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btaining intelligence from jihadist operatives is not about getting revenge for 9/11, it’s about wanting to protect the next one.  But still, when you listen to this tape, you may well find that the desire for revenge is just as high as the desire to keep the jihadists from our door.

A horror beyond the ability of mere words to capture, isn’t it?  Those the Rahmbamites would prosecute for trying to stop the next attack were all well aware that avoiding this sort of abomination was at the heart of their mission.  That their methods were so comparatively mild is a testament to the honor and goodness of America.

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ob Woodward is on the anti-torture express, writing today about the case of Mohammed al-Qahtani, who, we are reminded way down in paragraph six, hoped to be the 20th highjacker, but his dreams of martyrdom were foiled when he was denied entry into the U.S. a month before the 9/11 attack.  He was later captured trying again to kill Americans, this time in Afghanistan.

As such, the Saudi national may have had important information about how the 9/11 plot was put together, who was involved, how the logistics were handled, and how financial payments were received. In other words, the information he was holding needed very much to become un-held.

To get that information, agents used nothing but legal methods: sustained isolation, sleep deprivation, nudity and prolonged exposure to cold. But, Woodward reports, Susan J. Crawford, the convening authority of military commissions, has found Qahtani’s treatment meets the legal definition of torture.

Her problem is not the methods, but the duration of the methods:

Crawford, 61, said the combination of the interrogation techniques, their duration and the impact on Qahtani’s health led to her conclusion. “The techniques they used were all authorized, but the manner in which they applied them was overly aggressive and too persistent. …

“For 160 days his only contact was with the interrogators,” said Crawford, who personally reviewed Qahtani’s interrogation records and other military documents. “Forty-eight of 54 consecutive days of 18-to-20-hour interrogations. Standing naked in front of a female agent. Subject to strip searches. And insults to his mother and sister.”

At one point he was threatened with a military working dog named Zeus, according to a military report. Qahtani “was forced to wear a woman’s bra and had a thong placed on his head during the course of his interrogation” and “was told that his mother and sister were whores.” With a leash tied to his chains, he was led around the room “and forced to perform a series of dog tricks,” the report shows.

That’s it? That’s humiliation, and it might constitute torture for a pimply, chubby seventh grader, but not for the likes of Qahtani.  As for Crawford’s biggest grouse, that this led to physical danger for the man who wanted to cause thousands of Americans to suffer mortal physical danger, there’s this:

… Qahtani had to be hospitalized twice at Guantanamo with bradycardia, a condition in which the heart rate falls below 60 beats a minute and which in extreme cases can lead to heart failure and death. At one point Qahtani’s heart rate dropped to 35 beats per minute, the record shows.

In other words, his health was carefully monitored, and when his heart rate slowed, he was hospitalized and treated.  That sounds like a carefully managed, intense interrogation, not torture.

As they say in the world of dealing with bloodthirsty, damned, America-hating, 7th century Islamist pigs, bring it on.  This is a case that should never have been brought but now it should be heard because our agents have to have clear direction – and, hopefully, courts will be wiser than Crawford and will allow the methods used on Qahtani.

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This morning, I posted this quote from Obama:

“This isn’t 9/11. We know how we got into this mess. What we need now is leadership that gets us out. I’ll provide it. John McCain won’t.”

My focus was on his recommendations for dealing with the economic crisis.  Wrong focus. What should have jumped out was:

“This isn’t 9/11.  We know how we got into this mess.”

Of all the windows Obama has given us into the darkness of his soul and the radicalism of his politics, this is the floor-to-ceiling, wall-to-wall one.  Here is a nominee campaigning hard to be the leader of the free world telling us we don’t know how we got into the mess of 9/11.

Where should I throw up first?  Let’s start with the worst:  We know how we got into the financial melt-down mess, but we don’t know how we got into the 9/11 mess. Obama may not be sure what exactly it was we did – troops in Saudi Arabia, support of Israel, not kneeling and bowing toward Mecca a few times a day – but it was something we did that drove al-Qaeda to fly our airliners into our buldings.

Obama has done a good job of playing the centrist Democrat and not parroting the words of the radicals who pin the blame for 9/11 on us, but in this statement he is showing he’s a comrade in arms with the Bill Ayres set.

