The Chicago Tribune has a long editorial up, titled, “Judging the case for war“, that, um, judges the case for war in Iraq. Though one could quibble with a few of their conclusions – for example they make too little of Saddam’s ties to al Qaeda and make too much of alleged implications by the Bush administration of ties between Iraq and 9/11 – it is overall a reasonable and balanced assessment. In short, the president made a reasonable judgment based on the information he had available at the time.

All the “Bush lied us into a war for 0il” canards should be relegated by now to the kook fringes. Unfortunately, that still includes most of the leaders of the Democratic party – Howard Dean, Harry Reid, Ted Kennedy, etc. The American people will have to decide again in November whether they want people to be in charge of the national legislature who are simply unserious about the threats we face.

Since before the war of liberation in Iraq began, the anti-war left has been adamant in its assertions that Iraq had nothing to do with al Qaeda, or the global war against islamist terrorism.

We noted a column last month by Richard Cohen in the Washington Post in which he summarized this view:

What’s more, there’s evidence aplenty that the sloppy thinking, false analogies and bad history that led to the Iraq war remain the cultural style of the White House. The president’s recent speech, for instance, conflates all sorts of terrorist incidents “” from Israel to Chechnya “” neglecting that they are specific to their regions and have nothing to do with al Qaeda. Every bombing somehow becomes an attack on Western values “because we stand for democracy and peace.” Oh, stop it!
[emphasis added]

Too bad Zarqawi and the editors of the UK Telegraph don’t read Cohen’s columns. Via Hugh Hewitt:

A wave of arrests across Europe has thrown new light on a European terrorist network being developed by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the most prominent insurgent in Iraq….

“Zarqawi thinks he is bigger than Iraq,” a British source said. “He is spreading his tentacles in Europe. There is a sense that attacks are inevitable.

“Even before the invasion of Iraq, Zarqawi had a network in Europe that provided funds and recruits. The same pipeline will sooner or later pump the other way, from Iraq to Europe.”

In France last week Nicolas Sarkozy, the interior minister, said that a sweep of 25 alleged Islamic militants and common criminals had broken up a terrorist network with links to Algerian and Chechen organisations and “indirect relations with al-Zarqawi”….

This week Spanish police arrested 15 people in raids across the country. Those detained are suspected of recruiting fighters for Iraq.
[emphasis added]

Cohen’s opinion piece was ironically titled “Ignoring the Facts”. The fact that matters here is that the anti-war left, which unfortunately includes the leadership of the Democratic Party at this point, can only make political hay out of the invasion of Iraq to the extent that they can convince the American public it is separate from the larger war against Islamist terrorism. To them, it seems, these political considerations are more important than dealing with the realities of the threat we face.

In an ongoing series, we note again that many liberals’ claims that they’re against religion in politics are a fraud – they’re not against religion in politics, they’re against conservatives in politics. While they reserve special venom for more traditional Judeo-Christian ideas — any conservative who makes any sort of public value judgment is in danger of being branded a “theocon” by the left — they aren’t against invoking God in arguing for left-of-center policies.

Today’s installment comes via OpinionJournal’s “Best of the Web” Tuesday, where we have Democratic House minority leader Nancy Pelosi preaching on the House floor:

“Mr. Speaker, as we leave for this Christmas recess, let us say, ‘God bless you’ to the American people by voting against this Republican budget and statement of injustice and immorality, and let us not let the special interest goose get fat at the expense of America’s children.

“The gentleman from Washington [state], Mr. McDermott, quoted the prophet Isaiah. And as the bible [sic] teaches us, to minister to the needs of God’s creation is an act of worship, to ignore those needs is to dishonor the God who made us. Let us vote no on this budget as an act of worship and for America’s children.”

It’s easy to imagine the outcry from the left that would ensue if a conservative Republican used exactly that sort of language in favor of a Republican bill. “What about separation of church and state!” “Theocracy!” “How dare you try to impose your religious values on others!”

As James Taranto noted in reponse to Pelosi’s remarks:

When a conservative politician cites the Bible in support of his views on, say, abortion or homosexuality, people like Pelosi get their backs up about the mingling of church and state.

We should also note once again that the “cuts” in question are $40 billion over 5 years. The projected federal spending over the next 5 years is about $14 trillion. So the “cuts” amount to about one-quarter of one-percent of the budget. These “cuts” are a rounding error, not “unjust and immoral.”

Ramesh Ponnuru helpfully gets to the bottom line on the Dover, PA “intelligent design” decision handed down today, which found the mention of ID in public school to be unconstitutional:

I’ve read about 40% of the decision, and it appears, with the exception of a few foolish passages, to be a plausible–though perhaps not the only possible–application of the Supreme Court’s establishment-clause jurisprudence. That jurisprudence is widely, and rightly, considered an embarrassment. The idea that anyone who ratified the Fourteenth Amendment intended for the federal courts to get involved in local science curricula, or for them to make authoritative pronouncements about what “is science,” is of course nuts.

