My daughter turned 12 today. Halloween was on a Sunday in 1993. We were living in Burke, Va., a section of the northern Virginia megalopolis that feeds Washington, D.C. every day. Our house was about three miles from the Washington beltway, I-495, that circles D.C.

At 10 p.m. Oct. 30 Cathy suddenly became aware that her baby was a’ coming. I called our pastor’s wife as prearranged, who came right over. The third child’s impending arrival did not put us in anything near the frenzy that the first two did. It was an old drill by then.

Into the car and up the beltway, then head clockwise on the inner loop to Bethesda, Md. Elizabeth would be born at the National Naval Medical Center, aka Bethesda Naval hospital. Cathy’s labors had always been very short — two and a half hours for our first child and not much longer than that for the second. She actually went into labor a little after midnight for number three. At 2 a.m. daylight savings time went off and the nurse turned the clock back to 1 a.m. Elizabeth was born 24 minutes later.

Not a kimono - this is a tradtional Korean dress called “hanbok,” and this is a fairly dressy version thereof. I bought it in Korea in 1978 on a lark for my then-fiancee. Frankly, she’s had precious few occasions to wear it, so Elizabeth used it tonight for her Halloween costume.

Having a Halloween baby is kind of special as they grow up. When they turn three they have absorbed the concept of “birthday” but they haven’t yet separated their own birthday from the Halloween festivities of trick or treating and dressing up in costumes. After all, they’ve seen a lot of birthdays by then but only two Halloweens, and their first-birthday Halloween didn’t make an impression. But the third and fourth are really enjoyable to watch. They think that Halloween is just part of their birthday celebration that is specially for them because other kids don’t get it on their birthdays. By number five and definitely the sixth they have dissociated the two events, though. But Halloween birthdays are always a lot of fun for them.

Oh: chocolate cake and orange sherbet. What else?

Reader John Vasut emailed me the link to a Waco Tribune story of “the death of the Rev. Kyle Lake, who was electrocuted earlier in the day as he prepared to baptize a new member at University Baptist Church.

Lake, 33, was stepping into the baptistery, a small pool used for baptisms, as he reached out to adjust a nearby microphone, which produced an electric shock, said Ben Dudley, community pastor at University Baptist Church. Several doctors attending the service because of Baylor University’s homecoming rushed to help Lake, who collapsed, Dudley said.

Church members called 9-1-1 and efforts were made to revive him by administering CPR before emergency medical service personnel arrived, Dudley said.

Dr. Vasut wrote, “I am a member of sister Baptist church in town and found out when it was announced during our service. Your prayers would be appreciated on their behalf.”

I have known since being trained as a nuclear target analyst in 1983 (and remaining current through my 1995 retirement from the Army) that there is no such thing as “suitcase nuke.” The term refers to an atomic bomb that is small enough to fit in the space of a suitcase and is therefore presumably approximately as portable as a suitcase.

There was such a thing as atomic demolition munitions and I was trained in how to compute their use against targets such as bridgeheads or to create obstacles by filling a valley with displaced earth. ADMs were indeed man portable, but not easily and certainly not by only one man. Their utility (such as it might have been) was obviated with the invention of terminal-guided missiles such as a late variant of Lance, cruise missiles and GPS-guided weapons.

So I am glad to see today’s piece in OpinonJournal busting the myths about so-called “suitcase nukes.” Not a short read, it is thorough at explaining why suitcase nukes don’t exist. It isn’t simply a matter of engineering challenges, which given enough time and money could be overcome. It is also that,

… radioactive weapons require a lot of shielding. To fit the radioactive material and the appropriate shielding into a suitcase would mean that a very small amount of material would have to be used. Radioactive material decays at a steady, certain rate, expressed as “half-life,” or the length of time it takes for half of the material to decay into harmless elements. The half-life of the most likely materials in the infinitesimal weights necessary to fit in a suitcase is a few months. So as a matter of physics and engineering, the nuclear suitcase is an impractical weapon. It would have to be rebuilt with new radioactive elements every few months.

This isn’t entirely accurate, though. The half-life of fissionable material has nothing to do with how much is in the bomb. The half life of Uranium 235, for example, is 713 million years whether you have a thousand pounds of it or one pound. (Half life, btw, is the time required for half the nuclei in a sample of fissionable material to undergo radioactive decay to the point where those nuclei will not undergo fission).

The point that the piece’s writer, Richard Miniter, was probably trying to make is that even with eons-long half lives, when the warhead contains only a small amount of fissionable material, the design yield of the bomb will not be achieved after a suprisingly short time, not the “few months” Mr. Miniter speaks of by any means, but only a number of years. I know personally of US Army atomic artillery projectiles that were removed from war-reserve inventory for that very reason. Somewhat larger that presumed suitcase nukes, their nuclear material had decayed enough that they couldn’t be trusted to fiss as designed.

Speaking of ADMs. Mr. Miniter quotes Viktor Yesin, former chief of staff of Russia’s Strategic Missile Forces:

As for special compact nuclear devices, the Americans were the first to assemble them. They were called Special Atomic Demolition Munitions (SADM). As of 1964, the U.S. Army and Marine Corps had two models of SADM at their disposal-M-129 and M-159. Each SADM measured 87 x 65 x 67 centimeters [34 by 26 by 26 inches]. A container with the backpack weighed 70 kilograms [154 pounds]. There were about 300 SADMs in all. The foreign media reported that all these devices were dismantled and disposed of within the framework of the unilateral disarmament initiatives declared by the first President Bush in late 1991 and early 1992.

Again, this information is not entirely accurate. ADMs didn’t come in “backpacks” but in hard cases similar to footlockers in shape, but somewhat larger. These weapons were originally designed, decades ago, to be employed by US Special Forces teams in eastern Europe if war against the Soviets ever came. The smallest SF team has 12 men. It didn’t take 12 men to carry an ADM, but one man sure couldn’t do it by a long shot. ADMs were heavy, not really man portable at all in the sense that a suitcase nuke would be presumed to be.

