’m not showing the photo of his older brother, about 5 years old, who lay beside him because the brother had been beaten so badly that nothing was left of his face. And alongside the two boys was the corpse of their mother.

The photo to the right shows the corpse of a man with an injured leg who was apparently unable to run away when the janjaweed militia attacked.

At the lower left is a man who fled barefoot and almost made it to this bush before he was shot dead.

Last is the skeleton of a man or woman whose wrists are still bound. The attackers pulled the person’s clothes down to the knees, presumably so the victim could be sexually abused before being killed. If the victim was a man, he was probably castrated; if a woman, she was probably raped.

There are thousands more of these photos. Many of them show attacks on children and are too horrific for a newspaper.

Some estimates of the dead exceed 220,000, “and the number is rising by about 10,000 per month.” For political reasons, the U.N. won’t call this a genocide. But if that’s not what this is, then the word has no meaning.

22 February 2005 @ 5:58PM >> Maybe you’ve heard about these billboards that will taunt Hollywood’s glitterati as they shuffle into the Oscars for their annual festival of self-congratulation.

Well, Anna of Liberty Belles decided to go out and ask some Hollywood residents what they thought of the signs. The resulting video, called Boomerang, shows that most people were a little confused. But one thing’s clear: Anna’s great on camera. I’m betting this won’t be her last video.

22 February 2005 @ 5:24PM >> Three weeks into the war in Afghanistan, American and coalition forces controlled about a fifth of the country. Eager to compare every American conflict to Vietnam, that’s when the media and the American left began their predictable use of the term “quagmire” to describe the conflict. A week later, of course, the Taliban government was crushed and its ragged remnants fled to the mountains.

It wasn’t widely covered in our media, but last fall, Afghanistan had a rather successful election that was remarkably free of bloodshed. To say the election was a historic event is to downplay it. It was monumental.

Now there seem to be even more reasons for optimism:

One of the Taliban’s most senior and charismatic commanders has become a key negotiator as more and more members of the Islamic militia in Afghanistan give up the fight against the Americans.

The commander, Abdul Salam, earned the nickname Mullah Rockety because he was so accurate with rocket propelled grenades against Russian troops.

He later joined the Taliban as a corps commander in Jalalabad before being captured by the Americans after September 11.

Now he is a supporter of President Hamid Karzai and is tempting diehard Taliban fighters to accept an amnesty offer and reconcile themselves to Afghanistan’s first directly elected leader.

“The Taliban has lost its morale,” he said, speaking by satellite phone from the heartlands of Zabul province, a Taliban redoubt.

“But you have to go and find the Taliban and call to them and ask them directly. If they believe they will be secure and safe they will come down from the mountains.”

After the Taliban’s three-year struggle against a superior U.S. force, there is growing optimism among the Americans and Afghan government that the end is close.

19 February 2005 @ 5:09PM >> Dana Milbank has graciously agreed to an interview. Thank you, Mr. Milbank, for getting back to me so quickly.

I will be submitting questions by e-mail next week. Feel free to e-mail me if you’d like me to consider including your question for Mr. Milbank. Please note, however, that I will not be sending an exhaustive list; e-mail interviews can be time-consuming for the interviewee, and I appreciate the time that Mr. Milbank is giving.

19 February 2005 @ 1:25AM >> Dana Milbank, a Washington Post reporter that many conservatives perceive as having a thinly-veiled liberal bias, was recently interviewed by the hard-left blog Daily Kos.

In April 2004, Markos (”Kos”) Moulitsas Zúniga—the proprietor of Daily Kos—made news around the blogosphere after the charred bodies of four dead Americans were strung up from a bridge in Fallujah. His compassionate response to the grisly display was, “They were there to wage war for profit. Screw them.” But instead of the comment relegating Kos to political oblivion, the Democratic political establishment ignored it and embraced him. Why? Because his site is a fundraising powerhouse that funneled around a half-million dollars to various Democratic candidates.