That pretty much sums up our take perfectly. Whatever one thinks about the issue of teaching intelligent design in school, it clearly isn’t something for the federal government to decide for every school in the nation.

Patterico has an interesting quote from the LA Times:

ONE OF THE PERKS OF being commander in chief is that you get to edit the Constitution, even the Bill of Rights, from time to time. That is in essence the legal justification offered by the Bush administration for its authorization of a secret program to wiretap, without any court order, international communications of individuals within the United States suspected of ties to terrorist groups.

But we thought liberal Democrats believe the Constitution is a “living breathing document.” It has to be “flexible” and “change with the times.” Sure the document doesn’t mention anything like a right to abortion, or “separation of church and state,” the Department of Education, farm subsidies, or any number of federal programs, but it should, and the Founders couldn’t think of everything, so let’s all pretend those things are in there somewhere.

Surely a document with enough flexibility to do everything liberals want can bend enough to allow the Commander in Chief to intercept a few cell phone calls from Osama bin Ladin without filling out all the right paperwork, can’t it? Since when are all these liberals “strict constructionists”?

Too often, Democrats seem to show enthusiasm for limited government only when it comes to national security.

Also linked at OTB’s Traffic Jam.

We’ve stayed away from the whole NSA/spying on Americans story for the most part, because few facts are available and we are not experts in all the legal questions that are in play.

What is known? Very little. What sort of communications were intercepted? Who were the participants in these communications? The public and the NY Times do not have answers to these kinds of questions. What are the publicly known facts at this point?

• The NSA engaged in surveillance of some individuals who were in the United States at the time of the surveillance.
• Someone leaked the existence of this program to the press.
• This surveillance was conducted without obtaining warrants from the FISA court.
• Under some circumstances, warrants are not required by the FISA statute.

That’s about it. We do not know who was surveilled. We do not know the means of surveillance. Most of the commentary about this issue, from the press, from members of Congress, from pundits, etc., has been an uninformed mix of speculation, hysterics, and partisan posturing.

For some good non-partisan, non-hysterical analysis, start with Orin Kerr’s lengthy analysis at The Volokh Conspiracy, and this balanced commentary from the Indepundit.

From the Washington Post:

BEIRUT, Lebanon — A Lebanese man serving a life sentence in Germany for the 1985 hijacking of a TWA jetliner and killing of a U.S. Navy diver has returned to Lebanon after being paroled in Germany, security and guerrilla officials said Tuesday.

Mohammed Ali Hamadi arrived in Beirut four days ago on a commercial flight from Germany, a Lebanese security official and a Hezbollah guerrilla group said on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media.

….

TWA flight 847 from Athens, Greece, to Rome was hijacked in June 1985 to Beirut, where the hijackers beat and shot U.S. Navy diver Robert Dean Stethem, 23, of Waldorf, Md., and dumped his body on the tarmac.

American liberals are always telling us how we must align our values and laws with those of the “international community”, or explaining how “they would never do things that way in Europe”, or telling us we have to pass “the global test” when making policy in the United States.

We’ve heard a lot of this sort of thing in regards to the war on terrorism, our intervention in Iraq, and in another realm, we heard a lot about European outrage against the execution of Stanley “Tookie” Williams for murdering four people in cold blood.

Well here’s another example of European law and values in action. Are these the sort of values liberals in America would like us to emulate? A convicted terrorist – the highjacker of a commercial aircraft, the taker of 39 American hostages for 17 days, the murderer of a U.S. Navy diver – is set free and given safe passage to Lebanon by the German government.

So we have a choice. Do we want to emulate Europe, or do we want to maintain American values? Do we wish to execute murderers, or do we want to give them a free flight home to rejoin the jihad? To us, the choice is clear. Europeans do not represent the gold standard of morality or law.

We just wonder if he flew first class or coach. And how was a known terrorist allowed through airport screening? Did they check his carry-on bag for nail clippers and so forth? So many questions.

The NY Times also has an account.

Related: Michelle Malkin links a couple of reports from the Tookie Williams funeral and herb festival, and asks “How do you say ‘weasel’ in German?

This seems to be a pretty important assertion from Colin Powell. In an interview by the BBC, Powell says that any doubts the U.S. intel community had about Iraq’s WMD programs were not shared with the Bush administration before the invasion of Iraq in March 2003.

Via Captain’s Quarters (via Mark in Mexico):

THE US administration was never told of doubts about the secret intelligence used to justify war with Iraq, former secretary of state Colin Powell told the BBC in an interview to be broadcast on Sunday night.

Mr Powell, who argued the case for military action against Saddam Hussein in the UN in 2003, told BBC News 24 television he was “deeply disappointed in what the intelligence community had presented to me and to the rest of us.”

“What really upset me more than anything else was that there were people in the intelligence community that had doubts about some of this sourcing, but those doubts never surfaced to us,” he said.