Mr. Miniter’s conclusion: “For now, suitcase-sized nuclear bombs remain in the realm of James Bond movies.” Indeed.

Charles Croninger emailed to say that I am not taking the Libby indictment as seriously as either Kevin Drum at Washington Monthly or John Hinderaker at Power Line. Reading both these posts (and I assume Charles would include this later one by Kevin) ISTM that they have both pretty much said the same thing I’ve about the Plame-case investigation since it began.

Please note that Mr. Hinderaker has added a crucial update to his post, drawing the distinction, as I have, between Plame’s status with the CIA as being “classified” or specifically covered under the Intelligence Identities Protection Act. This is a distinction that seems to escape Kevin, but then his post doesn’t really focus on that aspect much so I could be wrong. John also has a later post that says,

Having now read fifteen or twenty news stories about what a devastating blow the Lewis Libby indictment was to the administration, about how President Bush is “reeling” and the administration is “in turmoil,” even “in crisis,” and how Libby was a key and irreplaceable figure in the administration, whose departure is a serious blow because he played such a vital role, I couldn’t help wondering: does anyone remember who Al Gore’s chief of staff was when he was vice-president?

My guess is that the large majority of people who read these stories are asking themselves, “Scooter who?”

So it’s far from clear that Libby’s indictment is a hard blow to anyone but Libby. Certainly VP Cheney will wish his closest advisor was still on the job, but a hard blow to the Bush administration itself? Nope. This is not to minimize that the crimes Libby is accused of are serious ones for which prosecution is most appropriate since the grand jury has brought indictment therefor.

It is to say that Libby’s indictment papers do nothing much to clarify what was supposed to be the central issue all along: was a crime committed in the divulgence of Valerine Plame’s CIA status to the media?

That question is, after all, what Special Counsel Fitzgerald was appointed to answer. After almost two years and untold millions of dollars spent, he has not answered that question. Not explicitly, anyway. But I think he has answered it in full implicitly, and I think he did so deliberately. From the transcript:

QUESTION: … Can you give us any sense of how you think you might and how long it might take you now to determine if there was this underlying crime that occurred dealing with alleged unauthorized disclosure?

FITZGERALD: I can’t and I wouldn’t. And if I predicted two years ago when it started when it would be done, I would have been done a year ago.

Officially, though the grand jury has dissolved, PF’s authority to continue investigation continues, and the media have endlessly (and hopefully) reported that Karl Rove is “still under investigation.” As may well be. But I join the chorus of commentati who say no other indictments will be forthcoming:

— Paul Mirengoff, also at Power Line, “The sense I got from the portions of Fitzgerald’s press conference I saw is that, more likely than not, there will be no additional indictments.”

— Kevin Drum agrees (same post): “What I’m saying is that I don’t think there will be any indictments for the actual act of exposing Valerie Plame’s identity.”

Special Counsel Fitzgerald was careful yesterday in his press conference to point out that whomever told Libby of Plame’s status broke no law. He also said that the fact that Plame was “a CIA officer was classified” and that, “Mr. Libby was the first official known to have told a reporter when he talked to Judith Miller in June of 2003 about Valerie Wilson.” But note also these words from his mouth: “The average American may not appreciate that there’s no law that’s specifically just says, ‘If you give classified information to somebody else, it is a crime.’”

Put those two statements together and I think you get that Libby’s disclosure of Plame’s status to Miller was not prosecutable under law. One reporter homed in on this apparent discrepancy but PF sort of tap danced out of it. As summarized by the SF Chronicle’s FAQs about the case,

Q: Fitzgerald was supposed to investigate whether anyone committed a crime by leaking Plame’s name, but the charges against Libby do not mention the leak itself. Why not?

A: Fitzgerald offered a partial explanation. He said the obstruction of justice that prosecutors claim Libby engaged in made it impossible for them to determine whether the leak itself violated the law.

Fitzgerald refused to say whether he sought to bring that charge and, if so, whether the grand jury turned him down.

If you read that part of the transcript, this explanation looks like a dodge. Fitzgerald and the grand jury were convinced (1) that Libby lied, (2) that his alleged lies obstructed getting to the heart of the matter, and (3) that his alleged lies could be particularly identified (as they are in the indictment). So why not proceed with the investigation based on what the truth is? That is, if Libby’s (alleged) lies are known then that would reveal what the attempted-hidden truths are, no? Or at least enough to circumvent the untruths, investigation wise. I admit that this may actually be what PF is doing, but that additional matters will perforce come before a different grand jury because the one that indicted Libby expired.

Obviously PF played his cards close to his vest. There were two reasons I think: (1) at least officially his investigation is not closed and (2) he was careful not to address matters beyond the sole indictment that the grand jury rendered because, ISTM, PF truly believes that doing more than that would be a violation of the legal ethic, an admirable position in my view, even if it leaves many matters clouded.

So for now we have to leave matters at this:

A. Libby is indicted and the charges are serious, but at this point serious for him and not very serious for the administration.

B. We still do not know explicitly whether the public disclosure of Plame’s name and status by Libby violated the law, but ISTM it’s most likely it did not.

C. The investigation continues.

D. We are all mostly confused based on what little we know right now.

The NYT has the transcript of yesterday’s press conference by Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald. I’m still wading through it. Here is Fitzgerald’s press release (PDF) announcing Libby’s indictment.

So far special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald has gone to great lengths in his news conference, still ongoing, to avoid answering the question whether the giving of Valerie Plame’s name to reporters was itself a crime. He’s been directly asked at least twice and has not addressed the issue. He’s merely claimed that her status with the CIA was classified and that its public divulgence was bad for national security. But in his opening remarks he tacitly admitted it was one of the worst-kept secrets in town: her position with the CIA “was not widely known.” But actually, others have written a long time ago that it was widely known, indeed.