Next, the don’t know phrase.  Is Obama ignoring the 9/11 Commission findings?  Is he cozying up with the 9/11 Truthers Wackos?  Most of us know exactly what happened:  Radical Islamists attacked us as an act of war, an act of jihad.

And finally, all 9/11 is in Obama’s eyes is a mess.  You don’t justify wars over messes.  You don’t launch a long-term engagement with the Islamist enemy over a mess.  You don’t support democracy as an alternative to Islamism in order to avoid future messes.  I have never heard a serious elected official state so profound a minimization of what occured on 9/11 since today.  I thought it was bad enough to call it a “tragedy” instead of an “attack,” but “mess” is an insult of an entirely different, and more obscene, level.

This is why Obama is glued to his teleprompter.  When he talks for himself, he says things like “This isn’t 9/11.  We know how we got into this mess,” and let us see that inside that empty suit is the screaming heart of an anti-American radical.

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ne of my good friends is an entirely reasonable man except that he’s a 9/11 Truther Nutcase. It seems oxymoronic, but it’s true – there’s no other wackiness about him at all. And one of his favorite arguments revolves around the failure thus far to come up with a reasonable explanation of why building #7 at the WTC complex fell.

It didn’t just fall, it fell perfectly, like the towers did, the upper floors collapsing in a mimicking of scenes of the destruction of Vegas hotels by planned demolition. My friend is therefore convinced it was all part of the big conspiracy – especially since the CIA’s New York offices were in #7.

(Why exactly the CIA would want to destroy its offices if it was behind the conspiracy is a bit nutty to me, but what do I know about how the minds of people who would knowingly kill thousands of their fellow citizens work?)

So now there’s a solution being proffered. I would load the BBC video if I could, but that part of WordPress still mystifies me, so here’s the link.

The cause, the clip says, is fire. The building couldn’t have fallen by controlled demolition because skyscraper design, unlike midrise tower design, precludes it.

I find this plausible because the Truthers Nutcases fail to understand the difference between the melting temperature of steel, which they claim can’t be reached with burning jet fuel, and the temperature at which it loses its tensile strength, which is much lower and can be.

Of course, #7 wasn’t hit by an airliner, so there was no jet fuel. But the BBC clip points out that there were subway systems and electrical substations beneath the building, and that an intense fire was raging there as part of the entire 9/11 catastrophe.

Will it convince my friend and his fellow travelers? I doubt it. You can stack facts up against conspiracies forever, and they still endure.

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2,459 days after his plan was executed, killing 2,792 innocents,Khalid Sheikh Mohammed sits in a courtroom, a major milestone in his descent to Hell.

GUANTANAMO BAY NAVAL BASE, Cuba (AP) – The accused mastermind of the Sept. 11 terror attacks is facing a military judge in his long-awaited first public appearance before a war-crimes tribunal.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four alleged co-conspirators have taken their seats at defense tables before Judge Ralph Kohlmann, a Marine colonel.

Their arraignment Thursday is the highest-profile test yet of the controversial tribunal system, which is being challenged in court. It comes seven years after the attacks. All five face the death penalty if convicted.

How very odd, and how very American, that Mohammed (familiar name; isn’t that some prophet or something?) awaits his fate amidst the dry, orderly environs of a military courtroom.

How very different from those he judged misjudged, who he sentenced to painful, noisy, smelly, terrifying deaths, without ever once looking any one of them in the eye.

And how amazing that there are American lawyers who hate the country that nurtured them and gave them freedom so much that they are standing beside this pillar of Islamism, attacking America to defend him.

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Benjamin Baines, Jr. is in a world of trouble, since the hollowed out book he uses to stash his drugs went through a TSA X-ray machine at Tampa International and, lo and behold, a box-cutter was stashed inside.

“I’m moving to Las Vegas and I forgot the box-cutter was in the book,” Baines told authorities, according to the Tampa Tribune’s Web site, TBO.

That’s about as reasonable an excuse as the guy who said, “Sorry, I thought it was my nose” when he was caught picking someone else’s nose. Baines was at an airport; that might have sent a reminder. On his way to X-ray, he would have passed numerous signs saying what was prohibited, including, of all things, box-cutters. He would have seen the X-ray machine and the TSA agents screening.