We continue to believe the invasion of Iraq was justified based on the entire body of evidence that was known at the time the decision to invade was made. But this assertion by Powell throws another wrench in the “Bush lied” anti-war spin machine.

The president issued a strong defense of the Patriot Act, condemnation of the Democrats’ filibuster of that Act, and of his authoraization of NSA surveillance of today in his weekly radio address.

On the Patriot Act:

One of the first actions we took to protect America after our nation was attacked was to ask Congress to pass the Patriot Act. The Patriot Act tore down the legal and bureaucratic wall that kept law enforcement and intelligence authorities from sharing vital information about terrorist threats. And the Patriot Act allowed federal investigators to pursue terrorists with tools they already used against other criminals. Congress passed this law with a large, bipartisan majority, including a vote of 98-1 in the United States Senate.

Since then, America’s law enforcement personnel have used this critical law to prosecute terrorist operatives and supporters, and to break up terrorist cells in New York, Oregon, Virginia, California, Texas and Ohio. The Patriot Act has accomplished exactly what it was designed to do: it has protected American liberty and saved American lives.

Yet key provisions of this law are set to expire in two weeks. The terrorist threat to our country will not expire in two weeks. The terrorists want to attack America again, and inflict even greater damage than they did on September the 11th. Congress has a responsibility to ensure that law enforcement and intelligence officials have the tools they need to protect the American people.

The House of Representatives passed reauthorization of the Patriot Act. Yet a minority of senators filibustered to block the renewal of the Patriot Act when it came up for a vote yesterday. That decision is irresponsible, and it endangers the lives of our citizens. The senators who are filibustering must stop their delaying tactics, and the Senate must vote to reauthorize the Patriot Act. In the war on terror, we cannot afford to be without this law for a single moment.

And on the NSA:

In the weeks following the terrorist attacks on our nation, I authorized the National Security Agency, consistent with U.S. law and the Constitution, to intercept the international communications of people with known links to al Qaeda and related terrorist organizations. Before we intercept these communications, the government must have information that establishes a clear link to these terrorist networks.

This is a highly classified program that is crucial to our national security. Its purpose is to detect and prevent terrorist attacks against the United States, our friends and allies. Yesterday the existence of this secret program was revealed in media reports, after being improperly provided to news organizations. As a result, our enemies have learned information they should not have, and the unauthorized disclosure of this effort damages our national security and puts our citizens at risk. Revealing classified information is illegal, alerts our enemies, and endangers our country.

A strong message, read the whole thing.

Here is the WaPo account.

Speaking out on the NY Times leak of classified national security information, Senator Specter called for an investigation. Via Yahoo News:

“There is no doubt that this is inappropriate,” declared Republican Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania…”

Unfortunately, the senator wasn’t referring to the actions of the NY Times, but those alleged of the NSA.

After pronouncing guilt, Specter called for an investigation:

“I want to know precisely what they did,” said Specter. “How NSA utilized their technical equipment, whose conversations they overheard, how many conversations they overheard, what they did with the material, what purported justification there was.”

If he doesn’t know the answers to those questions, then the obvious question is on what basis does the senator pronounce the NSA actions, if they occurred, to be “obviously inappropriate”?

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NY Times again leaks national security secrets

Where are all the liberals who are outraged by Robert Novak mentioning Valerie Plame’s name, as once again the NY Times leaks top secret information in disregard of U.S. national security interests?

Michelle Malkin has a great roundup of reaction to this exposé of yet another attempt by the Bush Administration to protect Americans from terrorist attacks in flagrant disregard for the sensibilities of the ACLU and like-minded Democrats.

The real headline news is not that President Bush took extraordinary measures to protect Americans in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, but that the blabbermouths at the Times chose to disclose classified information in a pathetically obvious bid to move the Iraqi elections off the front pages. And to help sabotage the Patriot Act reauthorization, which went down in the Senate this afternoon.

Exactly.

Here’s The Washington Post’s take

The Senate Democrats have successfully, at least for now, blocked reauthorization of the Patriot Act by filibuster. What they’re doing, quite simply, is playing politics with our national security.

The ABC News website reports the story beginning with this headline:

Senate Rejects Reauthorization of USA Patriot Act; White House, Frist Oppose Temporary Extension

CNN begins their report:

The Senate on Friday rejected efforts to renew expiring provisions of the Patriot Act, dealing a major blow to President Bush and the Republican leadership.

The Washington Post says:

Senate Deals Setback to Bush on Patriot Act

The Los Angeles Time front page summarizes:

Proposal to reauthorize major portions of the provision enacted after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks is defeated in a 52-47 vote.

But the Senate actually voted 52-47 in favor of ending debate and holding a final vote for reauthorization. The stories do make clear that the failure to pass the legislation is the result of a filibuster, but these headlines andsummaries suggest a majority voted to reject the legislation outright.

More accurate headlines might read something like, “Senate Democratic minority blocks vote on Patriot Act”.