Measles has killed one child in Britain this year and infected 450, making headlines. In poor countries, it kills more than 1000 children a day. Although there is a cheap vaccine, scare stories from the west are building up aversion to this life-saving MMR (measles, mumps and rubella) injection, just as scare stories led to millions of avoidable deaths from malaria. That one death in the UK was exceptional and measles is just an inconvenience for most westerners — some parents even make sure their children get infected, to immunise them. The danger, however, comes from widespread and spreading fears about an alleged link between the MMR vaccine and childhood autism. Proof that the scare was based on highly dubious science appeared long ago, in dozens of studies, but the fear lives on, based on 12 cases in the UK in a 1998 paper by Dr Andrew Wakefield that established no chain of cause and effect. Activists are keen to export this fear, encouraged by the worldwide campaign against DDT that consigned tens of millions to easily and cheaply avoidable death from malaria: DDT never had any effect on humans (in fact you could safely eat it by the spoonful). Again, it was not much of a problem in the west because we had already eradicated malaria, using DDT, by the 1960s. But a million people a year still die of malaria in poor countries. The fashionable campaign against genetically modified (GM) foods is another fad in the west that is fatal in the south: Zambia rejected food aid from the US in 2002, right in the middle of a famine, because it contained GM maize — the same maize Americans and Canadians had been eating for six years. Most poor countries ban GM crops, especially for food, saying it might conceivably be harmful, with no evidence. This is what activists call the “precautionary principle”: even if no harm has ever been demonstrated, assume that it is harmful if you cannot prove that it cannot harm you in any way. This principle is enshrined in much new United Nations and European Community law. The “precautionary” effect on MMR could be sudden and dramatic. Just a small decline in vaccinations has disproportionate effects: in the UK, between 1993 and 2003, vaccination fell from 92% of children to 82% while the number of measles cases increased six-fold. Conversely, when the vaccine is used widely, the effect is also dramatic. In the Americas, the number of reported measles cases has declined by over 99% since 1990. The western Pacific region has seen a 95% drop in the incidence of the disease since MMR was introduced, and worldwide measles deaths fell from 871,000 in 1999 to 454000 five years later. Rubella, and the severe defects it can cause in newborn children, has been eliminated in many countries and the threat to health posed by mumps and meningitis has greatly diminished. For lucky westerners, measles is not much of a problem but in developing countries poor nutrition and weak health care combine to make it a killer. In a world where international travel has become commonplace, an increase in measles in the west heightens the risk of deadly epidemics in poor countries. So far, international health agencies have remained steadfast in their backing for MMR. But a UK survey showed that misleading coverage of the MMR scare meant only one in four people was aware that most studies showed no link between the vaccine and autism. Negative stories tend to stick and our increasingly networked world means they also tend to spread. The internet effect may be working already. In SA, two patients who had separate, single-vaccine measles, mumps and rubella jabs instead of MMR have caught measles this year. Peruvian daily El Comercio reported an increase in calls to a ministry of health’s phone line from parents worried about the link between vaccines and autism. They are a long way from Britain, Germany and the US where the scare was incubated. Only consistent advocacy can work against the spread of fear and myth. At the height of the vaccine scare, UK Prime Minister Tony Blair added fuel to the controversy by refusing to reveal whether his baby son had received it. Such equivocal leadership only adds to public confusion, even in other countries. As the DDT and GM experiences show, leaders facing pressure from activists or the media are quick to invoke the “precautionary principle” in banning a technology, even when scientific evidence of a threat is weak or completely absent. In the developed world, such over-caution is merely an irritant to health and wealth. In developing countries its effects are murderous. Mark Weston is a policy consultant specialising in international development, including public health, HIV/AIDS, demography, education and corporate social responsibility. This article is was originally published in the The Business Day, South Africa.

Inter Arma Enim Silent Leges - Cicero

Believe it or not this was obtained from an episode of Star Trek Deep Space Nine.  It is relevant in the War on Terror that we are fighting.  With all the Court challenges and the Congress entering on the war making powers of the President this saying may be quite true.

Translation:  In Time Of War The Law Remains Silent.

Now another piece of information.  The word IPSEDIXITISM which means, an unsupported dogmatic assertion.  This is what you hear from liberals all the time.  Liberals and those like Al Gore, who come from the church of global warming, love this word.  They feel that something is true because they say it is true.  Dogmatic=Characterized by arrogant assertion of unproved or unprovable principles, if this dosen't sound like some of the things you hear liberals say I don't know what does.  Assertion=A declaration that is made as if no supporting evidence were necessary, fits liberals like a glove.  Now one last word SPURIOUS=Not genuine, false, lacking authenticity or validity [another liberal favorite.]