Given the extreme partisanship of Daily Kos, it seems like an odd choice for Dana Milbank’s first blog interview. By all appearances, it just furthers the perception that Milbank himself is a partisan journalist. Would he grant an interview to a conservative blog? That’s what I intend to find out.

Earlier today, I left Mr. Milbank a voicemail requesting an interview and followed it up with an e-mail. As yet, there has been no response. However, as a public service, I will persist in trying to get an interview with him, and I will keep you posted about my progress—or lack thereof.

If Milbank is willing to grant interviews to left-wing blogs but won’t submit to questioning from conservatives, one could reasonably conclude that it is an indication of his personal political preferences.

For now, I’m reserving judgment. The life of a reporter is very hectic, and in fairness to Mr. Milbank, he has not yet had a reasonable amount of time to respond.

Stay tuned...

18 February 2005 @ 2:53AM >> From Peggy Noonan’s latest Wall Street Journal piece:

“Salivating morons.” “Scalp hunters.” “Moon howlers.” “Trophy hunters.” “Sons of Sen. McCarthy.” “Rabid.” “Blogswarm.” “These pseudo-journalist lynch mob people.”

This is excellent invective. It must come from bloggers. But wait, it was the mainstream media and their maidservants in the elite journalism reviews, and they were talking about bloggers!

[...]

When you hear name-calling like what we’ve been hearing from the elite media this week, you know someone must be doing something right. The hysterical edge makes you wonder if writers for newspapers and magazines and professors in J-schools don’t have a serious case of freedom envy.

The bloggers have that freedom. They have the still pent-up energy of a liberated citizenry, too. The MSM doesn’t. It has lost its old monopoly on information. It is angry.

But MSM criticism of the blogosphere misses the point [...]

When you think of new media, Peggy Noonan isn’t exactly the first name to come to mind. But the rest of her article demonstrates the depth of her understanding of the new world of Internet media. If a more insightful analysis of the world of blogging has appeared in the establishment press, I haven’t read it.

17 February 2005 @ 5:15PM >> On Sunday, Fox News Channel will be airing a one-hour documentary called Hollywood vs. America. One of the topics covered will be the nascent conservative film movement, which is growing in reaction to the left’s monopoly in Hollywood.

I was interviewed for Hollywood vs. America and discovered yesterday that I’m appearing in the promo spots. (I’m the guy who says, “Hollywood has to realize that it’s not a political party.”)

Hollywood vs. America will air this upcoming Sunday (February 20th) at 9:00PM ET (6:00PM PT) and will repeat at midnight ET (9:00PM PT).

16 February 2005 @ 6:56AM >> The truth about those mysterious memos may still come out. Court discovery procedures are like mental equivalents of rectal exams. And in the process, incriminating e-mails always manage to get leaked. (Just ask Microsoft.) So I would not relish being a boss at CBS News right about now:

[F]ar from resolving the problem of the network’s credibility, the independent report commissioned by CBS appears instead to be leading to a confrontation, with defenders of both the ousted CBS staffers involved in the debacle and top CBS management asserting two different truths from the same document.

Mr. Howard and two other ousted CBS staffers—his top deputy, Mary Murphy, and CBS News senior vice president Betsy West—haven’t resigned. And sources close to Mr. Howard said that before any resignation comes, the 23-year CBS News veteran is demanding that the network [...] correct its official story line and ultimately clear his name.

[A]ll three remain CBS employees and collect weekly salaries from the company that asked them to tender their resignations.

[...]

Legally, CBS and the ousted staffers are in an unusual stalemate: The network cannot be sued for breach of contract unless it actually fires them. Theoretically, the network could refuse to offer an apology or correct statements and simply drag its feet, continuing to write paychecks to the trio until their contracts expire.

[...]

On its own, CBS management has little motivation to publicly revisit the details of the Thornburgh report—let alone admit any errors in its own interpretation, which assigned little or no blame to Mr. Moonves, CBS News president Andrew Heyward and CBS executive vice president of communications Gil Schwartz.