VP Cheney’s chief of staff, Lewis Libby, is certainly up a creek after being charged with five felony counts, obstruction of justice being the most serious, I would think. But none of the charges relate to whether announcing Plame’s name to the media was itself a crime. As I said back in October 2003, for the divulgence of her name and status to have been a crime, there was a critical question:

Did Valerie Plame’s CIA employment status fall under the provision of US Code: Title 50: Section 421, “Protection of identities of certain United States undercover intelligence officers, agents, informants, and sources“? The kind of intelligence-related employment or affiliation protected by the code is that of “covert agent,” not “operative” or “employee.”

Now Fitzgerald just said that he’s not addressing whether Plame was a “covert agent,” only that her status with the CIA was “classified,” and that he makes no allegation whether Libby’s discussion of her status with reporters violated the law. Translation: her CIA status did not fall under the law concerned.

It’s no small things that Libby is charged with and the seriousness of the charges mustn’t be minimized. But the lack of action on the fundamental purpose of the investigation demonstrates that the accusations and the investigation were political circus more than anything else, a manufactured scandal.

Here is a PDF file of the indictment.

Byron York at NRO:

[I]n his original column, Novak wrote that, “Two senior administration officials told me his wife suggested sending Wilson to Niger to investigate the Italian report.” And finding those two senior administration officials was apparently the purpose of the investigation. So who are they?

Fitzgerald just now basically said that he was not able to garner enough evidence to support an indictment for violation of the 1917 Espionage Act, which in fairness to him he did explain should be narrowly interpreted. As I’ve already explained, his words so far seem nearly certain that there was no violation of the even narrower act I cited above. That explains why we aren’t being told the names of the two administration officials Novak mentioned (see here): they committed no crime. Ergo, Plame’s CIA status did not fall under the acts, which I’ve said all along. Again, Fitzgerald has never claimed that her CIA status did fall under the acts.

2:16 CST: Now Fitzgerald has contradicted himself. In his discussion related to the Espionage Act, Fitzgerald emphasized that there is no American equivalent of the British Official Secrets Act. Divulging classified information itself, he said, is not a crime except under very narrowly defined circumstances. Now he just said that the conversation in which Plame’s name was mentioned was the commission of a crime. So which is it? This was the first time I’ve heard that Fitzgerald has indicated that it was criminal to revfeal her name. But under what statute? Does he mean that although her CIA status was protected by law that the grand jury didn’t find enough evidence to bring an indictment against whomever had the conversation referred to? Fitzgerald refuses to address anything beyond the bare facts of the Libby indictment, which is legally proper but which doesn’t clarify matters.

Bill Roggio is the brilliant man behind the milblog, The Fourth Rail. He’s been invited by the 2d Regimental Combat Team, USMC, to visit them in Iraq. He leaves next month. The Marines are not funding his trip, which is not cheap, so he’s asking for help. Says Bill,

Current planning centers on leaving in mid-November, and I plan to be out of country for a month and in theater as long as possible. I will be taking an unpaid leave of absence from my current employment, and hopefully returning to find that I’m still employed. And I’ll need lots of assistance to make this a reality. Foremost is a means to defer the significant cost of going. Additionally I am seeking the media credentials necessary for entry into Iraq.

I am envious and have asked him to look up my son, serving in the Marines there if he swings by my son’s operational area.

The Fourth Rail is one of the very top blogs explaining what is happening and why in Iraq. Bill takes no partisan political positions; he is strictly analytical from the tactical and strategic viewpoint. On his behalf, I urge you to contribute to his trip. The PayPal link is here.

The special prosecutor for the Plame investigation has announced he will hold a press conference at 2 p.m. EDT. Don’t expect anything but rabid media speculation until then. Rumors are still rampant that VP Cheney’s chief of staf, Lewis Libby, will be indicted today for making false official statements to the grand jury.

For two or three days now the media have been in a panting state of suspense about impending indictments to be handed down by Plamegate special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald. Since Tuesday the media have let it be known daily that they expected indictments to be announced that day.

None have.

The term of the present grand jury that could bring an indictment expires Friday.

The White House braced for the possibility that Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, could become a criminal defendant by week’s end. Bush’s top political adviser, Karl Rove, remained in jeopardy of being charged with false statements.

One of the basic rules of Washington is that you do not release major news on a Friday, especially a Friday afternoon, unless it’s bad news. The media like their weekends off just as well as anyone. Americans don’t watch or read the news nearly as much on Friday nights or weekend days as the rest of the week. If the White House was the releasing authority about indictments, then the prospect of indictment announcements tomorrow would be quite plausible. Of course they’d want the story to garner less media attention than otherwise while they worked the spin machine into high speed by Monday.

But the White House isn’t the announcement authority; the special prosecutor is. And he certainly would consider such an announcement good news, not bad.

Now, it may well be that Fitzgerald thinks that no announcement should be made until the grand jury’s expiration date. I don’t believe that, but it could be.

Here’s the limb I’m climbing out on: there will be no indictments. Fitzgerald will render his report to Congress and eventually we will learn that no law about Plame’s identity was provably violated because at the time of Robert Novak’s column started all this Plame’s status was not covered by the law. As I explained back in October 2003,

In order for Plame’s identification in Novak’s column to be considered violating the law, all the following elements of proof must be met:

1. The person who told Novak (or anyone else) had to have had access to classified information that identified Plame as covert. Even if the information is accurate, if the “leaker” did not learn it from classified sources, there is no violation of the law.

2. The disclosure of Plame’s covert status must have been intentional; this would seem easy to ascertain. But it’s far from a slam dunk that Plame actually in covert status at all at the time.

3. The person receiving the information, i.e., Novak, was not authorized to receive classified information; again, this would seem easy to prove.

4. The discloser must have known that the information identified Plame as covert.

5. The discloser must have known that the United States was taking positive actions to conceal Plame’s covert intelligence relationship to the US government.

All five of these things had to have happened in order for the law to have been violated.