On the last day of the Supreme Court’s term, Tom Goldstein, the prominent D.C. appellate lawyer who served as second chair representing Al Gore in Bush v. Gore, participated in a panel hosted by the liberal American Constitution Society at the National Press Club. In the middle of the symposium, Goldstein received word concerning the result of one of the final cases of the term, and raised his hands as if to signal a touchdown. When the moderator asked whom the “touchdown” was for, Goldstein declared: “The Good Guys.” The case was Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, and the victorious party was Osama bin Laden’s purported personal driver and bodyguard, Salim Ahmed Hamdan. Goldstein was not alone: From legal academia, to Capitol Hill, to the mainstream media, to the blogosphere, liberals have expressed undue exuberance concerning the outcome of Hamdan, and thereby reaffirmed why many Americans are reluctant to trust liberals on questions of national security. Liberal legal scholars and practitioners were among the first to offer their thoughts on the Hamdan opinion. Walter Dellinger, the former acting solicitor general for the Clinton administration, exclaimed that “Hamdan is simply the most important decision on presidential power and the rule of law ever. Ever[,]” and concluded that “[t]his really is a wonderful day for the rule of law.” It is simply absurd to call Hamdan the most important decision on presidential power ever. This is not a partisan judgment; it is the simple legal sense of the matter. Much of Hamdan is little more than a questionable patchwork of statutory interpretation. That portion of Hamdan which addresses presidential power simply applies the principles announced in the Youngstown Sheet & Tube — the infamous steel-seizure case. The Youngstown case is widely regarded as the most important case on wartime presidential power, and it is difficult to see how anything but misplaced liberal glee arising from this administration’s loss could cause anyone to suggest that the modest application of Youngstown’s ideas makes Hamdan somehow more important than Youngstown itself. Not to be outdone, Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, responded to Hamdan in a more effusive fashion, stating that “[i]t doesn’t get any better.” The responses of Ratner, who filed an amicus brief in Hamdan, and Goldstein, who was one of the attorneys representing Hamdan in the Supreme Court, are partially explained by simply the excitement of winning. Even so, the statements lacked anything resembling prudence or good judgment. A lawyer representing Jeffrey Dahmer would have been ill-advised to issue a statement saying that the “good guys” won if he succeeded on a claim against the government, and a sophisticated lawyer representing Osama bin Laden’s bodyguard should be expected to have at least that much sense at the National Press Club. While liberal lawyers may have overstated the importance or the merit of the opinion, they at least seemed to have some idea about what legal issues were at stake. Not so the Democratic politicians, who have asserted that that the decision recognized constitutional rights for non-citizen detainees held at Guantanamo. Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said, “This is a triumph for the rule of law. The rights of due process are among our most cherished liberties, and today’s decision is a rebuke of the Bush Administration’s detainee policies and a reminder of our responsibility to protect both the American people and our Constitutional rights.” Dianne Feinstein appeared on This Week and defended Pelosi’s statement, compounding it by suggesting that the president and Congress should work together to draft legislation to create either “a special authorized commission, or . . . a military tribunal . . . that gives the detainees the rights that the Constitution provides.” But the Hamdan court did not find that the Constitution grants the detainees any rights, or that it prohibits the president, if (or, should I say, when) authorized by Congress, from using the very tribunals that he established to try the detainees. Pelosi and Feinstein’s statements may resemble the opinions of their liberal constituencies, but they do not resemble the Court’s opinion in Hamdan. The hyperbolic reaction of the Left seems particularly ill-advised given that the Hamdan opinion will have little lasting practical effect: Congress has already made clear that it intends to grant the president the authority to utilize some kind of military commission. Despite several prominent Democrats supporting some form of legislation, there is caustic liberal sentiment against granting the president any such option. One of the first comments on the Daily Kos after Hamdan was issued summed up this position: “Democratics [sic] in Congress need to be told in no uncertain terms that they shall not vote to allow these tribunals. We need to put the electoral gun to their heads and make sure they march in the right direction on this.” Of course, these orders would march the Democrats right out of Congress. Offering what may be an even more extreme sentiment, Richard Cohen in the Washington Post argues that rather than granting the president authority to use tribunals, Congress should question the war itself: “[w]hatever the case, a hitherto compliant Congress ought to pick up on the Supreme Court’s suggestion that it tell the president how detainees should be handled — and go even farther, taking a hard look at whether an unrestrained war on terrorism, like the war in Iraq, is an exaggerated reaction to an exaggerated threat.” And Professor Mark Graber, responding to the legislative momentum, laments the bloodthirsty plebeians that populate his country: “Those us who believe in the principles of Hamdan also need to recognize that a great many Americans are so scared, they are willing to slaughter numerous innocents if there is the possibility of getting a terrorist among the bunch, so that due process seems a luxury we can no longer afford.” Despite the fact that the public generally trusts Republicans more on national-security issues than Democrats, the latter have been given a golden opportunity to capitalize on growing public disapproval of the Iraq war. But at every turn, liberals overreach, overreact, and, quite frankly, give the American people reason to distrust their judgment. Hamdan is just the latest example. While liberals enjoyed a short-lived victory before the Supreme Court, their excessive celebration is likely to bring about additional losses at the polls, cast by Americans who don’t think that the good guys won. — Robert D. Alt, an NRO contributor, is a fellow in legal and international affairs at the John M. Ashbrook Center at Ashland University.