There are also questions remaining about the way the report itself was assembled. No one at CBS has taken credit for determining the format of the investigation, which excluded recording devices or transcripts of interviews with the 66 people who were involved in the segment. No written record exists of Mr. Howard, Ms. Murphy, Ms. West or Ms. Mapes telling their side of the story to the investigative panel. None were allowed to take notes or voluntarily speak under oath.

In a recent article in The New York Law Journal, James C. Goodale, the former vice chairman of The New York Times, called the CBS investigation “a flawed report. It should not be swallowed hook, line and sinker.”

He added: “Surprisingly, the report is unable to conclude whether the documents are forgeries or not. If the documents are not forgeries, why is the panel writing the report?”

Good point.

16 February 2005 @ 2:47AM >> Maybe I am overly sentimental, but I just watched a collection of political TV commercials from Iraq, and I found the whole experience to be very moving.

14 February 2005 @ 4:28PM >> Presto Chango: Meet Teresa Heinz, formerly Teresa Heinz Kerry.

12 February 2005 @ 6:40PM >> Embattled CNN news chief Eason Jordan has resigned in the wake of the the scandal surrounding his accusation that journalist battlefield deaths in Iraq are the result of targeting by the U.S. military.

While it is true that Internet media was responsible for keeping the heat on Jordan, the heat would have dissipated quickly if not for the principled truth-telling of two liberal Democrats from New England: Congressman Barney Frank of Massachusetts, and Senator Chris Dodd of Connecticut. They could have kept silent or stonewalled in the same fashion that Jordan and CNN did, but instead they spoke out and refused to let Jordan get away with his baseless and incendiary accusation. Good for them. While they may take stances that I disagree with, in my book, their actions here will always be a credit to their character.

10 February 2005 @ 11:28PM >> In 1994, the government of North Korea promised the Clinton Administration that its nuclear program would be shut down. In 2002, North Korea admitted that it had restarted its nuclear program in direct violation of that agreement.

Why did this diplomatic effort fail? Well, for one, it presumed that North Korea could be trusted to keep its promises. And that’s often the trouble with diplomatic attempts to rein in totalitarian regimes. Such agreements are based purely on the hope that you can trust the word of a tyrant. Going back through history, how many tyrants have proven themselves to be trustworthy?

Thanks to the Clinton Administration, North Korea had eight years to advance its nuclear program in secret. If they hadn’t been naive enough to believe that Kim Jung Il could be trusted, perhaps North Korea’s nuclear program could have been stopped before it was too late. Now it is too late; North Korea has nuclear weapons, and it appears likely that they’ve had nukes for several years now. That greatly constrains our options in dealing with North Korea.

Keep this in mind next time the members of the Cult of Diplomacy try to convince you that all the world’s problems can be solved with talk. Sometimes, they can’t. Sometimes, the dangerous developments in the world can only be stopped by action.

10 February 2005 @ 6:20PM >> A professor from the Miami University (of Ohio) recently sent a rather nasty e-mail that illustrates quite well the environment that many students face on campus.

Check out the e-mail over at AcademicBias.com.

10 February 2005 @ 6:01AM >> The Institute for Politics, Democracy and the Internet sponsors an annual set of awards for “outstanding achievement in the use of the Internet as a political tool.” One of the categories is for “Best Political Web Video.”

Because I’ve noticed several other sites campaigning for web awards of various types, I will follow their lead and shamelessly point out the award nomination page while submitting for your consideration Pin the Tale on the Donkeys.

If you decide to submit a nomination, you’ll notice that the nomination form is a little confusing, and you won’t be able to provide all of the information requested. I’d suggest leaving fields blank if you don’t know what to put there. You can indicate your selection(s) in the comment box. I trust these guys a little more to figure out voter intent than I would if they were, say, the Palm Beach County Board of Elections.

9 February 2005 @ 2:00PM >> Once upon a time, being a liberal meant standing for freedom in the face of tyranny. That’s what classical liberalism was, anyway. That’s not what liberalism seems to be anymore. Many of today’s self-described liberals may still talk a good game about liberty, but they then take to the streets to complain when someone actually takes action against tyrants. As long as they have their freedom, they’d rather not have to think about the messy details of how others might gain theirs. But out there in the real world, freedom doesn’t spread unless murdering dictators are actually deposed.