I am perfectly willing to accept the idea that dirty politics was going on with the Plame name game, but no indictment for criminality will be forthcoming. If dirty politics was indictable, there’d be no one minding the store up there.

This prediction is little different from what I said in 2003:

Plame’s status will be shown not be have been protected by the law, but someone will be fired anyway, just because the Washington culture of punishment of the innocent demands it.

I’m not so sure now that anyone will be fired.

Update: The New York Times says it has info from “people officially briefed” about the grand jury investigation.

Aide to Cheney Appears Likely to Be Indicted; Rove Under Scrutiny

WASHINGTON, Oct. 27 - Lawyers in the C.I.A. leak case said Thursday that they expected I. Lewis Libby Jr., Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, to be indicted on Friday, charged with making false statements to the grand jury.

Karl Rove, President Bush’s senior adviser and deputy chief of staff, will not be charged on Friday, but will remain under investigation, people briefed officially about the case said. As a result, they said, the special counsel in the case, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, was likely to extend the term of the federal grand jury beyond its scheduled expiration on Friday.

Nothing here that contradicts my original prediction: no crime was committed in connection with Plame’s name and CIA status appearing in Robert Novak’s column.

News flash on TV: Harriet Miers has withdrawn from her nomination to be Supreme Court justice.

Lots more info and many links at OTB.

Mercedes Benz’s 2006 S Series sedan, their top of the line model on the US market now, has radar-directed self acceleration and self braking coupled with the cruise control. Once you set the cruise, the Benz will brake, including emergency braking to full stop if necessary, and will auto-resume the set speed, even from a stop.

Now Honda has developed a self-steering car that will hit overseas showrooms next year. It also has automatic cruise control.

The car will stay between the white lines with the help of a tiny camera behind the rear-view mirror that scans the road and feeds signals to a computer behind the dashboard. If the vehicle strays, an electro-mechanical system gives a nudge to the power steering.

The car also has a cruise control system that keeps it at a steady speed unless the vehicle in front brakes. A radar sensor concealed behind the radiator grille tells the car to slow down.

The car cannot negotiate roads other than freeway-type roads. When driving conditions start to overwhelm the system, an alarm sounds to warn the driver to take over. The test model’s autosteering system works between 45-112 mph, with the radar cruise control working above 20 mph.

Here’s a kicker:

To make sure they do not fall asleep, drivers must keep contact with the steering wheel. If they let go for more than 10 seconds, a warning sounds and the system shuts down.

So the driver falls asleep and his hands drop off the wheel. Ten seconds pass. The car sounds an alarm, which may or may not awaken the driver. But whether he’s awake or not, auto-driving shuts off and the car is (maybe) an unguided missile. Not so smart, ISTM.

Vauxhall, the British subsidiary of the American car giant General Motors, is hot on Honda’s heels with a system that could be used to manoeuvre a car through city traffic at speeds of up to 30mph.

It has cameras that can recognise objects as well as road markings and steer to avoid them so the car can drive in city centres, but it will not be ready for another five years.

Lastango asks at Daily Pundit,

How long before we’re sometimes not allowed to drive? Or we mostly won’t want to bother because our involvement is pointless and we’d rather use the time doing something else? No doubt many urban commuters would chuck the driving chore tomorrow if they could - a self-steering car would be like having one’s own chauffeur.

Add sensors in an area to detect which parking spots are available, and our cars will be dropping us off at the front door of our destination, then figuring out where to park themselves. We’ll call them on our cellphones when we’re ready to leave.

Remember how Roy Rogers fetched Trigger by whistling? So we’ll call our cars for curb service via cell phone. Not far fetched: cell phones already have GPS signaling built in for emergency calls. It’s obvious that autodriving systems will be GPS-linked in their next generation. Coupled with GPS, a car’s sensors could enable it to self-navigate from a parking space to pick you up - very handy in a rainstorm!

What about reduced visibility, such as fog or heavy rain? Obviously for radar that’s little or no problem (depending on the radar’s wavelength) but what about this: couple GPS location detemining with RFID signaling from other vehicles and traffic-control devices such as traffic lights or roadway signs. Turn lanes could be designated by RFIDs, too.

Rolf Jensen, a Danish motoring consultant, believes the driver’s days are numbered. “As the driver you’ll pretty much be out of business,” he said. “Automatic steering, speed control and distance-keeping from vehicles around you will become the norm.”

I for one will not be sorry. Especially on long trips I’d be happy to leave the driving to a smart car, even if I did have to monitor it. Around town might be more problematic, not simply from the safety perspective, but from a car built to drive more or less aggressively than its owner would like. So I assume the cars will be able to be owner-adjusted for that. There would be some occasions you’d want the car to make tracks. Other times a more sedate ride would be more acceptable.

So the car’s autodriving system would have to be settable as follows:

A. Bank robbery getaway.

B. Step on it, I’m late for my plane.

C. Normal commute.

D. Sunday drive.

E. I really don’t want to go, anyway.

But manufacturers won’t necessarily be quick to introduce autodrivers to the market en masse.

In the end, it is likely to be legal issues that constrain the extent to which technology takes over. Motor manufacturers do not want to be held responsible for collisions that drivers blame on the car for failing to steer or stop.

Autodriving, hence autocrashing cars - a lawyer’s dream.

Endnote: Navy aircraft have used autolanding systems on aircraft carriers for many years. Many jet airliners (I think the Boeing 777, for example) can take off by themselves, fly themselves to the next airport and land themselves. All they can’t do is taxi themselves. (Or can they?)

- Time really weighs heavily on some people’s hands.

— Christopher Hitchen’s 10-page, PDF synopsis of the Oil for Food payola scandal.

— An NPR segment calls for calling terrorists, terrorists, not insurgents.

All for now.

What’s the point? (Click image for video)

As the news media have almost endlessly repeated, Monday there was a fairly sophisticated attack of three al Qaeda bombers in or near Firdos Square, Baghdad. This was the square where US Marines pulled down a statue of Saddam Hussein on April 9, 2003 (here and here and here).