Bells? Any bells going off? He would like us to believe that no, he just plain forgot that he was trying to pull off a Mohammed Atta.

Am I jumping to conclusions? Well, his backpack contained a few books that didn’t have pages cut out, including one called The Noble Qur’an (“The English translation of the meanings and commentary”) and another called The Prophet’s Prayer. Amazon doesn’t have the latter yet, but you can view it here: It’s a detailed tutorial on every aspect of Muslim praying, including:

STANDING IN PRAYER

The Prayer of a Sick Person in a Sitting Position
Prayer on a Ship
Sitting and Standing in the Night Prayer (Tahajjud)
Prayer Wearing Shoes and the Command to do so
Prayer on the Pulpit (Minbar)
The Sutrah, and the Obligation to have one
What Breaks the Prayer
Prohibition of Prayer Facing the Grave

It goes on and on, including quiet prayers, Friday prayers and how to assume the position (sujood); it is not the sort of book someone who isn’t serious about Islam would read.

As near as I can tell, there isn’t a “Praying on Planes” chapter, though — with a good defense attorney, that must might get Baines off.

He faces up to ten years in prison on the federal offense of trying to smuggle a weapon onto an aircraft. Great. While he’s there, Saudi-funded Wahhabi radicals will push him further and further over the edge …

… unless he starts reading that other book that was in his backpack. You might have heard of it. It’s called The Bible.

hat-tip: Hugh Hewitt

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Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his band of brothers buggers plotted the deaths of 2,973 Americans, none of whom were engaged in any kind of warfare with Mohammed’s country or religion. He has, to our knowledge, never expressed one word of regret, other than a regret that he didn’t kill more of us.

The Soros-funded Human Rights Watch, whose agenda is in significant part to embarrass America, will not rest until it has tried every trick to shift the focus from the ruthless Islamist terrorists to the American process for dealing with these dangerous, unrepentant men.

We will not be fooled, Daskal! Try as you will, you’ll not convince us that Mohammed and his co-conspirators deserve anything more than prisoners of war deserve. They don’t even deserve that, as they fight for no nation and wear no uniform.

Our system is not on trial, except by those who want to destroy our system, those who take their money and their cues from Soros, the world’s premier America-hater and noted contributor to the Democratic party.

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A dilemma for Leftists and Truthers 9/11 whack-jobs is shaping up as, six and a half years after the crime, the U.S. is about to charge six al-Qaeda terrorists with the capital crime of planning the 9/11 attacks.

In addition to Khalid Sheik Mohammed, those to be charged, according to the NYT, are:

The official identified the others to be charged as Mohammed al-Qahtani, the man officials have labeled the 20th hijacker; Ramzi bin al-Shibh, said to have been the main intermediary between the hijackers and leaders of Al Qaeda; Ali Abd al-Aziz Ali, known as Ammar al-Baluchi, a nephew of Mr. Mohammed, who has been identified as Mr. Mohammed’s lieutenant for the 2001 operation; Mr. al-Baluchi’s assistant, Mustafa Ahmed al-Hawsawi; and Walid bin Attash, a detainee known as Khallad, who investigators say selected and trained some of the hijackers.

Many Leftists will feel compelled to defend the six. For the hardcore, they are revolutionaries who attacked America, Bush and Wall Street. If the rhetoric is going to reach the road, they have no choice but to support. I hope this crowed is loud and highly visible.

More run-of-the-mill Lefties, marinated in anti-military beliefs, will defend the six because they were held in Guantanamo, away from due process, and will claim that evidence from their interrogation sessions must be rejected as coerced. While not as offensive as the first set, this group’s protests will alienate most level-headed Americans who know intuitively that the six would have been dead long ago, were it not for the fact that it was America that captured them.

The anti-death sentence folks will be out in force, of course, as evidenced by the NYT, which didn’t even wait for an editorial to editorialize:

Relatives of the Sept. 11 victims have expressed differing views of potential death sentences, with some arguing that it would accomplish little other than martyring men for whom martyrdom may be viewed as a reward.