It makes me wonder whether classical liberals still exist. It seems that they do, but many of the classical liberals now call themselves neoconservatives.

Last spring, while traveling around the country talking to students for the Brainwashing 101 project, I met a principled liberal at Yale. His name is Jamie Kirchick, and he has an article in yesterday’s Yale Daily News that makes me wish there were many more liberals like him:

One would expect — or at least hope — that an election in a country once tyrannized by rape rooms, poison gas attacks and aggressive militarization would bring some degree of happiness to self-described liberals. But as with many things in life, reality hardly lives up to expectation.

[...]

To mask their resentment at the rightness of Bush’s cause, these cynics initiate any discussion of the issue with the requisite pleasantries about how elections and democracy are all well and good (with a few half-hearted words of disgust for Hussein thrown in for good measure) and then proceed to denigrate the enactment of the democratic process itself. This attitude has been on full display in both written and spoken form by Yale Coalition for Peace member Ishaan Tharoor (”For Iraq, an American dream that wasn’t,” 2/6). Asked what he thought about the Iraqi election, Tharoor told the News last week, “I think it’s important to remember these elections weren’t benevolently granted, but were disputed for a year and a half of Iraqi occupation.” Indeed, the elections were “disputed” by religious fascists who behead aid workers and maim their innocent countrymen in roadside bomb attacks. But for Tharoor and other individuals of his illiberal ilk, this sort of barbaric behavior constitutes legitimate acts of disputation, as long as it is directed at representatives of the Great Satan.

[...]

It’s telling that the protests, teach-ins and signature drives of two years past — all committed to preventing the war that lead to last month’s exercise in democracy — drew hundreds upon hundreds of righteously indignant students and faculty. Yet when women and ethnic minorities voted for the first time in their lives, hardly anyone at Yale seemed to notice, or care.

[...]

What is vital to remember is that the once-rare images of women voting in the Middle East, of long lines forming at the polls, of Iraqis crying tears of joy at their newfound right — none of these would exist had the United States abstained from invading Iraq two years ago. It is Tharoor’s “agents of occupation” who removed Hussein from power; it is their daily courage and ultimate sacrifice that allowed for last month’s election. The destruction of a thug regime, the imprisonment of its titular head and the flourishing of civil society all stand in testament to the wisdom of the Bush doctrine.

Opponents of the war had every right to make the case against President Bush’s decision to invade Iraq. But in recoiling at the very presence of liberalism in its most classic form, these liberals have lost every right to label themselves as such.

If the left wants to save itself from political oblivion, it should realize that the future of liberalism lies in its classical liberal past.

8 February 2005 @ 4:15PM >> You may know the name Eason Jordan. As the chief news executive at CNN, he made headlines a couple years ago by admittting in a New York Times op-ed piece that CNN deliberately ignored atrocities committed under Saddam Hussein so that the network could maintain a staff in Iraq:

Over the last dozen years I made 13 trips to Baghdad to lobby the government to keep CNN’s Baghdad bureau open and to arrange interviews with Iraqi leaders. Each time I visited, I became more distressed by what I saw and heard — awful things that could not be reported because doing so would have jeopardized the lives of Iraqis, particularly those on our Baghdad staff.

[...]

I came to know several Iraqi officials well enough that they confided in me that Saddam Hussein was a maniac who had to be removed. One Foreign Ministry officer told me of a colleague who, finding out his brother had been executed by the regime, was forced, as a test of loyalty, to write a letter of congratulations on the act to Saddam Hussein. An aide to Uday once told me why he had no front teeth: henchmen had ripped them out with pliers and told him never to wear dentures, so he would always remember the price to be paid for upsetting his boss. Again, we could not broadcast anything these men said to us.

[...]