---

 

 

The best explanation for the Supreme Court's holding that a military tribunal lacks jurisdiction to try suspected terrorist Salim Ahmed Hamdan is not to be found in the Constitution or the cases interpreting it, or in the Court's interpretation of congressional legislation, but in extrajudicial factors.

The Court lacked jurisdiction to hear Hamdan's appeal, but once assuming jurisdiction, it ruled incorrectly that the Geneva Conventions apply to his case. The Court strained, in the first instance, to inject itself in this matter, despite the clear intent of Congress to deprive it of jurisdiction, and it strained to grant Hamdan, a suspected al-Qaida member, Geneva Convention protections.

Such an unwarranted assumption of jurisdiction by the Court, coupled with its bending over backward to treat a suspected civilian-killing terrorist the protections guaranteed to bona fide soldiers of Geneva signatories, can only be explained by the psychology of the court's majority.

When learning of this decision, I was reminded of the words of Justice Antonin Scalia in a speech on the growing (and disturbing) influence of international law on our Supreme Court jurisprudence. Scalia's words, even more than his brilliant dissent in this case, contain the key to understanding the mindset of the Hamdan majority.

Scalia said that judges inclined toward the "living Constitution" approach think "there really is a brotherhood of the judiciary who indeed believe it is our function, as judges throughout the world, to determine the meaning of human rights. And what the brothers – and sisters – in one country say is quite relevant to what the brothers and sisters in another country say. And that's why I think if you are a living constitutionalist, you are almost certainly an international living constitutionalist."

To grasp the magnitude of the arrogance of the Court's majority in extending Geneva protections to Hamdan, you really need to understand that it had no power to decide this case.

Justice Scalia devoted his entire 24-page dissent to making this point. On Dec. 30, 2005, Congress passed the Detainee Treatment Act (DTA), in which it expressly and unambiguously stripped all courts, including the Supreme Court, of jurisdiction to consider habeas corpus petitions of Guantanamo Bay detainees, such as Hamdan.

The DTA provides, "No court, justice or judge shall have jurisdiction to hear or consider an application for a writ of habeas corpus filed by or on behalf of an alien detained by the Department of Defense at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba." The provision, said Justice Scalia, took effect on the date the act was passed: Dec. 30, 2005. As of that date all courts were deprived of jurisdiction in all such cases, including pending cases, like Hamdan's.

The majority went out of its way to find that Congress did not mean to deprive the courts of jurisdiction over pending cases. But as Scalia explained, previous Supreme Court precedent makes clear that "when a law conferring jurisdiction is repealed without any reservation as to pending cases, all cases fall with the law."

And there was no such reservation in the DTA. As the Court stated in Ex parte McCardle (1869), "Without jurisdiction, the court cannot proceed at all in any cause. Jurisdiction is power to declare the law, and when it ceases to exist, the only function remaining to the court is that of announcing the fact and dismissing the cause."

It is inconceivable that the Court's majority was in doubt about Congress' intent to deprive it of jurisdiction in these cases. But it decided to snub its nose at those annoying scalawags, whom, after all, are not fit to tie the shoes of members of the elite global fraternity of judges.

Once it usurped jurisdiction of the case, the majority further demonstrated its determination to go the extra mile for al-Qaida (and thus please its international brethren) by straining to interpret "Common Article 3" of all four Geneva Conventions as applying to Hamdan even though al-Qaida is not a nation, not a Convention signatory, and the conflict is clearly international in scope.

Can you imagine the implications of granting Geneva protections to terrorists who lurk incognito among civilian populations and target them for extermination? What incentive remains for anyone – even from signatory nations – to abide by the rules? Leave it to the liberal elite to reward rule-breaking and barbarity.

Above all, this case illustrates the urgent need for at least one more Bush Supreme Court confirmation: an originalist who is a lifetime non-member of the international brotherhood.

