JunkYardBlog

THE ULTIMATE WAR SIMULATION

I wasn't going to post anything else today, hoping to leave the Boston Globe story at the top, but then David Wong came along and forced me to reconsider. Strategy gamers will understand why, after reading The Ultimate War Simulation.

Like my Grandpa always said, there were no naked human pyramids in Starcraft.

There were no whiny anti-war Hollywood types or questionable war motives or granola-munching human shields. I'm starting to think that even Command and Conquer: Generals, a game so "realistic" it took a NASA-built Quantum supercomputer to run it, has left me woefully unprepared to fight an actual war.

Well, below is my open letter to the Real Time Strategy gaming cartel. I want a War Simulation. A real one. I don't want little cartoon tanks jostling around in a video sandbox chewing down each other's health meters while a preteen opponent insults my sexuality using every key on his keyboard except the ones with letters. I want an RTS game that will give me a stress headache after an hour and an ulcer after a week. I want to identify experienced players on the street by their Thousand-Yard Stares.

---

I want a War Sim...

1. ...where I spend two hours pushing across a map to destroy a "nuclear missile silo," only to find out after the fact that it was just a missile-themed orphanage.

I want little celebrities to show up on the scene and do interviews over video of charred teddy bears, decrying my unilateral attack. I want congressional hearings demanding answers to these atrocities.

2. On the very next level I want to lose half of my units because another "orphanage" turned out to be a NOD ambush site. I want another round of hearings asking why I didn't level that orphanage as soon as I saw it, including tearful testimony from a slain soldier's daughter who is now, ironically, an orphan.

Read the whole thing. He even has great screenshots of his simulation.

Joking aside, Wong gets the war we're in. It's a post-modern conflict in which the media plays nearly as big a role as actual terrorists in trying to defeat us. The sooner the rest of the country gets it, the better for everyone.

COVERUP AT THE BOSTON GLOBE

A JunkYardBlog Special Report
by Bryan Preston and Chris Regan

The Boston Globe, owned by the New York Times Company, is covering up for the fact that it helped spread a hoax last week perpetrated by a senior official of the Nation of Islam. The hoax was intended to smear American troops fighting in Iraq by portraying them as brutal rapists using photographs from a pornographic web site and passing them off as unreleased photos from Abu Ghraib prison. It follows on the heels of similar attempts to smear US troops in the Arab press and on Islamicist websites which were exposed twice before by Internet-based reporters.

The hoax concerns pornographic photos of actors portraying American soldiers mock raping actresses portraying Iraqi women. The photographs originated from a fetish porn site called www.sexinwar.com. That much was explained in a series of WorldNetDaily stories beginning May 4 that exposed the websites and detailed the State Dept response to several Arab press organs which used the photos in anti-American stories about the actual, and milder, abuses that took place at Abu Ghraib prison. The fake photo story received an even wider airing on Monday, May 10, during a press briefing when a reporter asked White House spokesman Scott McClellan about the WorldNetDaily report.

The following day, May 11, Boston City Councilor Charles Turner and race activist Sadiki Kambon held a press conference to exhibit several graphic photos and urge the media to determine whether or not they depicted actual crimes committed by American troops. Among organizations represented were the Globe, the Boston Herald and the Associated Press. Neither the Herald nor AP ran stories about the press conference, either to promote the photos or shoot them down as a hoax as would have been possible given the May 4 WND story. The Globe’s Donovan Slack, apparently under pressure from her editors, wrote up a brief story about the press conference that ran in print the following day, May 12, along with a photo from the briefing. That uncensored photo depicted scenes of hard core pornography that Turner and Kambon had shown to the press. Though the story explained that the Turner images were unverified, the photo that accompanied the story lent credence to them. In any case, the Globe ran unfiltered porn in its morning edition, and only bothered to shrink the offending image in its later edition after receiving a strong outcry from readers and several blogs. The Globe never censored the image, though sexual acts were clearly visible. Later the AP ran a story that piggybacked off the Globe’s reporting, spreading the hoax from Boston to the rest of the world.