Near the square is the Palestine Hotel, where international journalists stay in large numbers. It remains the hotel of choice for reporters who were immediately convinced that they themselves were the targets. The AP reported, “Baghdad hotel bombing targets journalists.”

Three massive vehicle bombs exploded Monday near the Palestine Hotel, home to many Western journalists, killing at least 20 people. Dramatic TV pictures showed one of the bombers driving a cement truck through the concrete blast walls that guard the hotel, then blowing up his vehicle.

Iraq’s national security adviser, Mouwafak al-Rubaie, said the attack – which appeared well-planned – was a ‘‘very clear’’ effort to take over the hotel and seize journalists as hostages.

One of the car bombs exploded near the police position on the northeast side of Firdous Square, where a statue of Saddam Hussein was toppled in April 2003 shortly after the fall of Baghdad, and more than 100 yards east of the hotel. Security officials said a third bomb struck the area around the same time. All three were believed to be suicide attacks.

Other Iraqi government officials contradicted Mr. al-Rubaie’s assertion, though, for which he could offer no evidence. Firdous Square itself is no target, it’s just a traffic roundabout. It’s busy with traffic all the time, but as the video shows, the deadly effects of high explosive fall off rapidly in an open area. Drivers of other vehicles in the traffic circle simply kept on driving (pretty quickly, I think!).

There were three vehicles used in the attack, two cars (one of which blows up in the video) and a cement truck. According to a timeline published by the Mercury News, a white car detonated first by the barrier wall between the square and the hotel’s grounds, blowing a large hole in the barrier. Two minutes later a second car blew up on the other side of the square. (Other reports say this other car was shot up by Iraqi police as it entered the square and blew up near a police post, killing four or five policemen.) One minute after that, a cement truck attempted to ram through the breach in the barrier wall. Reports say that it apparently couldn’t make headway all the way through the barrier. It was seen to drive fore and aft a few times, then it blew up in a colossal explosion.

No one in the hotel was reported injured, though there was some blast damage to part of the building, mainly broken windows and shredded awnings.

Why would al Qaeda target journalists?

The question is begged as to whether the Palestine Hotel was actually the target. There’s nothing of military significance near the square, nor any Iraqi government offices, so it seems likely that the hotel was the target. So why would Zarqawi (who claimed credit today) attack there? (The Ministry of Agriculture is about 100 yards from the square but was clearly not the target.)

Ed Strong quotes Patrick Cockburn’s column that the hotel, “… is also used by contractors and is defended by a detachment of US troops. Both facts are enough to make it a target.” True, but not a very good target. And if al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) chief Abu Musab al-Zarqawi didn’t actually intend the reporters to be the targets, but the troops and contractors, then he made an unbelievable error in judgment in risking massive media casualties collaterally.

Another point in favor of the hotel and its reporters being the target is that al Qaeda tipped the reporters off that they attack would occur. What better way to maximize casualties than that? It guarantees they’d be crowded around the windows, more exposed to the bombs, cameras rolling to video their own destruction.

According to American military officers interviewed Tuesday on cable news, including Lt. Col Gary Luck, the security commander of the area, had the cement-truck-borne bomb reached the hotel, the results would have been catastrophic for the building. Apparently, the only thing that prevented the cement truck from getting past the breach in the barrier was concertina wire that wrapped around its axles. That explains why the truck was seen to move rapidly fore and aft a few times before it blew up. It’s fortunate that barbed wire and its military cousins are remarkably resistant to explosives.

Some snarks have said that if any reporters had been injured in the bombings it would have been a case of “friendly fire.” However much many of us think that the mainstream media’s reportage from Iraq has ranged from incomplete at best to openly biased against the US at worst, al Qaeda does not think consider the media their fifth column nor even useful fools. In his July letter to Zarqawi, al Qaeda’s number two man, Abu Muhammed al-Zawahiri wrote,

… the general opinion of our supporter does not comprehend that [i.e., the justification for al Qaeda’s actions], and that this general opinion falls under a campaign by the malicious, perfidious, and fallacious campaign by the deceptive and fabricated media.

Hence, wrote Zawahiri,

[W]e are in a battle, and that more than half of this battle is taking place in the battlefield of the media. And that we are in a media battle in a race for the hearts and minds of our Umma.

Al Qaeda sees the media, especially the Western media, as their enemy. It may be (and we may never know) that they believed that by striking the Palestine Hotel and injuring or killing reporters they would accomplish some positive things for their side.

It would have greatly reduced the number of Western reporters in Iraq. Once reporters had deliberately been murdered by al Qaeda, there may have been a strong exodus of reporters from the country. There may yet be a number of reporters who choose to leave because of the bombings. In al Qaeda’s view, the news from Iraq is unfavorable them. As I have explained a number of times before, al Qaeda, from bin Laden on down, see the Muslim ummah as their natural allies. If the corrupting influences of Western media are reduced or better yet, eliminated, then the ummah will no longer waver in support of the Islamist cause. Zawahiri admitted they are in a battle for hearts and minds, but he believes that the ummah’s hearts and minds are his to lose. So while the intended target of violence may have been reporters, the intended audience was the Muslim masses, especially those of Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Syria, three strongholds of al Qaeda support.

At the same time, Zarqawi may have thought (not unreasonably) that once they managed to kill reporters inside the reporters’ own safe haven, reportage would have turned immediately and strongly against the US and Iraqi governments. Claims of “Iraq the quagmire” would have been promulgated even harder and media commentary would have lambasted the inability of the authorities to maintain security.

So the attack, has it succeeded in reaching the hotel itself, might have been seen by al Qaeda as a three-fer:

1. Announce to al Qaeda’s supporters and the general ummah that al Qaeda can hit sensitive Western targets in Iraq and to symbolize to them that the Western media are inimical to Islamist interests.

2. Garner immediate and severe negative coverage of the Iraqi government and American military authorities.

3. Reduce the number of Western reporters in Iraq.

That’s my take, anyway.