The mainstream print and television media are gleefully abuzz this
week with headlines and lead broadcast stories touting President
George W. Bush's latest, lowest public approval rating---31
percent. It seems Bush(43)'s degraded standing with Americans has
dropped below even that of Bush(41)'s low of 33 percent back in
August of 1992. Only three other presidents have registered lower
approval ratings: Carter, Nixon and Truman.

Not to be outdone by the Executive Branch, however, is Congress,
which boasts public approval marks a full eight points lower than
those of President Bush.

There are two reasons that the performance ratings for the
President and Congress are at record lows---even among their
Republican constituents.

The first is obvious. Republicans, who control both the
White House and Congress, have managed not to live up to
even the lowest expectations for politicians, particularly on
domestic issues. Though some Republicans are still
conservative (http://PatriotPost.US/alexander/edition.asp?id=464),
most have fallen into the "distinction without a difference"
category: They have morphed into Republicrats.

Ronald Reagan led Republicans and Democrats alike with a resolute
conservative mandate and won 49 states for a second term (Walter
Mondale won only his home state of Minnesota). However, President
Bush and congressional Republicans have not exhibited leadership on
many critical issues Americans care about. To the contrary, they
have exhibited considerable arrogance and equivocation---assuming
that somehow, because of their esteemed positions, the electorate
would fall into line behind them.

As The Patriot (http://PatriotPost.US/subscribe/)
has noted, President Bush deserves high marks
for his leadership in the war against
Jihadistan (http://PatriotPost.US/papers/primer01.asp),
particularly on the current front---Operation Iraqi
Freedom (http://PatriotPost.US/alexander/edition.asp?id=470). Even
here, though, he and his administration have done a poor job of
rallying a majority of Americans behind this critical military
campaign.

On domestic issues, however, most notably containing government
spending and reducing taxes (with a few minor exceptions),
the President and Congress have failed miserably. Additionally,
many Republicans have aptly demonstrated how out of touch they are
with their constituents on issues such as immigration
reform (http://PatriotPost.US/alexander/edition.asp?id=472). For
example, Senate Republicans are still advocating amnesty for
illegal aliens despite the fact that the overwhelming majority
of Americans do not support fast-track
 citizenship.

Their abysmal performance notwithstanding, there is a second
more subtle and insidious reason that Republicans' standing
among their own constituents, and the nation at large,
is at a low point: Polloganda (  HYPERLINK
"http://PatriotPost.US/alexander/edition.asp?id=274"
http://PatriotPost.US/alexander/edition.asp?id=274). Better
known as disinformation or dezinformatsia, we're referring to
any campaign of political propaganda masquerading as "objective
journalism" designed to advance a liberal bias.

For example, after weeks of relentlessly "reporting" bad news for
Republicans, CBS news anchor Bob Schieffer led Tuesday night with
"Bad news for the Republicans" and went on to proclaim that a
new CBS News/New York Times poll foretells "a dramatic shift in
the political landscape."

Schieffer continued, "Are we about to see a dramatic shift in the
political landscape? If the findings of a new CBS News/New York
Times poll are accurate, the answer may well be yes. President
Bush's ratings have hit another all-time low at only 31 percent
and the Republican-controlled Congress gets even lower marks,
an approval rating of only 23 percent. That's just a little
better than 1994, when dissatisfaction was running so high that
Republicans wrested control of both houses of Congress for the
first time in 40 years from Democrats."

Gloria Borger added, "Our new poll shows... that change is in the
air. By wide margins, the public says Democrats would do a better
job of handling most all issues. Democrats are viewed favorably by
55 percent of Americans. Just 37 percent favor Republicans. That's
a complete turnaround from 1994 when Republicans dominated public
opinion just before taking control of the Congress."

Wednesday morning, The New York Times' top headline was, "Poll
Gives Bush His Worst Marks Yet." In the first paragraph, the
writer notes, "Americans have a bleaker view of the country's
direction than at any time in more than two decades, according
to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll. Sharp disapproval
of President Bush's handling of gasoline prices has combined
with intensified unhappiness about Iraq to create a grim
political environment for the White House and Congressional
Republicans. Mr. Bush's approval ratings for his management of
foreign policy, Iraq and the economy have fallen to the lowest
levels of his presidency... The Times/CBS News poll contained
few if any bright notes for Mr. Bush or Congress."

Of course, months of Times headlines and CBS reports prior to
this poll had "few if any bright notes for Mr. Bush or Congress."

To be fair, the last paragraph of this 1,480 word Bush-bashing
diatribe includes this tidbit: "Senator John Kerry of
Massachusetts, who was Mr. Bush's opponent in 2004, had a lower
approval rating than Mr. Bush: 26 percent, down from 40 percent
in a poll conducted right after the election. And just 28 percent
said they had a favorable view of Al Gore, one of Mr. Bush's more
vocal critics." In other words, with all the favorable mainstream
media coverage Kerry and Gore get, Bush still comes out on top.