In the May 12 Globe story, Mr. Kambon is quoted as stating he received the photos from Akbar Muhammad, the international representative of the Nation of Islam. Mr. Muhammad appears to be the author of the hoax, and intended Turner to lend his authority as an elected official to the photos for the purpose of smearing American troops serving in Iraq.

In a column Muhammad wrote for the May 12 edition of the San Francisco Bay View newspaper, Muhammad claims:

The rape of the Iraqi women in those prisons has been completely omitted from the Western press reports. The pictures were so viscious [sic] and humiliating to the entire Muslim and Arab world that they found a way to delete and block entrance into the websites that published them. However, I was fortunate enough before they deleted them all to get the pictures. (emphasis added)

By his wording, Muhammad claims to have downloaded the images himself from their original source before they were taken offline (Both Islamicist websites and one of the porn sites running the images were taken offline last week when the owners learned that Arab news organizations and Islamicist sympathizers were using them in anti-American propaganda). He appears to have gotten the uncensored photos from a Tunisian website produced in France by Committee for the Defense of Saddam Hussein, since the Turner images and filenames match those found on that site. Perhaps the Nation of Islam should explain a) what one of its most senior members was doing trolling a pro-Saddam Islamicist web site and b) why he would send images downloaded from that site to an activist in Boston immediately after it was proven to be pornography and taken offline. Why did Mr. Muhammad knowingly pass off pornography as evidence of US troop misconduct and time his own column announcing the “war crimes” to coincide with the press conference coverage in the Globe, coverage he engineered?

Maybe this sort of propaganda is not unexpected from the Nation of Islam, but perhaps the Globe should explain to its readers why it continues to cover up what it knew as early as May 12 and should have known earlier—that the photos are in fact fakes. They are not part of the body of evidence detailing abuse of Iraqi prisoners by American troops on guard at Abu Ghraib prison, but are in fact fetishistic porn photos taken in Hungary and served up on pornographic websites. WorldNetDaily’s Sherrie Gossett publicized the facts more than a week ago and personally informed the Globe on May 12, yet on Friday, May 14, the Globe’s ombudsman Christine Chinlund claimed that her paper had still not been able to verify where the photos came from. She claimed the she could not trace them to their source. That is in spite of a series of emails between Gossett and Slack, and later from Gossett to Chinlund herself, containing the original web addresses from which the photos originate. Perhaps Chinlund should explain why she—the Globe’s readers’ representative—is lying to her readers.

Here are the facts: The photos Charles Turner and Sadiki Kambon showed to the press on May 11 were fakes. Originating from a porn site, they went to Islamicist Yahoo! and other message boards and then to the Committee for the Defense of Saddam Hussein and from there through a Nation of Islam activist to the Boston Globe. On May 12 the Globe ran a story about the Turner/Kambon press conference, and the print editions actually ran an uncensored image of Turner and Kambon with the pornographic photos in full view. That caused a firestorm at the Globe and a round of weak apologies from editor Martin Baron, but no explanation that the photos Turner and Kambon had shown were fakes. That same day, May 12, WorldNetDaily’s Sherrie Gossett alerted the Globe’s Donovan Slack that not only was the Globe running uncensored hard core pornography, but that the photos in question were fakes. Gossett even sent Slack the original URLs to prove that the photos were fakes, and later sent those addresses directly to Baron and Chinlund; we have obtained the entire chain of timestamped emails that prove it. Yet on the 14th, the Globe’s ombudsman still insists that her paper cannot determine whether the photos are real or not.

With all due respect, what kind of paper is the Boston Globe if it can’t get this story right when at least three editors looked at the press conference photo before running it and long after it became obvious that the photos in question were fakes? What kind of paper tries to spin itself out of an obvious hoax? What kind of paper is the Globe if it can’t get this story right after several tries and then turns to damage control and spin instead of admitting a mistake and moving on?