Update: The story continues to develop. Time magazine now reports that an American security firm working out of the hotel was the target because the terrorists think that “the targeted security firm is actually a Western or Israeli government intelligence agency.” As for the cement truck,

Had the truck moved 20 to 30 feet closer [to the hotel], it’s likely it would have taken down much of the Palestine Hotel with horrific casualties.

Insurgent sources told TIME the plan after that was to storm into the hotel and kill the surviving security members, but that part of the plan never came about because the third truck never got close enough to the hotel to do real damage and Iraqi security forces and American troops drove off the insurgent assault teams.

“Insurgent sources”? The mind boggles. It may be that the terrorists think the security firm is a front, and that the attack was directed at the firm. Rush Limbaugh read an email on the air this afternoon claiming to be from an employee of the firm, who said that they already knew of the presumed identity in the minds of the enemy (transcript here).

But more questions are begged than answered by this hypothesis (which I say again, may be true). Why did the terrorists phone a tip of the coming attack to some reporters in the hotel? What nationality were the reporters? Iraq’s national security adviser, Mouwafak al-Rubaie, said that both Western and Arab reporters were to be held as hostages, so we know that not only Western reporters stayed in the hotel. Did the tip come to Arab reporters working for al Jazeera, al Arabiya? Other? Was it meant to warn them to leave the scene of imminent danger? Who took the broadast-quality video of the explosions and how did they know to be taping at that moment?

Why have “insurgent sources” revealed the entire operational plan to Time and presumably other media? Might they be lying about what they intended (yeah, perish the thought)? And as I implicitly asked above, why would Zarqawi be so intent on eliminating the security firm that he will risk massive media casualties as collateral damage? Or did he see the media casualties as bonus effects?

Finally, is there any sense at Time or other media that they are possibly being played by al Qaeda in Iraq?

Consider how the appointment of one David Davis to the Supreme Court came about:

The letter-writing campaign on Davis’ behalf frankly mentioned the political debt the president owed him. One asked why Davis should not be appointed, “especially when he was so instrumental in giving position to him who now holds the matter in the hollow of his hand?” Another wrote that the appointment of Davis would be pleasing “especially to the circle of your old personal friends.” A third asked, “Now should not a man in power remember those men, and discriminate in favor of those men, who throughout life have been as true as steel to him. Is this not common justice[?]”

So the president, who was a close personal friend of Davis anyway, appointed Davis to the high court. That would be President Abraham Lincoln.

Callimachus has a fascinating look at Lincon’s Supreme Court appointments. Cronyism? Unqualified nominees? Mediocrity? You betcha.

That and Syria’s special movie for Ramadan are discussed by Saudi blogger Alhamedi.

And mine would be less than the $100,000 the Newark City Council is paying Howard Scott, who owns Newark Weekly News, to publish positive news about the city.

The Newark City Council has awarded the Newark Weekly News a $100,000 no-bid contract to publish positive news about the city. …

“Do we have critical reporters on staff? No. Do we have investigative reporters? No,” Scott said. “Our niche is the good stuff. People have come to know it, and they love it.”

Under the contract, the paper will work with the city’s public information office to spread positive aspects of the city.

The paper can only generate stories based on leads from the council and the mayor’s office.

Observes OpnionJournal (whence the link), “The city is, in essence, contracting out a public-relations newsletter.”

If there are many other cities dissatisfied with their present PR newsletters, contact me! I’ll give you a first-year discount!

Actually, this might not be the windfall for Scott that it appears. The contract is doubtless all-inclusive and obligatesh im not simply to produce the newsletter but distribute it. After taxes and expenses, he’s banking a lot less than $100K.

The Politburo Diktat is “making a family tree of the blogosphere.” He asks bloggers to leave a comment noting,

1. your blogfather, or blogmother, as the case may be. Just one please - the one blog that, more than any other, inspired you to start blogging. Please don’t name Instapundit, unless you are on his blogchildren list.
2. Include your blog-birth-month, the month that you started blogging, if you can.
3. Identify your blog as Left, Right, or Other
4. If you are reasonably certain that you have spawned any blog-children, mention them, too.

He has a Blog Family Tree page that is very interesting.

Jim Miller is soliciting opinions of just what this bumper sticker is supposed to symbolize. What do you think?

The AP:

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) — A U.S. Army sergeant died of wounds suffered in Iraq, the Pentagon announced Tuesday.

The death — along with two others announced Tuesday — brought to 2,000 the number of U.S. military members who have died since the start of the Iraq conflict in 2003.

Staff Sgt. George T. Alexander, Jr., 34, of Killeen, Texas, died Saturday at Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio, Texas, of wounds suffered Oct. 17, when a bomb exploded near his vehicle in the central Iraqi city of Samarra, the Defense Department said.

It has been long anticipated that the antiwar factions would use this benchmark as the occasion for renewed demonstrations.

Update: Reuters:

The U.S. army said the 2,000 American dead was an artificial mark, not a milestone.

“It is an artificial mark on the wall set by individuals or groups with specific agendas and ulterior motives,” said U.S army spokesman Lieutenant-Colonel Steven A. Boylan.

Click for larger image

As Hurricane Wilma moved away from Florida today, she curled her lip into a dismissive sneer as if to say,”You ain’t seen nothing yet.”

Tripping over the miracles

You may know Anne Rice as the hugely successful author of a large number of occultic novels. Interview With the Vampire is her best known book; it established her as a saleable author of the first rank and was made into a movie starring Tom Cruise as the vampire.

But now Anne says that all her future books will be written “only for the Lord,” starting with “Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt,” a novel about the 7-year-old Jesus, narrated by Christ himself.”