The MSM's relentless propagation of Democrat-generated
dezinformatsia has portrayed Operation Iraqi
Freedom (http://PatriotPost.US/alexander/edition.asp?id=470)
as a quagmire, the booming
economy (http://PatriotPost.US/alexander/edition.asp?id=469)
as an unjust bust and the President as a lawless
spy (http://PatriotPost.US/alexander/edition.asp?id=461)
and has even suggested that George Bush is at
fault for high fuel prices (HYPERLINK
"http://PatriotPost.US/alexander/edition.asp?id=476"
http://PatriotPost.US/alexander/edition.asp?id=476). All this
certainly has taken its toll in the polls. These polls become
self-fulfilling when the MSM incessantly pushes a particular
perspective, polls the indoctrinated masses in search of that
perspective and then reports the results as "news."

Americans who agree to answer public-opinion polls about political
performance are not political analysts, national-security
specialists, economists or policy experts. They are folks who
hold common labor and professional jobs in order to support
their families and make ends meet. They are the backbone of our
nation. Unfortunately, a large measure of their perspective on
politics, national security, the economy and public policy is
not reality based, but shaped by the MSM.

What The Times and CBS, along with other MSM outlets, are really
doing is polling on the media's effectiveness at indoctrinating
readers and TV viewers with opinion-shaping propaganda---or in
The Patriot's parlance, "pollaganda."

Pollaganda is outcome-based opinion samples (polling instruments
designed to generate a preferential outcome) based on prior-opinion
indoctrination or cultivation by the media, the results of which
are then used to manipulate public opinion further by advancing
the perception that a particular opinion on an issue has majority
support, and then presenting this "data" as if it were "news."

We say "outcome-based" because most polls reflect intentional
propagation of a particular bias by Leftmedia television and
print outlets to manipulate public opinion. They accomplish
this by first saturating viewers with "reporting" that reflects
a particular bias. After a thorough indoctrination, the media
outlets then conduct "opinion polls" which, of course, reflect
that indoctrination. Then they use the poll results to further
proselytize by treating the results as "news." This in turn induces
"bandwagon psychology" ---the human tendency of those who do
not have a strong ideological foundation to aspire to the side
perceived to be in the majority---and thus further drives public
opinion toward the original media bias, ad infinitum.

Pollaganda, then, is self-perpetuating.

Polls are so often manipulated for this purpose that The Patriot
NEVER reports polling (conservative or liberal) as legitimate news
because virtually all polling is nothing more than a well-crafted
lie used to propagate a particular opinion or bias. This is not
to say that polls don't provide an accurate account of public
sentiment. It is simply to say that such sentiment is largely
a reflection of MSM indoctrination---and thus comports with a
liberal viewpoint.

In the final analysis, conservatives are forced to run a
considerable and unrelenting MSM opinion gauntlet. Still,
if President Bush and Republican leaders would merely listen
to their conservative constituents and act accordingly, they
would be in a stronger position to defend themselves against MSM
pollaganda---and they would enjoy a more favorable standing with
the American people.

There is still time between now and November for Republican
leaders to make a comeback---but they had better start reversing
the trend today if President Bush is to have a shot at fulfilling
his most significant domestic-policy legacy---placing one more
constructionist judge on the Supreme Court. Democrats know that
would do more to restore Constitutional Federalism than any
legislation or executive orders in more than a century---and that
is why they are pulling out all the stops to regain control of
the Senate.

No reasonable person would deny that a government and a country at war against international terrorism must cloak some of that war in secrecy. That's especially true on the vital matter of intelligence gathering, the decisive front in identifying and defeating an unconventional, hidden enemy that operates by stealth.

We also have a cherished Constitution whose Bill of Rights begins with a First Amendment guaranteeing a free press, an institutional bedrock of American liberties. That free press has no higher public duty than to act, as the founding fathers envisioned, as an independent watchdog against abuses of government power.

So, who is right when editors at The New York Times override strenuous objections from the Bush administration and reveal a highly classified counterterrorist intelligence program?

The program in question is a follow-the-money operation, obviously an essential tactic in finding terrorists and disrupting their organizations. The program, begun immediately after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, is jointly run by the U.S. Treasury Department and the Central Intelligence Agency. Its purpose is to identify terrorists by tracking funding to them routed through the Brussels-based bank clearinghouse known as the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications, or SWIFT.

