Low Earth Orbit

It's ok, there's wasn't a blue dress involved

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Seven days after the Oklahoma City bombing, the INS agreed to deport a brother-in-law of Osama bin Laden who had been implicated as a possible accessory to the attack by a jailhouse confession and documents relating to bomb construction. At the same time, the government agreed to remove allegations of terrorism from Mohammed Jamal Khalifa's INS records and to return evidence seized from his luggage. Evidence in the FBI's possession at the time potentially implicated the Saudi businessman in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the airliner bombing plot and the Oklahoma City bombing. Khalifa was formally named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the World Trade Center case. On April 26, 1995, Khalifa abruptly changed strategy and requested the deportation proceed. His lawyer blamed an "anti-alien climate" generated by the OKC attack for his change of heart. The U.S. government not only agreed to Khalifa's request for deportation to Jordan, but in exchange for his cooperation it expunged terror-related charges from his INS record […] According to author Peter Lance, the Justice Department had wanted to hold Khalifa and investigate his alleged ties to terrorism as early as December. But *Secretary of State Warren Christopher wrote a three-page letter to Attorney General Janet Reno in January urging that the deportation proceed*. [emphasis added] p(qq). The government had one of the few terrorists in the world who could possibly link all three of the most deadly terror attacks in US soil in the past decade, and they _let him go_. Worse, they gave him all the evidence they had against him, which was quite a bit. Bomb recipes that matched both the 1993 WTC bombing and the OKC bombing, manuals for terrorist tactics, the works--and they gave it all back.

Jeez, a very disturbing tale of Clinton era terrorist appeasement and I can't blame Janet Reno? That hurts. But I'm sure "it wouldn't have happened if Warren Christopher had still been alive":http://www.freerepublic.com/forum/a3a24323940b5.htm#31.

They're everywhere, they're everywhere!

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University College Cork in Ireland has put together a list of well-known authors and speakers who are Jews, under the name ??Palestine: Information with Provenance??. p(qq). The material presented here is intended to help people who, after a lifetime's indoctrination by Zionist propaganda, are starting to question their beliefs and who are interested in learning the truth.

Living on the edge

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Planning bias. Again and again, critics charge the government with having no plan or strategy. Whenever the Pentagon or administration changes course, they charge it with having planned poorly. Headlines speak of events "out of control" in Iraq. More than just hindsight bias is at work here. Many people, particularly the sophisticated sort, hate messiness. They like to know that smart managers are in charge, figuring out everything. Surprises are defeats. In truth, the planning mind-set is exactly wrong for Iraq. Anything might have happened after the war: a flood of refugees, a cholera pandemic, a civil war--or, for that matter, the discovery of an advanced nuclear program. The fact that the Bush administration keeps adjusting its course, often contravening its own plans or preferences, is a hopeful sign. The administration's decisions to raise rather than reduce troop levels, to ask for $87 billion that it never planned on needing, to go looking for help from the United Nations--all this suggests not that the Iraq effort is failing but that the administration is more flexible than its rhetoric.

It's a fine line to walk, between flexibility and chaos. But as we're finding out in many areas, if you want to be able to respond rapidly to the real world, you have to live right on the edge of instability.

Davis sacked, long live Ah-nuld

[source] Soon-to-be-former California governor Gray Davis is recalled, Arnold Schwarzenegger wins the run-off. But you knew that already.