During the May 11 press conference, Green Party member Councilor Turner explained his motive in delivering the photos to the press—to force the Bush administration to release even more real photos from Abu Ghraib and sites where he claims other abuses took place, knowing that new disclosures will keep the story in the headlines and damage President Bush’s re-election prospects. Mr. Muhammad, in his companion article to the press conference he instigated, was very clear that he felt the rape photos were being kept from the American people after just being wiped from the internet (by WorldNetDaily’s reporting as well as earlier work by web journalist Jeremy Reynalds, who found the images in Islamicist chat groups hosted by Yahoo!) and that something needed to be done to get them mainstream press coverage. The question is, then, why is the Globe still hanging on to this story long after even Arab news sources have knocked it down? Why are they compounding that crime with a cover-up? And why did it take them four days to admit what they knew on day one—that the photos were fakes?

The Boston Globe played along with the hoaxers until shot down by readers, then played stupid with readers until shot down by WorldNetDaily. Now they’re in a position where they must retract or correct the lies they used when they went out of their way to avoid shooting down the hoax. The latest editorial blaming irresponsible city leaders cannot be allowed to replace real journalistic responsibility.

According to Globe editor Martin Baron as quoted last month in Editor & Publisher, 'Editors bear responsibility for what's in their newspapers and if they are alerted to problems they have an obligation to pursue them.' It’s time the Globe lived up to that standard.

CHALABI

No, I don't know what to make of the raid on his home, either. But I do wonder if this has anything to do with it:

Ahmad Chalabi, the exiled financier promoted by the Pentagon as a leader of postwar Iraq, claims to have obtained 25 tonnes of intelligence documents detailing Saddam Hussein's relationship with foreign governments and Arab leaders.

The files, seized by his Iraqi National Congress supporters from Ba'ath party offices and secret police stations, may fuel a fresh round of recriminations and score-settling as politicians meeting in Baghdad struggle to agree the terms of an interim administration.

That story is from May 7, 2004. Within two weeks, Chalabi finds his home raided apparently at the behest of local officials and possibly the UN. Looks like score-settling to me.

MORE: This report, from a former CPA official, is very disturbing if true.

The situation in Iraq today is dire. Bremer has embarked on a policy which is as damaging in the region as the Abu Ghraib scandal. Across the region, Arabs and Iranians point to the raid on Chalabi's house to show that friendship with America is futile; the United States cannot be an ally and should never be trusted. Democracy is not about crushing peaceful dissent. Across the region, Iraqis and Arabs juxtapose Bush rhetoric and implementation. The gap grows wide.

MORE: Then there's this:

Ahmad Chalabi is in possession of "miles" of documents with the potential to expose politicians, corporations and the United Nations as having connived in a system of kickbacks and false pricing worth billions of pounds.

That may have been enough to provoke yesterday's American raid. So explosive are the contents of the files that their publication would cause serious problems for US allies and friendly states around the globe.

As I said, I don't know yet what to make of all this. If I had to pick a side that I would rather be right, I would pick Bremer. To think that he is making such awful calls from his position is to believe that Iraq is in worse hands than I'd thought; to think that Chalabi is wrong isn't nearly as disturbing.

MORE: For a conservative anti-Chalabi roundup, see Rich Lowry. At the very least, what we have here is a mess and I don't really know whom to trust to sort it out anymore. That's not good.

MORE: Then there's this, courtesy InstaPundit:

U.S. officials believe they have "rock solid" evidence that Iraqi Governing Council member Ahmad Chalabi (search), once a darling of the American government, passed secrets to Iran, Fox News has learned.

"There is no need for an investigation because we're quite certain he did it," one senior Bush administration official said.

The official first described the evidence against Chalabi as "pretty solid" and then characterized it as "rock solid."

U.S. officials won't describe the information Chalabi's alleged to have passed to Iran or how he's supposed to have obtained it, but they said he does not have the clearance to possess American classified information.