The New York Times would have a case for exposing this secret program if it could show that it is illegal, endangers the rights of Americans or otherwise constitutes a misuse of government authority. But the newspaper's reporting doesn't establish any of these disqualifiers.

Federal monitoring of interbank fund transfers is fully legal. It's specifically authorized by statute and confirmed by a Supreme Court decision.

By the Times' own admission, its reporting found no abuses, no use of the information obtained beyond the very legitimate purposes of counter-terrorist surveillance.

Congressional leaders and subsequently the government's 9/11 Commission were duly briefed on the operation by Bush administration officials. The Treasury Department and the CIA retain an independent auditing service to monitor the surveillance and guard against any abuses. The administrative subpoenas used to obtain these international bank records must specify the suspected terrorists or terrorist organizations under scrutiny.

Clearly, these are not blank-check fishing expeditions. Nor is anyone's privacy invaded unless there is very good reason to believe that they are al-Qaeda or another identified terrorist affiliate.

To date, not a single instance of abuse has been alleged, by The New York Times or anyone else.

Is this surveillance necessary?

Here is what The New York Times itself said in an editorial it published Sept. 24, 2001:

"Organizing the hijacking of the planes that crashed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon took significant sums of money. The cost of these plots suggests that putting Osama bin Laden and other international terrorists out of business will require more than diplomatic coalitions and military action. Washington and its allies must also disable the financial networks used by terrorists.

"The Bush administration is preparing new laws to help track terrorists through their money-laundering activity and is readying an executive order freezing the assets of known terrorists. Much more is needed, including stricter regulations, the recruitment of specialized investigators and greater cooperation with foreign banking authorities. There must also be closer coordination among America's law enforcement, national security and financial regulatory agencies."

The Bush administration couldn't have said it better.

Is this intelligence operation successful?

The New York Times' reporting acknowledged at least two notable successes: Capture of the Indonesian terrorist Hambali, who was wanted for instigating the 2002 Bali bombings that killed hundreds, and identification of a Brooklyn man who laundered $200,000 for al-Qaeda. Subsequent reporting in The Wall Street Journal also linked surveillance of bank-fund transfers to significant progress in investigating the 2005 bombings of London's subways and the apprehension of an Iraqi terrorist figure.

A logical surmise is that terrorist financing has been greatly disrupted, and that other specific successes remain undisclosed because the program is continuing.

Significantly, there were almost no protests from Bush administration critics in Congress after the SWIFT-monitoring program was revealed.

Indeed, 9/11 Commission Vice Chairman Lee Hamilton and commissioner Tim Roemer, both Democrats, joined the Bush administration in asking The New York Times not to reveal the program. So, too, did Treasury Secretary John Snow and Bush's director of National Intelligence, John Negroponte.

The case against publication is also endorsed by James Woolsey, a highly respected Clinton appointee who was director of the CIA a decade ago and who still speaks and writes frequently on intelligence matters.

"It was not a wise decision to publish," Woolsey said in an interview last week.

Did the Times decision to reveal the SWIFT-surveillance program damage national security?

"There is always likely to be some increased risk of terrorists or others learning how to avoid surveillance if you disclose the way surveillance of them is being done ... certainly terrorists may be helped," Woolsey said.

A former front-line fighter in the counterterrorism war, ex-San Diego FBI chief Bill Gore, offered a blunter assessment. Gore implemented the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act for the FBI from 1979 to 1985 and was special agent in charge of the bureau's San Diego office at the time of the 9/11 attacks. Given that two of the 9/11 hijackers lived undetected for a time in San Diego, consider Gore an expert on the need to track terrorists by monitoring their financial transfers.

"There is no doubt in my mind that this disclosure damaged national security. Now the terrorists will find other ways to move this money around. It's damaging to our security, it will have significant impact," Gore said emphatically.

A visibly angry President Bush had his own take on what The New York Times did. He called it "disgraceful," and no wonder.

---

Are you bored with hearing about global warming all the time? Me, too. The din of asinine predictions, warnings, and claims that global warming is real, i.e. a rapid increase in the overall temperature of the Earth, always seems to occur just as summer arrives when -- surprise -- it gets warmer.

It must have been a slow news day on June 23 because my daily newspaper ran the following headline at the very top of the front page: “Global warming is real, scientists warn.” Since the 1980s, environmentalists have been telling us that the next Ice Age -- due any day now -- has been cancelled and, instead, the Earth will suffer sizzling temperatures that will make it uninhabitable.

Then, on June 25, Parade, the Sunday newspaper insert, arrived with a cover article, “How Climate Change Affects You Right Now” and the photo of a man dabbing his sweaty brow with his tie. Everything including poison ivy was attributed to the dreaded, but fictitious global warming.