Rice’s most daring move, though, is to try to get inside the head of a 7-year-old kid who’s intermittently aware that he’s also God Almighty. “There were times when I thought I couldn’t do it,” she admits. The advance notices say she’s pulled it off: Kirkus Reviews’ starred rave pronounces her Jesus “fully believable.” But it’s hard to imagine all readers will be convinced when he delivers such lines as “And there came in a flash to me a feeling of understanding everything, everything!” The attempt to render a child’s point of view can read like a Sunday-school text crossed with Hemingway: “It was time for the blessing. The first prayer we all said together in Jerusalem … The words were a little different to me. But it was still very good.” Yet in the novel’s best scene, a dream in which Jesus meets a bewitchingly handsome Satan—smiling, then weeping, then raging—Rice shows she still has her great gift: to imbue Gothic chills with moral complexity and heartfelt sorrow.

You can listen to an audio excerpt of the opening. The excerpt presents the seven-year-old Jesus telling of murdering a playmate who mocked him by simply willing the boy’s death and of turning clay-figure birds into real birds that fly away to the astonishment of Jesus’ friends. (Jesus subsequently resurrects the slain playmate, off mike.)

As the article points out, Rice didn’t make those stories up. They are contained in “apocryphal gospels” that she studied, among other things, in preparing to write the book. The apocryphal gospels, such as the gospel of Peter, are not narrative gospels like the four of the New Testament, but are anecdotes and in one case simply aphorisms attributed to Jesus. However, none date earlier than the second century. These documents were well known to the early church, whose leaders rejected them as authentic because they lacked apostolic credentials and did not accord with the verified testimony of the apostles.

The childish miracles Rice wove into her book illustrate why. The miracles related of Christ in the NT gospels are layered and complex. The miracle stories we read in the NT gospels may be thought of as “third level” stories. The first level was whatever historically happened, what Jesus did that was noteworthy enough to be recollected at the second level. The second level was the apostolic witness of what happened. For many years - decades, even - that witness was oral. Finally, the apostolic accounts were written down, probably by members of their faith communities after the apostles began to be killed. The gospels themselves make no claim of who wrote them and only two are even attributed to an apostle. (The gospel of John and the epistles of John have been proven to come from the same hand, a hand that did not write Revelation, and the gospel of Luke was provably written by the same hand that wrote Acts. In fact, most NT scholars consider Luke and Acts to be one work that was later divided.)

When the miracles stories were included in the written gospels, they were woven into a literary narrative. The gospels were not written originally as a tool for evangelism but were meant to be studied by members of the church for their edification and education. They were “insider” documents. They were propaganda in the word’s original, religious sense: to be used for the propagation of the faith. The gospels are not unbiased accounts of some days in the life of Jesus. They are structured to reveal and elucidate who Jesus was.

So it was also with the miracle stories. These stories are not simple, “gee-whiz!” stories of the fantastic. The telling of them is shaped to ft within their narrative setting; some are structured similar to parables. That is, the miracles mean something, and what they mean is gleaned either from their narrative environment or “folding in” of the miracle story itself. In fact, the working of the miracle itself is not even the point. The miracle itself serves as a dramatic means to make a religious point.

And sometimes the miracle is not even important to the story. In the healing of the ceeturion’s servant, the miracle is an afterthought:

5 When he entered Capernaum, a centurion came to him, appealing to him 6and saying, ‘Lord, my servant is lying at home paralyzed, in terrible distress.’ 7And he said to him, ‘I will come and cure him.’ 8The centurion answered, ‘Lord, I am not worthy to have you come under my roof; but only speak the word, and my servant will be healed. 9For I also am a man under authority, with soldiers under me; and I say to one, “Go,” and he goes, and to another, “Come,” and he comes, and to my slave, “Do this,” and the slave does it.’ 10When Jesus heard him, he was amazed and said to those who followed him, ‘Truly I tell you, in no one in Israel have I found such faith.a 11I tell you, many will come from east and west and will eat with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven, 12while the heirs of the kingdom will be thrown into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.’ 13And to the centurion Jesus said, ‘Go; let it be done for you according to your faith.’ And the servant was healed in that hour (Matt. 8:5-13).

The meaning of this story is not found in the healing of the servant but in the righteous faith of a Gentile, and a hated Roman-soldier Gentile at that, an occupier of Judea and an oppressor of the children of Abraham. Moreover, Jesus is presented as saying that this inclusion of the Gentiles as enjoying communion with “Abraham and Isaac and Jacob” - the three founders of the Hebrew people - will be the norm. And the descendants of the three prophets, the “heirs of the kingdom” of God? They will be thrown into outer darkness unless they can exhibit faith in Jesus like the centurion did. At this point the centurion’s servant is irrelevant. The “punch line”of the story has been given. But he is healed, well offstage, to wrap things up neatly.

Hence one of the fatal flaws of the cute little stories of Jesus’ childhood miracles in the apocryphal gospels. Besides having no provenance, they had no point. Little Jesus made clay birds grow real feathers and fly away? So what? We don’t need such stories to profess faith in Christ. The church through two millennia hasn’t confessed Jesus as the worker of miracles, especially petty ones, but as the One to whom the greatest of all miracles was done: “God raised him up, having freed him from death, because it was impossible for him to be held in its power” (Acts 2:24).

I am glad that Anne Rice says she has found the Lord and has turned her considerable literary skill to writing only for him. There is a lot of money to be made in religious writing. Maybe I should try it some time. But my incapability to sensationalize the narrative might make a publisher shrink.

Update: Mycropht writes, “the entire publishing industry is viewing religious literature as the lifeboat for its sinking sales.”

Federal and local officials at odds with each other; storm victims in desperate straits, demand aid

All this in Mexico.

CANCUN, Mexico (Reuters) - Dazed foreign tourists stranded in stinking shelters in this hurricane-hit Mexican beach resort demanded to be rescued on Monday, and President Vicente Fox lost his temper at slow aid efforts.

Toilets overflowed and food was scarce at refuges in Cancun, where some 20,000 vacationers spent their fifth day sleeping on floors or in stuffy rooms without electricity or running water. …

Heavily armed federal police stood guard at supermarkets to prevent looting, but a convenience store was raided of food and soft drinks. Authorities declared a night-time curfew.