That characterization raises more questions than answers. For one, why is there "no need for an investigation?" There's always a need for an investigation, if for no other reason than to make sure you've pursued every angle. Second, for which part of the Bush administration does this anonymous source work? That's relevant for a number of reasons. The war over the war has to some extent been personified by Chalabi, who was until recently seen by the Pentagon as an ally but by State as a liar and a schiester. To some extent, both sides have been proven right--Chalabi was an ally and a committed Iraqi democrat, but he also lied to us on a number of fronts. If the story's source is in the Pentagon, it may mean that the Bush administration has fully turned on Chalabi. If the source is in State, it could just be another smear.

Either way, the "rock solid" statement doesn't really make much sense, in that the raid on Chalabi's home wasn't apparently aimed at Chalabi himself, but at several people close to him. If he is an Iranian spy as this source alleges, why not just arrest him directly? He would certainly deserve it. Leaving him free to either run or make more mischief seems stupid, unless you're hoping he'll lead you to other accomplices.

And you'd still have to investigate him, both to shore up the data against him and find out who else, if anyone, was involved.

There is something deeply strange about this whole affair.

KERRY SETTLES ON COMMUNIST'S THEME FOR HIS CAMPAIGN

I guess moving to the center is no longer on the table for the Kerry campaign. Permanently stuck in the smoldering revolutionary fervor of an anti-Vietnam War radical activist, Kerry has decided it's time for more than just "regime change" in the U.S. He's wants to evoke a certain kind of regime change:

The Kerry campaign sure is starting to look like the Gang that Couldn't Shoot Straight. According to the Drudge Report today, John Kerry's campaign has settle on the words "Let America be America Again" as their campaign theme.

There's only one problem. Kerry plagiarized the phrase from a poem written by black writer Langston Hughes. The punchline that follows Kerry's line reads, "America never was America to me."

Even worse for the embattled presidential candidate is the fact that Langston Hughes was a well-known Communist.

Langston Hughes is a man who once added an extra S to USA in a poem. The extra S stood for Soviet. In the same piece, Hughes also wrote, "good-morning, Revolution: You're the very best friend I ever had. We gonna pal around together from now on."

Hughes took to communism in the 1930's when he actually left the United States to live in the Soviet Union.

John Kerry is not the farthest left Senator in America for nothing. Just as it was back in his VVAW days, he's the leader of the America-bashing enemy-assisting left and he's proud of it!

May 20, 2004 -- Now available from WinterSoldier.com -- the entire 21,477 page collection of FBI files detailing the activities of Vietnam Veterans Against the War during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Wade right into our new Complete VVAW FBI Files section for days, nay, weeks of investigative enjoyment.

A quick look through a few files turned up an interesting proclamation that the VVAW issued in February of 1971:

"We, as veterans of the war in Vietnam, give notice that if Laos is attacked, we will respond at once. We call for mass civil disobedience to take place all over this country. We call for industry to shut down. We call upon the students to close the schools. We call upon our brothers who are still in uniform to close the military bases throughout America and the world. We call on the anti-war movement to shut down the major cities of America.... If this be a threat, let us make the most of it... We have been trained to fight. If need be we will use the knowledge we have gained against those who are seeking to extend this war." -- 100-HQ-448092, Section 02, page 66.

Such threats of sedition and violence seem a bit difficult to square with Kerry campaign spokesman Michael Meehan's recent description of the VVAW as "thoughtful" and "moderate," but no doubt there's a reasonable explanation. Incidentally, one of North Vietnam's greatest fears was that U.S. forces would move enough ground forces into Laos to cut off the Ho Chi Minh Trail. The VVAW, so it appears, felt exactly the same way.

Thirty years later, Syria is the new Laos -- only the domestic threat is more subtle. Ask Joe Biden:

CLARKE: If the same people are around, it could be Iran, it could be Syria. And I fear that they haven‘t learned from their mistake.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

MATTHEWS: What do you think of that, Senator?

BIDEN: Well, I think that may be what they‘d like to do. But ironically, if they have—if we do not succeed in Iraq, they will have so weakened our resolve militarily, that I think most nations will look at us and say, they‘re not going to do anything to us.