Those relatives, if they exist at all, were not named in the article, which then went on to add:

Some countries have been critical of the United States’ use of the death penalty in civilian cases, and a request for execution in the military commission system would import much of that criticism to the already heated debates about the legitimacy of Guantánamo and the Bush administration’s legal approach there, some lawyers said.

The countries supposedly holding the view went unnamed as well. The lawyers were not identified.

Finally, the Truthers Imbeciles. It will be really something to see them mount an “It ain’t them!” defense as the government rolls out its evidence against the six. Rosie, prepare to become even more obnoxious.

My view: The six are lucky to be alive. How nice it would be to be able to go back in time a bit and mount them in stocks on the sidewalks alongside the World Trade Center site, but we are no longer that country, thank God. We will see that evidence is presented against them, that their lawyers will be heard.

A military tribunal will decide their earth-bound fate. If indeed they are guilty, a higher power will consider their eternal fate.

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There were certainly more than four stories this year to qualify for “most ridiculous story of the year,” but given that I didn’t start chronicling them until April 25, and that I still have to actually work for a living, rather than read all I’d like to read, four it is.

The criteria for selection aren’t easy to meet: Entries must be work that serious writers present in all seriousness that goes far, far beyond the sublime and settle heavily into the imbecilic.

Ladies and Gentlemen, the nominees, in order of their original appearance in C-SM:

First, Naomi Wolf’s “Fascist America in 10 easy steps.” Wolf is, of course, the author of much ridiculousness, much of it ending up in The Guardian, which is a repository of such stuff. But in this piece, Wolf lets lose all her paranoid delusions, not stopping at merely comparing Bush to Hitler, but:

From Hitler to Pinochet and beyond, history shows there are certain steps that any would-be dictator must take to destroy constitutional freedoms. And … George Bush and his administration seem to be taking them all.

She then lists the ten steps Bush is supposedly following to turn America into a dictatorship, stuff like “Create a Gulag,” “Invoke a terrifying internal and external enemy,” and “Develop a thug caste,” in this case, “angry Republican men.”

Never mind that mobs angry Republican men have not rounded up scores of Muslims (the internal/external threat) and sent them to Guantanamo (the Gulag), Wolf is, very ridiculously, convinced her home country — which lets her write and publish this filth — is becoming a police state.

Second, Steven Simon and Ray Takeyh in their WaPo column “We’ve Lost. Here’s How To Handle It.” Cuing off the June mosque bombings in Samarra and Basra, Simon and Takeyh decide:

The war in Iraq is lost. The only question that remains — for our gallant troops and our blinkered policymakers — is how to manage the inevitable. What the United States needs now is a guide to how to lose — how to start thinking about minimizing the damage done to American interests, saving lives and ultimately wresting some good from this fiasco.

The authors miss the obvious point: No one loses a war unless someone has won it — and not realizing that makes everything that follows, in a word, ridiculous.

It’s easy to read this in light of what’s happened following the Surge, which proved the authors false again and again, as in this case:

U.S. troops can’t beat the insurgency on their own; our forces are too few and too isolated to compete with the insurgents for the public’s support.

It is obvious that al-Qaeda has lost the public’s support and we helped that happen not by the sheer number of our troops, but by their sheer decency and al-Qaeda’s sheer savagery.

But that’s the easy critique, and hardly the most damning. That goes to Simon and Takeyh’s dismissal of speculation that bloodshed would follow our retreat as “unknowable … In fact, history suggests that the consequences of a U.S. defeat will not be that dire.”

Unknowable? Not dire? Can you say Vietnam? Cambodia?

The two have a solution, though, that they say will make retreat very do-able and positive: Contain Iran; tamp down the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and return to realism.

Oh, yeah. We’ll use all our great new credibility, gained by letting al-Qaeda defeat us, to do just that.

Third, This is Your Brain on Politics, by Sharon Begley, an opinion writer for Newsweek, a book by Drew Westen of Emory University, “The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation.”

The book itself is a disagreeable thing with a central thesis I generally agree with: Emotion trumps rationality in opinion formation. But Begley earned her nomination for using Westen’s book as nothing more than a platform for her blind as a bat, emotionally over-amped Democratic bias.

