Wednesday Link Latte - 12/12/07

Here we go, in no particular order:

Bush's New Dentist Faces Tough Confirmation Hearing

Colorado Heroes

Colorado Shooting Update

I’ll have a double espresso

Adam Sandler's Chanuka Song video

Israel now world's fourth largest weapons exporter

Syria Blocks Facebook Access, Fearing Israeli 'Infiltration'

Chronology of Iran's nuclear program

Knight's Move

Department of ....?

Via Jihad Watch comes this JPost article by Michael Freund on the recent hypocrisy and double standards in the comments issued by the Secretary of State.

Condoleezza Rice has got some nerve. First, the US Secretary of State had the hutzpa to compare Israel's treatment of Palestinians to that meted out to US blacks during the bad old days of the segregationist South.

Speaking at a private session at the close of the Annapolis conference, America's top diplomat said that having grown up "as a black child in the South, being told she could not use certain water fountains or eat in certain restaurants, she also understood the feelings and emotions of the Palestinians."

"I know what it is like to hear that you cannot go on a road or through a checkpoint because you are Palestinian," the Washington Post (November 29) quoted her as saying. "I understand the feeling of humiliation and powerlessness," she added.

Needless to say, the fact that American blacks were victims of violence and hate, while Palestinians are its proficient practitioners, seems to have escaped the secretary of state's attention.

Moreover, Rice's comparison between Israeli security measures and America's Jim Crow laws is both intellectually dishonest and morally obscene.

There is no similarity whatsoever between Israel establishing a checkpoint aimed at catching Palestinian suicide bombers and the state of Georgia's 1960s era prohibition against serving blacks and whites in the same restaurant.

To suggest otherwise is insulting and offensive, and Rice should know better. After all, by her logic, would Hamas terrorist-in-chief Ismail Haniyeh qualify as a Palestinian Rosa Parks? And yet, for all of her ostensible sensitivity to questions of discrimination, Rice did not hesitate to engage in some bigotry of her own last week when it came to the issue of building new homes for Jews in Jerusalem.

After Israel announced the approval of tenders for the construction of 307 housing units in the capital's Har Homa neighborhood, Her Excellency went into what can only be described as a tizzy.

Speaking at NATO headquarters in Brussels on Friday, Rice told reporters that she had raised the issue of Har Homa with Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni - not once, but twice! "I did, in fact, bring up Har Homa, both earlier in a phone call and then today in our meeting," Rice said. "I've made very clear about seeking clarification on precisely what this means. I've made clear that we're in a time when the goal is to build maximum confidence between the parties and this doesn't help to build confidence," she proclaimed.

CONFIDENCE? Did she say "this doesn't help to build confidence?" And what, Madam Secretary, of the constant Palestinian rocket attacks against southern Israeli towns and cities? Do they "help to build confidence"? Or how about the daily incitement to violence on official Palestinian radio and television? Or the murder last month of 29-year old Ido Zoldan by members of Mahmoud Abbas' own Palestinian police force? Strangely enough, not one of these odious deeds merited a public comment from Rice about their impact on the "building of confidence" between the two sides.

And yet, when Israel decides to build some new apartments in an already-existing section of Jerusalem, Rice suddenly finds her voice? Who does she think she is kidding? But what was still more troubling about her statement on Har Homa is that it lends credence to the discriminatory notion that certain places should be off-limits to Jews simply because they are Jews.

Rice herself was born in the city of Birmingham, Alabama. Ironically enough, just 105 miles north of her birthplace lies a town named Jerusalem, Alabama.

Were the Secretary of State to suggest that the right of Jews to live and build in Jerusalem, Alabama, should be restricted in any way, she would immediately be denounced as a racist and an anti-Semite, and rightly so.

Yet when she suggests that Jews should not be permitted to build freely in Jerusalem, Israel because they are Jews, it is inexplicably described as being a "confidence-building measure."