Because I can‘t imagine this administration in a second term without Iraq turning out correctly. I can‘t imagine them getting—daring to think they could invade any other country in the world that has bad guys in it, because they wouldn‘t have a consensus. They don‘t have the troops. They don‘t have the capacity.

Look, things are blowing back up in Kosovo, for Lord‘s sake. We‘ve got to learn to finish one job at a time. The only—you know, if you look for a silver lining, the only thing that come out of this failed policy, in my view, is the inability of them to, I think, recreate that failed policy in the near term.

I sure sleep better every night knowing that, just as with Vietnam, there's a Democrat silver lining in the political and media attacks on the President and the troops. We can't do a thing about Syria's alliance with Saddam in the current war and we won't be able to defend ourselves from terrorist states in the future. "Let America be vulnerable America again."

If John Kerry is elected, don't be shocked when he pardons more unrepentant leftist revolutionary terrorists --as Bill Clinton did with the urging of Jerrold Nadler.

Two-and-a-half years ago he played a key role in securing President Clinton’s pardons of two homegrown terrorists – Susan Rosenberg and Linda Evans, who were members of the Weather Underground, a Marxist-Leninist cult founded in 1969. The violent Weathermen formally declared war on “Amerikkka” and dedicated themselves to fomenting social chaos and racial warfare by any means necessary.

After reading the Langston Hughes poem that has inspired John Kerry, you'll recognize the subtext is actually, "Let Amerikkka be America again." It ends with:

Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
The mountains and the endless plain--
All, all the stretch of these great green states--
And make America again!

So Kerry's new campaign theme is actually a backhanded slap at America disguised as patriotism. Fits nicely with his old theme, whatever that was. His new slogan may only be a call for a return to Clinton's unserious pre-9/11 America, but his unrepentant pro-Communist radical ideology and activism is a sign that he may have much more planned for a Kerry "regime."

More on that here, here and here.

THE TIMES SLAMS KERRY

It's parallel universe time, as we travel to a previously unknown dimension where the New York Times actually slams a Democrat nominee for President. Subject: gas prices and whether President Bush should use the strategic petroleum reserve to bring them down:

President Bush is rightly resisting the call. Since 9/11, the administration has been adding to the reserve in a disciplined manner, and it is closing in on its goal of filling up the reserve's capacity, 700 million barrels. Tapping the reserve to assuage motorists at a time of increasing security threats to already tight fuel supplies would be foolish.

As the energy secretary, Spencer Abraham, correctly noted yesterday, "The reserve is not there to simply try to change prices." In fact, the law calls for it to be tapped only in the event of supply disruptions. And even if Washington wanted to alleviate rising fuel costs, the reserve is not a very effective instrument for doing so, as President Bill Clinton learned in the fall of 2000. Experts estimate that at most, turning on the spigot now would knock only a few cents off a gallon.

Senator John Kerry, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, knows this, of course, and he demeans the seriousness of his own candidacy when he suggests that President Bush could single-handedly bring down fuel costs. Senator Kerry has urged the administration to stop buying oil for the reserve, as if that would make a difference. Fortunately, some residue of shame has kept him from joining the other Democrats calling for the reserve to be raided. The government's oil purchases have taken place at a time of higher prices, but they are not a major cause of the increase.

The editorial goes on to state correctly that Chinese demand is a huge factor in rising prices. Yes, kids, in this parallel universe the Times understands market forces.

But apparently some of our bizarro universe seeped in. Though the Times mentions the need to reduce US dependence on MidEast oil, it doesn't mention domestic drilling or those four little letters--ANWR. The editorial also fails to mention that in 2000 the Clinton administration did use the reserve to bring down the price at the pump, manipulating prices in an election year.

ANOTHER JOHN KERRY MINI-ME

Kerry smeared US troops during Vietnam, mainstreaming the worst assertions about our soldiers and helping ensure defeat in that war. The left is nothing if not predictable, and will use tactics that worked before to try and bring about US defeat again. That includes dishonest reporting in the press, demagogic politicians grandstanding against the war every chance they get, and trotting out experienced soldiers to betray their fellow warriors and smear them as criminals.