A Mexican newspaper said two people were shot dead in looting on Saturday night but state officials could not confirm that.

A fist fight broke out overnight at the El Forito theater, which was holding some 300 mostly American and British package tourists evacuated from their lodgings, witnesses said.

“If some changes aren’t made, it’s going to get real nasty, because people’s tempers are starting to get frazzled. You are living on rice and noodles and fruit,” said Jim Pelinka, 54, a school administrator from Minnesota. …

A visibly angry President Fox, touring the area, demanded that the army and police set up a joint command center in Cancun to stop looting and help tourists fly out.

“I want that command center operating 100 percent right now,” he shouted at local officials.

This all sounds rather depressingly familiar.

Via Bill Quick, I found this post on Stop the ACLU about why many Muslims during this Ramadan think that the End of the Age is at hand, and Osama bin Laden is the Mahdi.

“Islamic tradition says that the Mahdi will be a descendant of Muhammad through his daughter Fatima,” writes [Paul L.] Williams. “He will have a distinctive forehead, a prominent nose, and a black mole on his face. He will arise from Arabia and will be called from a cave by Allah to serve as the savior of all true believers.”

Williams points out bin Laden’s followers see significance in his high forehead, the prominent nose, the black mole, his origins in Arabia and his calling from a cave in Afghanistan.

“Bin Laden speaks of the president of the United States as Dabbah, the beast he must slay, and of the American people as the Yajuj wa-Majuj, the nation of Gog that he must destroy,” reports Williams. “In his edicts and official correspondence, he no longer signs his name as Osama bin Laden but as Osama bin Muhammad bin Laden.” [this citing a piece in WorldNet Daily]

In Muslim tradition, the Mahdi is an apocalyptic figure who will come to ring down the curtain on human history. Many non-Mulsim westerners don’t realize what a profoundly apocalyptic and eschatological religion Islam is. (”Apocalyptic” means that a religion foretells that the culmination of history will include widespread warfare and natural catastrophes. “Eschatological”means that the religion is oriented toward an ending point, and that all life and history is process toward and preparation for this ending point. Put the two together and you have in Christian tradition The Late Great Planet Earth of the early 1970s or more recently, the Left Behind novels. Human affairs and nature itself has become so rotten that humankind is saved only by the direct intervention of the deity. In Islam you have the coming of the Mahdi, acting as Allah’s direct agent. “Mahdi” is Arabic for “divinely guided.”

In Sunni Islam, the “Mahdi” is just one of several important figures, while the “Mahdi” of Shi’i Islam has a real eschatological importance, and is in the future the most important figure for Islam as well as the world. …

The main principle of the Mahdi is that he is a figure that is absolutely guided by God. This guidance is stronger form of guidance than normal guidance, which usually involves a human being willfully acting according to the guidance of God. The Mahdi on the other hand, has nothing of this human element, and his acts will be in complete accordance to God’s will.

The figure of Mahdi, and his mission, is not mentioned in the Koran, and there are practically nothing to be found among the reliable hadiths on him either. The idea of the mahdi appears to be a development in the first 2-3 centuries of Islam. In the case of the Shi’i Mahdi many scholars have suggested that there is a clear inspiration coming from the Messiah-figure of Christianity and its ideas of a judgement day in the hands of a religious renewer.[Link]

The possible inspiration of Christology on Islam generally and the idea of the Mahdi specifically is not shocking. More than two years ago I wrote about a book called Challenging the Quran by a German scholar writing under the pseudonym Christoph Luxenberg. Luxenberg, a scholar of ancient languages and texts, claims that the Quran was originally written in Aramic (since Arabic was not written until 150 years after Muhammed died) and that the Quran, in its Aramaic form, was a Christian liturgical document.

Back to the Mahdi. In Shia Islam the Mahdi is an apocalyptic-eschatological figure, but in Sunni tradition the Mahdi can be - and has been - a mortal man. Sunnis conceive of the Mahdi as a restorer of right Islam, often by military power, but not always. One such Mahdi was the caliph of Sudan in the 19th century, whose successors the British crushed as I related in 2002. In this sense, the Sunnis conceive of the Mahdi as a supreme general whose victory is won because of his devotion to Allah and true Islam, and whose triumph will usher in a reign of Islamic purity. In this sense the Mahdi is apocalyptic but not (necessarily) eschatological.

However, there is no clear-cut demarcation between the Sunni tradition and the Shia tradition; there seems to be a lot of conflation of beliefs between the two sects. The Iraqi Shiite imam, Moqtada al-Sadr, styled himself as a Mahdi when leading a rebellion against the Iraqi government and US forces in 2004. However, as I can make it out - and I freely admit I could be wrong here - the Sunnis are more concerned with the Mahdi figure himself and the Shias are focused more on the signs and indications the precede the Mahdi’s coming. For some of the signs, see here, for the description of the Mahdi himself, see here.

The WND article states,

“One Muslim, who views bin Laden as the Mahdi, is Sheikh Nasir bin Hamid al Fahd,” explains Williams. “Al Fahd recently issued a religious ruling or fatwa on behalf of the clerics of Saudi Arabia that granted bin Laden and other terrorists the permission to use nuclear weapons against the United States.”

In the fatwa, titled “A Treatise on the Legal Status of Using Weapons of Mass Destruction against Infidels,” al Fahd ruled that international law should not be taken into consideration while determining if America should be nuked. Islamic law, he says, overrides all man-made laws.

Osama bin Laden is by no means reluctant to be thought of as the Mahdi by either tradition. His religious megalomania makes all the more dangerous. Conceniving of himself as Allah’s “divinely guided one,” he is liable to direct courses of action or attacks that a more reflective, self critical enemy might not make. This at once makes him more vulnerable to our countermeasures, including attacking al Qaeda directly, since hsi actions may not be as wellplanned our thought through as otherwise. But it also makes him more dangerous as he tries to prove his Mahdi credentials to Muslims and Allah alike.