Greetings from the French Hill: Have You Cleaned Your Stains Lately?

-There are those that have made the claim that the whole impeachment and Monica Lewinsky scandal are the two main reasons that President Clinton was distracted from fighting terrorism during his Presidency. Of course, he was well into his second term when this happened, but I digress. In any case, contradicting this claim, Ann Coulter points out that Clinton was anything but distracted from fighting the war on terror during this period. In fact, as she shows, it was the only time when he actually bothered to fight the war on terror.

If you wonder why it took 50 years to get the truth about Joe McCarthy, consider the fanatical campaign of the Clinton acolytes to kill an ABC movie that relies on the 9/11 commission report, which whitewashed only 90 percent of Clinton's cowardice and incompetence in the face of terrorism, rather than 100 percent.

Islamic jihadists attacked America year after year throughout the Clinton administration. They did everything but blow up his proverbial "bridge to the 21st century." Every year but one, Clinton found an excuse not to fight back.

The first month Clinton was in office, Islamic terrorists with suspected links to al-Qaida and Saddam Hussein bombed the World Trade Center.

For the first time ever, a terrorist act against America was treated not as a matter of national security, but exclusively as a simple criminal offense. The individual bombers were tried in a criminal court. (The one plotter who got away fled to Iraq, that peaceful haven of kite-flying children until Bush invaded and turned it into a nation of dangerous lunatics.)
[...]
Despite the Democrats' current claim that only the capture of Osama bin Laden will magically end terrorism forever, Clinton turned down Sudan's offer to hand us bin Laden in 1996. That year, Mohamed Atta proposed the 9/11 attack to bin Laden.
[...]
Only in 1998 did the Clinton-haters ("normal people") force Clinton into a military response. Solely because of the Monica Lewinsky scandal, Clinton finally lobbed a few bombs in the general direction of Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden.

In August 1998, three days after Clinton admitted to the nation that he did in fact have "sex with that woman," he bombed Afghanistan and Sudan, doing about as much damage as another Clinton fusillade did to a blue Gap dress.

The day of Clinton's scheduled impeachment, Dec. 18, 1998, he bombed Iraq. This accomplished two things: 1) It delayed his impeachment for one day, and 2) it got a lot of Democrats on record about the monumental danger of Saddam Hussein and his weapons of mass destruction.

So don't tell me impeachment "distracted" Clinton from his aggressive pursuit of terrorists. He never would have bombed anyone if it weren't for the Clinton-haters.

As soon as Clinton was no longer "distracted" by impeachment, he went right back to doing nothing in response to terrorism.
[....]
READ THE REST OF THE ARTICLE...

READ THE REST...
-As kenneth Timmerman so aptly and thoroughly points out, the latest report by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, which states that "evidence" proves that Iraq never had absolutely any connection to or relationship with Al-Qaeda and has been plastered on the front page and headline of every major media organization, is filled with fabricated analysis and conclusions. He also points out that any-one who bothers to read the hundreds and hundreds of pages of the actual report will see that the actual conclusions and statements contradict that actual facts of the report.

If you thought efforts were over to rewrite history on the lead-up to the war in Iraq and to smear the head of the Iraqi National Congress, Ahmad Chalabi, then think again.

A remarkable pair of reports released last week by the Senate Select committee on Intelligence re-examine for the umpteenth time the pre-war intelligence on Iraqi WMD programs and Saddam’s alleged ties to al-Qaeda. The reports were produced at the demand of committee Democrats as part of a vast fishing expedition aimed at buttressing their old saw, Bush lied-People died.

What’s remarkable about these reports are not the facts they contain, although they are jammed packed with new information, culled from the more than 40,000 finished intelligence reports produced by CIA on Iraq in the six years leading up to the war.

The absolutely stunning news, totally unreported by the formerly mainstream media, is the scurrilous effort by committee Democrats to falsify the facts, introduce phony and erroneous conclusions, and then parade about on their political high-horse to journalists who never bothered to read the actual reports.

In an unprecedented move for a committee that until 2004 was known for bipartisan efforts to conduct oversight of the intelligence community, the committee chairman –Sen. Pat Roberts (R, Ks) – actually dissented from the report’s published conclusions on intelligence provided by Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress, as did most of the majority members.
[...]
Here you read how Vice Chairman John D. Rockefeller IV, D-WV, outvoted Roberts thanks to the defection of Senators Olympia Snowe, RINO-ME, and Chuck Hagel, R-France, and succeeded in superimposing totally bogus conclusions on an otherwise factual report.

“Paraphrasing the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan,” Roberts wrote in his dissent, “everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own set of facts… I will continue to draw the line when it comes to amending conclusions in a way that mischaracterizes or ignores the underlying facts.”

Roberts then dissected one by one the “myths” about alleged INC efforts to influence the judgment of the U.S. intelligence community on Iraqi WMD programs and Saddam’s ties to terror that the Democrats (plus Snowe and Hagel) adopted in the report’s conclusions.

Primary among them was the myth that the INC was “engaged in a disinformation campaign to supply erroneous information to the Intelligence community” that influenced the now infamous October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate on Iraqi WMD programs.

“The facts detailed in the findings portion of this report… do not support this theory,” Roberts stated blandly. On the contrary, “INC information did not significantly affect intelligence judgments” on Iraqi WMD programs. Nor did the INC supply information “used to support the Intelligence community’s key judgments about Iraq’s links to terrorism.”

For example, “of the 45 human intelligence (HUMINT) sources cited in the WMD NIE, only two were affiliated with the INC – and that does not account for the vast amount of information in the WMD NIE derived from signals intelligence, imagery, and HUMINT sources not specifically cited,” Roberts wrote.