Enter Jimmy Massey. Read Justin's post in full, paying particular attention to this paragraph:

This is how the anti-war forces seek to defeat the U.S. military. Seeping from conspiratorial Web sites and foreign anti-American rags into the mainstream consciousness like leech-filled swamp water rising through the floor boards, the level of conceivability for accusations notches up as time goes on — as September 11 recedes and as the election approaches. Whatever their motivation, and whether or not they believe the sunny delusions about the world scene after an American defeat, those who enable, promote, and lend credibility to this propaganda assault must be faced and stared down this time around the historical cycle.

Our nation cannot afford to follow either John Kerry or any Generation X versions of the anti-war veteran. Jimmy Massey cannot escape the implications of what he is declaring to all the world by laying blame with the President based on clichés about war for oil and lies about weapons of mass destruction. And we who understand the importance of success cannot afford to keep our heads down.

Massey and his ilk are one of three things that worry me about this war. The other two are the blatantly dishonest press and our divided government, which is as war with itself over the war. Note that among the three things that worry me, you don't find the on-the-ground reality in Iraq. That's because on the ground, we're doing fine. We've marginalized the Sadr militia with effective force and the help other Shiites. Thirteen of Iraq's 25 ministries have spun away from our direct control to become autonamous, entirely peacefully and with our blessing. Even the murder of the Iraqi Governing Council's president hasn't derailed the handover. We're doing fine in Iraq, and are well on our way to winning there.

If we hang on.

We threw away a successful war once before, because the press lied, the left lied and two US presidents let propaganda get the better of them. It can happen again, if we let it. And we are on the path to letting it happen again.

MORE: And losing our nerve now would be catastrophic. Nearly two years ago I predicted that taking Iraq would be but the beginning of a long, regional struggle against various forces arrayed against the idea of democracy taking root in the Middle East. That prediction is being borne out, in the Sadr militia's Iranian roots, in Syria's gameplaying, in the Arab press' use (until shamed out of it) of pornography as anti-American propaganda. We're in a regional conflict against various regimes and groups that want to destroy Iraqi democracy and shame or cow the US into backing away from our threat to destroy Islamic global terrorism.

If we fail, if we lose our nerve, our word is worthless, both as a guarantee to allies and as a threat to enemies. Forces of violence will be unleashed around the world that we can scarcely imagine if the US become a true paper tiger. And we will have proven our enemies right about us.

The quickest way out of this war is to win it; the surest way to make it more lethal, longer and ultimately far more dangerous for the entire world is to lose our nerve in Iraq and fail.

THE LA SLIMES LIES AGAIN

We absolutely cannot trust the "mainstream" press to give us the straight story on any aspect of this war. If it's not the Boston Globe propagating a rape photo hoax (and we'll have more on that story before long), it's the LA Times lying about the sarin bomb that recently went off in Iraq. Blaster has the scoop, plus some very interesting observations about that bomb and its provenance:

Iraqi CW agents were not comparable in quality to those stored in the arsenals of the USA and the former USSR, however. Impurities meant that the toxic compounds lacked stability and easily decomposed; as a consequence, Iraq developed a crude type of binary munition, whereby the final mixing of the two precursors to the agent was done inside the munition just before delivery. This had a major impact on the logistics of and preparations for chemical warfare, which may partly explain how overwhelming coalition air superiority prevented the use of CW during Operation Desert Storm.

That's according to UNSCOM's 1998 factsheet on Iraq's WMDs, so it can't be spun as Bush propaganda unless you want to propose that he time-travelled back a few years to plant this document. Though Iraq never declared that it even possessed such a shell in any UN report, 155 mm mustard gas shells did turn up after the Gulf War, as did 122 mm binary sarin shells. Iraq had the technology to manufacture these chemical shells in country, and could convert pesticide factories to produce sarin without much fuss.