Then there were the events that were not unreported but that nonetheless still haunt me. A 31-year-old Kuwaiti woman, Asrar Qabandi, was captured by Iraqi secret police occupying her country in 1990 for “crimes,” one of which included speaking with CNN on the phone. They beat her daily for two months, forcing her father to watch. In January 1991, on the eve of the American-led offensive, they smashed her skull and tore her body apart limb by limb. A plastic bag containing her body parts was left on the doorstep of her family’s home.

I felt awful having these stories bottled up inside me. Now that Saddam Hussein’s regime is gone, I suspect we will hear many, many more gut-wrenching tales from Iraqis about the decades of torment. At last, these stories can be told freely.

Nearly two years after admitting that CNN covered up Saddam Hussein’s atrocities, the network still hasn’t covered them extensively. And now, instead of trying to correct CNN’s journalistic fraud, The New York Sun reports that Eason Jordan is committing more:

The head of CNN’s news division, Eason Jordan, ignited an Internet firestorm last week when he told a panel at a World Economic Forum gathering in Davos, Switzerland, that the American military had targeted journalists during operations in Iraq.

Mr. Jordan, speaking in a panel discussion titled “Will Democracy Survive the Media?” said “he knew of about 12 journalists who had not only been killed by American troops, but had been targeted as a matter of policy,” said Rep. Barney Frank, a Democrat of Massachusetts who was on the panel with Mr. Jordan.

[...]

Mr. Jordan’s comments — prompted by a broader discussion of the dangers of covering the war in Iraq, in which some 63 journalists have been killed — left Mr. Frank, usually an outspoken war opponent, speechless.

“I was agog,” he said. “I took a few seconds and asked him to basically clarify the remarks. Did he have proof and if so, why hadn’t CNN run with the story?”

Good point. If CNN has evidence to back up Jordan’s claims, they should run the story. And if CNN doesn’t run the story, it amounts to an admission that Jordan’s assertions have no basis in fact, in which case Jordan owes one huge retraction and apology.

Congressman Frank wasn’t the only one to be taken aback by Jordan’s shocking accusation:

The panel’s moderator, Harvard University professor and columnist David Gergen, did not return a call seeking comment, but he told online columnist Michelle Malkin yesterday that the remarks left him “startled.”

“It’s contrary to history, which is so far the other way. Our troops have gone out of their way to protect and rescue journalists,” Mr. Gergen said. He told Ms. Malkin that the remarks could have been due to Mr. Jordan’s recent return from Iraq, where he was likely “caught up in the tension of what was happening there.”

The office of Senator Dodd, a Democrat of Connecticut who attended the panel, released a statement that said he “was not on the panel but was in the audience when Mr. Jordan spoke. He — like panelists Mr. Gergen and Mr. Frank — was outraged by the comments. Senator Dodd is tremendously proud of the sacrifice and service of our American military personnel.”

[...]

Mr. Jordan’s remarks might have shocked the American attendees, but they certainly played well among some in the audience. The Wall Street Journal’s Bret Stephens, who covered the panel for his paper, told the Sun that after the panel concluded, Mr. Jordan was surrounded by European and Middle Eastern attendees who warmly congratulated him for his alleged “bravery and candor” in discussing the matter.

So, not only does it appear that Eason Jordan lied, but his lie is now being embraced by America’s opponents and will undoubtedly be used as anti-U.S. propaganda. Jordan had the chance to cover Saddam Hussein’s actual atrocities, and he declined to do so. Instead, he’d rather falsely accuse the United States of imaginary atrocities.

Is it any wonder why some people believe the establishment media not only distorts the news to suit a left-wing agenda, but actively opposes the actions of the United States?

4 February 2005 @ 6:27AM >> Academia’s been generating much news recently, and we’ve been covering it over at AcademicBias.com.

4 February 2005 @ 4:54AM >> Earlier today, The New York Sun ran a profile of Charles Johnson, the gentleman who runs Little Green Footballs.

If you don’t know LGF, check it out. The site provides comprehensive attention to various aspects of the War on Terror, the Middle East, radical Islam, and Israeli/Palestinian relations.