Portrait of a Hero

She may look normal to you, but Jeanne Assam is nothing short of a hero. She stopped a massacre (with the help of another wounded church member) by firing back at the shooter. The murderer was armed with a rifle and 500 rounds of ammunition. You all do the math, but I think she personally saved the lives of over a hundred people. How many of us have saved a single life, let alone a hundred?

She calmly described how the incident unfolded.

"I heard shots fired, there was chaos," she said. "There was a lot of people in the church. People were running away from shots fired.

"I saw him coming through the doors, and I took cover, and I waited for him to get closer...I identified myself, engaged him, and took him down."

..."I just prayed for the Holy Spirit to guide me my hands weren't even shaking."

The softer side of terrorism...

It turns out that when these guys are not planning suicide bombings and mortar/rocket attacks on civilian towns, they are avid bird catchers! They appreciate God's world as much as you or me, and just want to share that beauty with their families. Is that so wrong?

Just a piece of advice to those nature aficionados - don't catch birds near the security fence.

IDF Kills Terrorists 'Bird Catcher'

(IsraelNN.com) Army soldiers Thursday shot and killed one Arab terrorist and wounded a second near the Gaza separation barrier, where terrorists frequently place explosive devices in the path of IDF patrols. The family of one of the terrorists claimed the men were trying to catch birds, although the fence is widely known to be the scene of terrorist and counter-terrorist actions. The incident follows almost daily targeting of Hamas terrorists, including one aerial strike on a Hamas training base.

NIE gets pwn3d by Bolton

Via Gateway Pundit comes this Washington Post column by John Bolton, former US ambassador to the U.N [emphasis by GP].

...All this shows that we not only have a problem interpreting what the mullahs in Tehran are up to, but also a more fundamental problem: Too much of the intelligence community is engaging in policy formulation rather than "intelligence" analysis, and too many in Congress and the media are happy about it. President Bush may not be able to repair his Iran policy (which was not rigorous enough to begin with) in his last year, but he would leave a lasting legacy by returning the intelligence world to its proper function...

First, the headline finding -- that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003 -- is written in a way that guarantees the totality of the conclusions will be misread. In fact, there is little substantive difference between the conclusions of the 2005 NIE on Iran's nuclear capabilities and the 2007 NIE...

The real differences between the NIEs are not in the hard data but in the psychological assessment of the mullahs' motives and objectives. The current NIE freely admits to having only moderate confidence that the suspension continues and says that there are significant gaps in our intelligence and that our analysts dissent from their initial judgment on suspension. This alone should give us considerable pause.

Second, the NIE is internally contradictory and insufficiently supported...

Third, the risks of disinformation by Iran are real. We have lost many fruitful sources inside Iraq in recent years because of increased security and intelligence tradecraft by Iran. The sudden appearance of new sources should be taken with more than a little skepticism. In a background briefing, intelligence officials said they had concluded it was "possible" but not "likely" that the new information they were relying on was deception. These are hardly hard scientific conclusions. One contrary opinion came from -- of all places -- an unnamed International Atomic Energy Agency official, quoted in the New York Times, saying that "we are more skeptical. We don't buy the American analysis 100 percent. We are not that generous with Iran." When the IAEA is tougher than our analysts, you can bet the farm that someone is pursuing a policy agenda...

Fourth, the NIE suffers from a common problem in government: the overvaluation of the most recent piece of data...

Fifth, many involved in drafting and approving the NIE were not intelligence professionals but refugees from the State Department, brought into the new central bureaucracy of the director of national intelligence...

That such a flawed product could emerge after a drawn-out bureaucratic struggle is extremely troubling. While the president and others argue that we need to maintain pressure on Iran, this "intelligence" torpedo has all but sunk those efforts, inadequate as they were. Ironically, the NIE opens the way for Iran to achieve its military nuclear ambitions in an essentially unmolested fashion, to the detriment of us all.