She dismisses GOP policy and its appeal to large blocks of American voters:

After reading [the book] you won’t be surprised that Westen has been approached by the campaigns of “several” Democratic hopefuls (he is too discrete to say which) for advice on how to make use of findings about how the brain operates in the political arena. Why aren’t Republicans beating a path to his door? Because the GOP has already mastered the dark art of psych-ops—of pushing the right buttons in people’s brains to win their vote. (emphasis added)

Have you ever heard a GOP candidate say the Dems would kill Social Security if they were elected? And don’t even get me started on playing the race card. Button-pushing is not a single party deal, but Begley is blinded to reality.

No, she sees Dem mind as a high-minded thing, “dispassionate, making decisions by rationally weighing evidence and balancing pros and cons.”

Ridiculous.

Our fourth entry is Is Cheney About to Blow Up the Bay Bridge? from Gypsy Taub at the blog Politics of the Heart. I considered not entering this post in the contest because 9/11 Truthers Paranoid Schizophrenics are so overwhelmingly ridiculous it gives Taub an unfair head start.

But then I thought about die-hard Socialists, cut-and-run Dems and blind pundits like Begley, and I thought, “What the heck? Taub’s got no head start with this bunch.”

Taub apparently missed the fact that the Bay Bridge was damaged in the Loma Prieta earthquake, so a new bridge had to be built. (That earthquake occurred in 1989, a bit before (take your pick) Bush/terrorists destroyed the World Trade Center.) As part of this process — and of construction not going as planned — the Bay Bridge was closed for four days in August.

I’m too harsh. Taub is aware of the earthquake … it’s just the conclusions he draws from it in his muddled mind:

Don’t quote me on this, but I have also heard that the old Bay Bridge is not earthquake stable, so if that is true [it is, my gypsy friend], then it sounds like the World Trade Center that needed to go because of all the asbestos that it was filled with.

Anyway, the bridge’s temporary closing was enough to set off a Truther’s Numskull’s paranoid fantasies:

Bush’s term is coming to an end. The public is pushing to ban voting machines. The power of the Bush administration is deteriorating with major figures resigning, almost daily scandals on the news and constant threat of impeachment. Their only weapon is fear, it’s their last hope. I can see them really desperately needing a terrorist attack in the near future. 911 [I thought that was an emergency number] did them a great deal of good. 911 was, of course, the work of the Bush administration, the Pentagon, and others connected tightly to the Bush administration.

This is a bit muddled. If Bush wants to stay in power, what do voting machines have to do with it? If he doesn’t want to stay in power, why does he need to (it’s hard to even type this) concoct another 9/11? Well, let’s not let rational thought get in the way of the ridiculous:

Getting back to the Bay Bridge, it being shut down for 4 entire days sounds suspicious. They are also demolishing a section of the bridge, so that gives them a green light to bring in a demolition crew. According to their official website they are doing seismic safety work which can, as far as I understand, involve drilling holes in the structure to test it for safety. Also, the new bridge being close to finished would be a convenient time to blow up the old one [sic].

Got it. Close the bridge for four days so as not to raise suspicion, then put your Black Ops crews out in full sight of all to drill the holes. Oh, those tricky bastards! Taug goes on to accuse the Bush administration of crashing a fuel tanker so the 880 freeway in Oakland would collapse:

As soon as 880 collapsed the mainstream media [those famous Bush allies] started screaming about steel melting from fossil fuel fires and comparing it to 911. I knew they were going to say that. That seemed to be the whole purpose of this incident, to “prove” that the WTC really did collapse from the jet fuel fire.

Purpose? There are no accidents? And the Minnesota bridge collapse? A training exercise for the upcoming Oakland explosion, of course! Then, suddenly, a near brush with reality:

Having said all this I would like to hope that I am wrong, that it is indeed a legitimate bridge repair work. But if the bridge does get blown up in the near future don’t buy the “terrorist” story! Investigate, document, take pictures, samples of soil, water, anything and don’t let them institute marshal [sic] law or sign Patriot Act 3!

It didn’t blow up; there were no charges of a new terror attack. And there’s no “marshal” law … yet.

So, which story is the most ridiculous?

Wolf, and her countdown to Bush’s dictatorship?

Simon and Takeyh with their primer for a win/win defeat in Iraq?

Begley with her insights into the GOP and Dem mind?