In addition, he stated, “the INC did not supply information used to support the Intelligence Community’s key judgments about Iraq’s links to terrorism.”

Despite this, Rockefeller and his colleagues asserted that “false information from the Iraqi National Congress-affiliated sources was used to support key Intelligence Community assessments on Iraq and was widely distributed in intelligence products prior to the war,” and cited “over 250 intelligence information reports” from just a single INC-affiliated defector.
[...]
“If you’re trying to say that the INC is the one that pushed us to go to war because of the WMD reporting, that’s wrong,” one CIA officer told the committee. (p144).

“The facts are clear,” Roberts concluded. “The prewar assessments of Iraq’s WMD programs were a tragic intelligence failure. However, the real causes of that failure… had nothing to do with Ahmed Chalabi and the INC.”

You would think such unambiguous findings would lay to rest the old conspiracy-laden allegations that Chalabi’s INC concocted a bunch of stories to sucker the U.S. into war.

But the Democrats have shown that they will not hesitate to use the Senate intelligence committee for partisan goals, with reckless disregard not just of the facts, but of their own obligations to conduct oversight of the intelligence community.

This ultimately is the most disturbing aspect of this latest chapter in the Bush lied-People died attacks. As Pat Roberts warned, “Rather than perpetuating an ongoing effort to rewrite history, the committee should be focusing all its resources on a host of troubling issues: monitoring Intelligence Community reforms, balancing acquisition requirements with budgetary constraints, corrected the flawed tradecraft which led to the Iraq intelligence failure, and assessing collection and analysis of intelligence on Iran, North Korea, and al-Qa’ida.”

Those are serious issues, that could become life and death issues – especially if Congress continues to ignore them.
READ THE WHOLE ARTICLE...

-Despit the fact that a right-wing government has replaced the extremely left-wing and corrupt left-wing government in Canada, the publically funded CBC has remained a biased and a left-wing propoganda machine. In this latest example, on the evening of the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, CBC aired a grossly made "documentary" that supposedly "proves" that the 9/11 conspiracy theories are in fact true.

It was the Canadian Left at its absolute insensitive and appalling worst.

On the eve of the 9/11 remembrance ceremonies, the leftist, anti-Bush Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Canada’s national public broadcaster, aired an outrageous and disgraceful documentary on a Sunday news program regarding half-baked 9/11 conspiracy theories that only served to insult the memories of those who perished that tragic day.

Titled 9/11: Truth, Lies and Conspiracy, the only fascinating thing about the CBC show was its complete absurdity and the fact that it actually made it to air.

On the conspiracy side, it featured a young, budding “film-maker” whose online documentary portrays the destruction of the World Trade Center towers as the result of a bomb in the basement, demolition explosives planted beforehand throughout the buildings, and the airliner crash, which, it claims, was not enough in itself to topple the towers. According to this masterpiece of misleading fiction, the Pentagon was also hit by a missile, not by an airplane; and the passengers of United 93 didn’t crash into a Pennsylvania field, but disembarked at an airport.

This is a widely downloaded internet conspiracy film that is being translated into different languages. The CBC swallowed it whole.
[...]
An example of this nudge and wink on the show, Warmington said, concerned the use of cell phones on United 93. The conspiracy theorists said the phones wouldn’t work at 30,000 feet and thus no calls were ever made. The CBC interviewer attempted to back up their claim by saying his cell phone didn’t work at 35,000 feet.

“It was a feeble attempt to lend credibility to a charge that he has no way of verifying,” said Warmington. “This kind of thing wouldn’t get by a college journalism professor to freshman students on their first day.”
[...]
“When the so-called film-maker suggests that airplanes and the passengers on it vanished harmlessly into thin air is when a real news organization would walk away,” said Warmington. “To me, it is just as ugly as the fabrications about President Bush’s National Guard record that cost Dan Rather and others their careers. The National Enquirer would not even have run this.”

In the long term, the CBC production is helping to build the kind of bridgehead one sees concerning Pearl Harbor. Regarding that historical catastrophe, conspiracy theorists believe President Roosevelt knew about the impending Japanese attack and did nothing to prevent it in order to get the United States involved in the Second World War. The same is now being said about President Bush regarding 9/11 and the current War on Terror. If such internet drivel makes it on a major network, fifty years from now, this twisted version of events could become history.
[....]
READ THE REST OF THE ARTICLE...

-A moral dillema is erupting within the confines of holocaust museums and the concentration and death camps.

Museums chronicling Jewish life and death — including the Holocaust — safeguard the memory of millions who can no longer speak.

These institutions often rely on artifacts — items bequeathed by those who want to share their family’s history with the world for posterity, to tell their stories.

But at former Nazi concentration camps that are now museums, the artifacts were largely items that were already on site, so they were obtained without the consent of former owners or their heirs.

So who has the right to claim them?

It is perhaps the ultimate ethical nightmare for a Jewish museum.

That nightmare is embodied in the case of Dina Gottliebova Babbitt, who has a claim against the Auschwitz Museum in Poland.

The 83-year-old Jewish artist, Czech-born and now living in California, was forced by the infamous Dr. Josef Mengele in Auschwitz to paint watercolors of gypsies — also known as Roma — as part of his effort to document their genetic inferiority.

Babbitt has unsuccessfully been trying for years to get seven of her paintings back from the Auschwitz Museum. The museum argues that the artworks’ role as crucial evidence in one of the 20th century’s greatest crime against humanity supersedes her ownership rights and her emotional attachment to the works that saved her and her mother’s life.
[....]
READ THE REST OF THE ARTICLE...