So...we have an Iraqi WMD that was previously unknown, even after a decade of sanctions and searches and shooting wars, turning up in the hands of terrorists. Do you think there are more like this one out there? Do you think the LA Slimes and other "mainstream" press outlets will investigate any of this stuff?

(thanks to InstaPundit)

A MAN OF HIS WORD

Reader MR sends in the following photo, captioned below by an Army Flight Surgeon:

"Attached is a picture of Mike McNaughton. He stepped on a land mine in
Afghanistan Christmas 2002. President Bush came to visit the wounded in
the hospital. He told Mike that when he could run a mile, that they would
go on a run together. True to his word, he called Mike every month or so
to see how he was doing. Well, last week they went on the run, 1 mile
with the president. Not something you'll see in the news, but seeing the
president taking the time to say thank you to the wounded and to give hope
to one of my best friends was one of the greatest/best things I have seen
in my life. It almost sounds like a corny email chain letter, but God
bless him."

So why don't we see pictures like this in the New York Times or the Boston Globe?

UPDATE: Instead of honest reporting, the "mainstream" press gives us dishonest commentary in a cartoon worthy of Ted Rall. And it's in the Washington Post. Or we get Time magazine aping The Passion of the Christ to airbrush Iraqi terrorists as innocent victims on one of its latest covers. Time's cover also apes Hezbollah propaganda tactics. If you're in doubt as to whose side they're on, just consider that--Time's editorial decisions mimic Hezbollah's. Birds of a feather...

SYRIAN BOMBS IN NORTH KOREA

Fascinating, if true:

A North Korean missile shipment to Syria was halted when a train collision in that Asian country destroyed the missile cargo and killed about a dozen Syrian technicians.

U.S. officials confirmed a report in a Japanese daily newspaper that a train explosion on April 22 killed about a dozen Syrian technicians near the Ryongchon province in North Korea. The officials said the technicians were accompanying a train car full of missile components and other equipment from a facility near the Chinese border to a North Korea port.

A U.S. official said North Korean train cargo was also believed to have contained tools for the production of ballistic missiles. North Korea has sold Syria the extended-range Scud C and Scud D missiles, according to reports by Middle East Newsline.

We know that the Norks need currency, and we know that they have expertise in missile construction and development and are willing to sell weapons of any kind to drum up cash. That's one of their three reasons for pursuing nuclear weapons, the second being to intimidate South Korea and Japan and the last being to repel a perceived threat from us. A similar shipment of missile components from North Korea to Libya that was halted on the seas was a catalyst in that country's decision to turn straight and give up its WMD programs altogether, so this story about a Syrian shipment is plausible. Secondarily, initial reports about the North Korean explosion indicated that it was huge, far more destructive than the usual train collision. That suggests that something unusual was on board, such as explosives or fuel or something of the like. So circumstantially, the story works. Very interesting.

SARIN BOMB IN IRAQ

Saddam's WMDs are turning up in the hands of terrorists. First, there was the attempted WMD attack in Jordan, intended to kill 80,000 and decapitate a government allied to us. Today, a shell containing sarin gas went off in Iraq:

A roadside bomb containing sarin nerve agent exploded near a U.S. military convoy, but there were no casualties, the U.S. military said Monday.

"The Iraqi Survey Group confirmed today that a 155-millimeter artillery round containing sarin nerve agent had been found," said Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, the chief military spokesman in Iraq (news - web sites). "The round had been rigged as an IED (improvised explosive device) which was discovered by a U.S. force convoy.

"A detonation occurred before the IED could be rendered inoperable. This produced a very small dispersal of agent," he said.

Come on, moonbats, let's get a conspiracy together before the rest of the world figures out what this means.

UPDATE: The presence of sarin in that shell has been confirmed. That's a bona fide WMD found in Iraq in use by terrorists. Game, set, match--the war's justification is as good as gold. Let's go out and actually win it.

JOHN KERRY'S DAUGHTER...

...is not work-safe. She's got her Cannes in full view.

Sheesh--can you imagine the uproar if one of Bush's daughters showed up in public practically nude?