On July 16, you can treat yourself to two hours of “Tom Brokaw’s Global Warming: What you Need to Know” on the Discovery Channel. What you need to know is that it is as bogus as all the proceeding propaganda.

The occasion for the latest claim was yet another report by a yet another panel. This time it was one convened by the National Academies of Science whose twelve incredibly distinguished members concluded that, “the planet warmed more rapidly over the past 25 years than at any other period in the past 400 years.” Pay no attention to the fact that actual temperature records only go back 200 years.

Indeed, the panel members “were asked to summarize temperature records going back 2,000 years and were urged to pinpoint any areas of uncertainty.” Let’s see, that leaves about 1,800 years of uncertainty based on what scientists call “proxy” evidence. This is data teased out of ice cores, tree rings, and anything else scientists can think to measure.

Any discussion of the role of the Sun is always ignored by these reports, but I assure you that the Sun has a lot to do with the temperature of the Earth.

What the distinguished members of the panel managed to ignore was a 350-year “Little Ice Age” from 1500 to 1850. After that, the Earth warmed up about one degree Fahrenheit until about 1950 and, since then, there has been no conclusive evidence of any significant imminent or long-term warming. That is to say, any unusual warming because, as noted, in the summer, the Earth gets warmer. Ever since the last big Ice Age, with the usual fluctuations, the Earth’s temperature been warmer and we should all be very thankful for that.

Conversely, in the winter, it gets colder, and for some reason, we do not get distinguished panels issuing “scientific” reports on any warming or predictions of an imminent Ice Age. The Earth is actually closer to the sun, though tilted away sufficiently so its rays do not provide as much heat.

Indeed, global warming has become such a boring topic that ABC News, desperate to keep the hoax alive, has actually asked viewers to email “interesting examples” of how their lives have been “directly affected by global warming?” This is what passes for science in the newsrooms of America.

In May, a coalition of the New Jersey Public Interest Research Group, the Sierra Club of New Jersey and the New Jersey Audubon Club warned of “a 2-to-4 foot rise in the level of the Atlantic Ocean due to the melting of the polar ice caps…that would put 1 percent to 3 percent of the Garden State under water and leave 6 percent to 9 percent vulnerable to chronic flooding.” Moreover, “37 species of wildlife would be either greatly reduced in numbers or gone from the state.”

This kind of nonsense is repeated state by state and the claims are changed depending on the local climate conditions. Out west the claims feature wildfires such as occur every single year. If the state is subject to hurricanes, than global warming gets attached to that annually reoccurring natural phenomenon. Meanwhile, the polar ice caps are not melting. Indeed, the ice pack is growing.

Inevitably, we get to the true agenda of these kinds of environmental scare campaigns. For example, the New Jersey coalition made it clear that our lifestyles have to be changed by “dramatically reducing energy consumption in homes, businesses and schools; shifting to clean renewable sources of energy generation; making cars go further on a gallon of gasoline; ensuring that people drive less and use mass transit more, and making the energy industry pay for every pound of global warming pollution they emit, with that money invested in solutions.” You only need solutions when you have a real problem.

The latest distinguished panel report is largely contingent on a much disputed and discredited mathematical computer model that was first published in 1998 by a climatologist Michael Mann of the University of Virginia. It provided “a hockey stick” scenario in which the Earth dramatically heated up in the twentieth century, providing a curve on a diagram that resembled a hockey stick.

If the “Little Ice Age” was a nuisance for Mann, you can imagine the bother of the subsequent “Medieval Warm Period.” As Tom Bethell, author of “The Politically Incorrect Guide to Science,” points out, Mann was determined that “The twentieth century was going to be the warmest, regardless of the data.” Suffice it to say, Mann’s hockey stick has drawn a lot of criticism such as that of Canadian economist Ross McKitrick who, in 2003, published an article stating that Mann had “used flawed methods that yield meaningless results.”

Global warming is the current version of the famed Piltdown Man whose skull was found in England in 1909, proving to many of the distinguished scientists back then that modern man began his journey in the British Isles and not somewhere like Africa. The skull was a total fraud, but a lot of scientists of the time were convinced it was the real thing and the media had a field day with the story.

All of which brings me back to the utter boredom induced whenever some government panel, newspaper, television program, or Al Gore’s new movie, reminds us that “Global warming is real, scientists say.”

From our best ex-president: "Our government leaders have become
increasingly obsessed with secrecy... [W]e must seek amendments
to [the Freedom of Information Act] to be more in line with
emerging international standards... Our democracy depends on
it." ---Jimmy Carter **"There is nothing in life so pathetic as
a former president." ---John Quincy Adams

"[In war], there is no alternative than to apply every available
means to bring it to a swift end. War's very object is victory,
not prolonged indecision. In war there is no substitute for
victory." ---General Douglas MacArthur

Environment: The Supreme Court has agreed to hear a case to decide whether the federal government should be forced to regulate carbon dioxide emissions. Is the basis for all plant life on earth really a pollutant?