Or Gypsy Taub, with his deep, deep insanity over police emergency numbers … oh, I’m sorry, not 911, but 9/11.

I have to reject Taub because his rants are more bizarre than ridiculous and are too narrowly focused on the guilt of the Bush administration. He says nothing that is broadly applicable.

Simon and Takeyh get a pass because history has so quickly proved so much of what they wrote to be wrong. Yes, history has made them appear even more ridiculous, but it has also made it easier to gauge their ridiculousness.

Between Begley’s blindness to her own prejudice, which is such a lovely metaphor for the greater MSM’s blindness, and Wolf’s senseless but vivid paranoia about Bush, it’s a tough choice.

But Wolf gets the honors because she took the care to identify ten separate steps, a primer for despots, and figure out how to connect each to Bush. In the process, she managed to ignore the fact that the American democracy remains balanced and protected by its three branches and its no-nonsense public, and that a campaign for the next American president is in the works.

But mostly, Wolf won because she didn’t share Begley’s blindness to her prejudices … she lays hers right out there, for all to see, and she glories in just how bright and insightful she is — failing to see just how ridiculous she and her views are.

Congratulations, Naomi. Keep up the ridiculous work.

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I will never refer those who think the US government is behind the attacks on our country on September 11, 2001 as “9/11 Truthers” because from a messaging point of view, the term yields the high ground to the disgusting whackos. So, I’m not happy to pass along this bit of news:

Nearly two-thirds of Americans believe the federal government had warnings about 9/11 but decided to ignore them, a national survey found. …

Sixty-two percent of those polled thought it was “very likely” or “somewhat likely” that federal officials turned a blind eye to specific warnings of the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon.

Only 30 percent said the 9/11 theory was “not likely,” according to the Scripps Howard/Ohio University poll. (NYPost)

Of course, the poll is useless because it phrased its questions to sensationalize rather than gain understanding. It certainly doesn’t show that 62% of Americans accept the insane, paranoid, anti-American rantings of the Truthers. Specifically:

• What percent of those answering yes believe a routine transmittal within the intelligence agencies may have been lost in the paperwork?

• What percentage of those answering yes believe a source that wasn’t credible provided information that was ignored for seemingly good reason?
• What percentage of those answering yes are aware of the many, many threats against America made by bin Laden and others; threats that seemed like huff and puff at the time, but turned out to be significant?

Unless polls ask follow-up questions like that to discern what percentage of people who answer “yes” to the question really think that senior U.S. officials knowingly allowed 3,000 people to die because it furthered their foreign policy and personal wealth objectives, and that the legions of operatives required to carry out the diabolical scheme have remained silent, we will not know what percentage of Americans have sadly fallen into the grip of the Truthers.

Designing polls right so they yield this level of understanding is not the exception; it’s the routine. But this poll was designed by the Scripps Howard newspaper chain, so sensationalism clearly was more important than objectivity.

Scripps Howard has not posted a link to the survey instrument itself, which used to be fairly routine, but now stands out as particularly guarded and lacking transparency. If we dig deep into the Scripps Howard coverage of the poll, we find down in paragraph nine that “16 percent of Americans speculate that secretly planted explosives, not burning passenger jets, were the real reason the massive twin towers of the World Trade Center collapsed.”

That’s a fairly good indicator of crazed conspiracy buy-in, but the one Truther I’m friends with believes explosives were planted, but doesn’t necessarily believe that the U.S. was the one planting them … so even a 16% whacko factor may well be nothing more than poor polling resulting in overstatement.

Still, the poll undeniably shows that a significant percentage of Americans believe in anti-government conspiracies. It shows, for example, a narrow majority believes the government is aware of the real truth of the Kennedy assassination and is keeping it secret, and about a third believe the government is keeping knowledge of UFOs and aliens secret.

These likely Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich voters can never answer the question “Why?” Why would no one ever break the silence — especially on Kennedy or Roswell after all these years? Why did Bush want war in Iraq when he didn’t campaign on it?

And most important of all, why would people who have dedicated their lives to serving the most freedom-loving, most transparent government on the planet suddenly stop loving freedom and create elaborate cover-ups of crimes against the country they serve?

Don’t count on Scripps Howard to provide any answers.

hat-tip: memeorandum

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