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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lane3 who wrote (28857)	2/10/2004 7:08:25 PM
From: LindyBill	Respond to of 794001

"Wonkette" Clark Out? According to the Daily Kos, a Clark fundraiser in Houston planned for tomorrow night has been canceled. The Clark website has no events beyond tonight's "Primary Party." That should be fun -- Clark's sophisticated emotion-simulation programming may fail him. Do androids cry electric tears? UPDATE: A reader prompts a thought: We've already grieved for Wes Jr., but this is also our last day to to make a joke about how slutty blondes seem to dig Wes Sr. (and how this campaign tanked even harder than Swept Away. Thanks, Madonna). And when's the next time we'll have a chance to question Michael Moore's taste in candidates? OK, that should happen again pretty soon. But still. And what about young Max, the lisping pre-teen who captured our hearts in January with his precocious dissection of the Bush agenda? What's his future? (Max, have your people call my people. We'll get you opposite Trippi tomorrow night.) It was beautiful while it lasted. Goodbye, Clark campaign, may your creepy robotic gaze never falter.

To: Lane3 who wrote (28857)	2/10/2004 7:49:24 PM
From: Ilaine	Respond to of 794001

I wouldn't vote in primaries in the past, but the Democrats voted in the last Republican gubernatorial primary, so I think it's fair to return the favor. It looks like the photo of Kerry on Drudge Report right now was taken in front of Ben and Nick's high school. Glad I didn't go, I really need to touch up my roots and I would have been mortified at the fear of being seen on the news. That may seem silly, but it's the truth.

To: Lane3 who wrote (28857)	2/11/2004 3:28:35 AM
From: LindyBill	Respond to of 794001

Found: A Smoking Gun By WILLIAM SAFIRE In the town of Kalar, about a hundred miles northeast of Baghdad, Kurdish villagers recently reported suspicious activity to the pesh merga. That Kurdish militia has for years been waging a bloody battle with Ansar al-Islam, the terrorist group affiliated with Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and supported by Saddam Hussein in Iraq. It captured a courier carrying a message that demolishes the repeated claim of Bush critics that there was never a "clear link" between Saddam and Osama bin Laden. The terrorist courier with a CD-ROM containing a 17-page document and other messages was Hassan Ghul, who confessed he was taking to Al Qaeda the Ansar document setting forth a strategy to start an Iraqi civil war, along with a plea for reinforcements. The Kurds turned him over to Americans for further interrogation, which is proving fruitful. The Times reporter Dexter Filkins in Baghdad, backed up by Douglas Jehl in D.C., broke the story exclusively. Editors marked its significance by placing it on the front page above the fold. Although The Washington Post the next day buried it on Page 17 (and Newsweek may construe as bogus any Saddam-Osama connection) the messages' authenticity was best attested by the amazed U.S. official who told Reuters, "We couldn't make this up if we tried." The author of the lengthy Ansar-to-Qaeda electronic message is suspected of being the most wanted terror operative in the world today: Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, long familiar to readers of this space as "the man with the limp," who personifies the link of Ansar and Al Qaeda. On Sept. 24, 2001 — not two weeks after 9/11 — Kurdish sources led me to report: "The clear link between the terrorist in hiding [Osama] and the terrorist in power [Saddam] can be found in Kurdistan. . . . The Iraqi dictator has armed and financed a fifth column of Al Qaeda mullahs and terrorists. . . . Some 400 `Arab Afghan' mercenaries . . . have already murdered a high Kurdish official as well as a Muslim scholar who dared to interpret the Koran humanely." The C.I.A. blew off that report. Our National Security Council did not learn of subsequent warfare against the Kurds by the Qaeda affiliate doing Saddam's bidding until its members read it in The Times. After Jeffrey Goldberg of the New Yorker and C. J. Chivers of The Times developed the story from inside northern Iraq, it dawned on some intelligence analysts that a "clear link" was probable. On Oct. 7, 2002, President Bush said "We know that Iraq and Al Qaeda have had high-level contacts that go back a decade. Some Al Qaeda leaders who fled Afghanistan went to Iraq. These include one very senior Al Qaeda leader who received medical treatment in Baghdad this year." The leader whose leg was treated, perhaps amputated, in Baghdad was identified here in January 2003, as Zarqawi (twice, after one misspelling). The presence of this international terrorist for two months in a Baghdad hospital required the approval of Saddam's ubiquitous secret police. In his U.N. speech the following month, Colin Powell publicly identified the Palestinian, born in Jordan, as one who oversaw a terrorist training camp in Afghanistan three years before: "Iraq today harbors a deadly terrorist network headed by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, an associate and collaborator of Osama bin Laden." Now we have documentary evidence of Ansar's current operation: employing suicide bombers to foment a civil war in Iraq that would reinstate safe haven for terrorists. The notion that these serial killers are not central players in the global network that attacked us — that the Ansar boss in Iraq must be found carrying an official Qaeda membership card signed by bin Laden — is simply silly. Of the liberation's three casus belli, one was to stop mass murder, bloodier than in Kosovo; we are finding horrific mass graves in Iraq. Another was informed suspicion that a clear link existed between world terror and Saddam; this terrorist plea for Qaeda reinforcements to kill Iraqi democracy is the smoking gun proving that. The third was a reasoned judgment that Saddam had a bioweapon that could wipe out a city; in time, we are likely to find a buried suitcase containing that, too. Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company