The 29 plaintiffs in this case, which include 12 states, the District of Columbia, two cities and environmental groups such as the Sierra Club, think carbon dioxide is in fact a pollutant that requires Environmental Protection Agency regulation under the Clean Air Act.

They are asking for the Supreme Court to reverse a ruling by the D.C. Court of Appeals that lets stand the EPA's refusal to regulate greenhouse gases from motor vehicles to stop global warming.

The Bush administration maintains that carbon dioxide, a natural product of animal respiration, is different from the noxious chemicals that can spew from an auto tailpipe or a factory smokestack, and is not in fact a pollutant as defined by the Clean Air Act.

Carbon dioxide has become the poster child for global warming advocates who constantly claim it is the major greenhouse gas. According to Al Gore, each time you exhaled while reading this editorial, you have contributed to global warming.

Carbon dioxide is in fact not a pollutant and is the basis of all plant — and therefore all animal — life on earth. So says Robert Balling, director of the Office of Climatology at Arizona State University. He notes "carbon dioxide concentrations were much higher in the past, millions of years ago, when plants evolved around the world."

Balling also points out "that when carbon dioxide levels increase, plants grow faster, bigger, more resistant to any number of stresses, and far more efficient in their use of water."

Hardly the scorched-earth scenario painted by the greenies.

As atmospheric CO2 levels have consistently been increasing, global mean temperatures have not kept pace. Warming has not been constant, has been interrupted by — dare we say it ? — global cooling, and seems to have stopped about eight years ago. This is not the kind of temperature fluctuations you'd expect in the face of steadily increasing CO2 emissions, if CO2 was the main culprit.

Richard Lindzen, the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, notes that global mean temperatures have risen about 1 degree Fahrenheit over the past century, rising significantly between 1919 and 1940, declining between 1940 and the early 1970s, rising again, and remaining essentially flat since 1998.

Paleontologist Bob Carter of the Marine Geophysical Laboratory at James Cook University in Australia discounts the alleged correlation between carbon dioxide and temperature.

The current warming trend started about 50 years before cars and factories began spewing significant amounts of CO2, he says. The 35-year cooling period occurred just after CO2 levels really began to surge, with major news magazines actually warning of an imminent ice age.

Roy Spencer, principal research scientist at the University of Alabama at Huntsville, calls claims that CO2 is the most important greenhouse gas "blatantly false" and that the warming effect of water vapor is about 10 times that of carbon dioxide.

Just by breathing, he says, humans produce about 6 million tons of CO2 per day. And that's including Al Gore.

When the Clean Air Act was last amended in 1990, according to Marlo Lewis Jr., senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, "the Senate rejected provisions calling for CO2 emission requirements for automobiles."

Lewis says the case "is probably the most important regulatory case facing the country" since "it affects 70% of our electrical power sector and 99% of our transportation sector."

We have managed to avoid the economic disaster that's waiting to happen in the form of Kyoto treaty, which was all pain for virtually no gain. We hope the Supreme Court will recognize that junk science makes worse law and that the very act of breathing does not threaten the planet. 

Why is it necessary for the NY Times to publish national security secrets as to how we are fighting the War on terror, and it seems most of the MSM does not come down on them as commiting treason?

Seems like those with a liberal mindset are more interested in attacking our President [as long as he's somewhat to the conservative side] than the islamofacists?

Remember when someone says he wants to kill you believe him.

If the Supreme Court [and the rest of the government in Washington] would follow the founders plan for a limited government [just with the enumerated powers listed in the Constitution] the country would not have half the problems it does today.

If the Court [and the rest of the Federal Judges] would limit itself & the rest of Government to the enumerated powers there would be no need for all the problems when judges are appointed.

The founders never intended for a Government like we have in Washington which tries to inject itself into every courner of our lives.

The other elements of the global-warming scare scenario are predicated on similar oversights. Malaria, claimed as a byproduct of warming, was once common in Michigan and Siberia and remains common in Siberia--mosquitoes don't require tropical warmth. Hurricanes, too, vary on multidecadal time scales; sea-surface temperature is likely to be an important factor. This temperature, itself, varies on multidecadal time scales. However, questions concerning the origin of the relevant sea-surface temperatures and the nature of trends in hurricane intensity are being hotly argued within the profession. So what, then, is one to make of this alleged debate? I would suggest at least three points.