Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein gave terror lord Osama bin Laden’s thugs financial and logistical support, offering al Qaeda money, training and haven for more than a decade, it was reported yesterday.
Their deadly collaboration - which may have included the bombing of the USS Cole and the 9/11 attacks - is revealed in a 16-page memo to the Senate Intelligence Committee that cites reports from a variety of domestic and foreign spy agencies compiled by multiple sources, The Weekly Standard reports.
The death of a thousand cuts…
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genomics pioneer Craig Venter announced that his research group created an artificial virus based on a real one in just two weeks’ time.
When researchers created a synthetic genome (genetic map) of the virus and implanted it into a cell, the virus became “biologically active,” meaning it went to work reproducing itself.
This means that these scientists constructed a living organism from non-living matter. That’s a historic first.
U.S. TV network news about Iraq as distorted as al-Jazeera? Checking in from Iraq on Wednesday’s Hardball with Chris Matthews as part of that show’s look this week at “Iraq: The Real Story,” Bob Arnot highlighted a Muslim ayatollah in Iraq who “is furious at the press coverage. He says not only American television, but Arabic satellite TV, such as Al-Jazeera and the Abu Dhabi station, have mis-portrayed the great success that is Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein.”
Arnot, MRC analyst Geoffrey Dickens noticed, documented how “Iraqis themselves are angrier than the American administration about the barrage of negative stories coming out of Iraq” on Arab television.
Instapundit reader Steve Hornbeck comments
Regarding the Hardball story on Iraqis being angry over US media coverage, isn’t it way past time that the news media started looking into the possibility that some of the negative feelings that the rest of the world has about the US are the result of the US news media’s behavior? If you were an Iraqi who for years saw American reporters playing ball with the Hussein government and then saw that those same reporters had mostly negative things to say about your liberation, how would you feel about Americans?
But they preserved their access! Isn’t that what matters?
P.S. Also at Instapundit is the tale of a movie reviewer in Germany using Legally Blonde 2 as a guide to how the American government works. Gosh, those sophisticated Europeans never cease to amaze.