RAGGED THOTS

A declassified report released yesterday by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence revealed that U.S. intelligence analysts were strongly disputing the alleged links between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda while senior Bush administration officials were publicly asserting those links to justify invading Iraq.

Far from aligning himself with al-Qaeda and Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, Hussein repeatedly rebuffed al-Qaeda's overtures and tried to capture Zarqawi, the report said. Tariq Aziz, the detained former deputy prime minister, has told the FBI that Hussein "only expressed negative sentiments about [Osama] bin Laden."

# posted by Robert A. George @ 6:00 PM

Let's go back to Dec. 30, 2002, when Bloomberg said of the bar-smoking ban, "We will save literally tens of thousands of lives."

He was talking about secondhand smoke in bars and restaurants and said we would all be healthier, if not wealthier, after the city curtailed it.

So smoking became the first legal product sold in New York that was partly banned in the city, based on Bloomberg's medical expertise, or access to pristine statistics about the effects of secondhand smoke in bars.

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In fact, there has been absolutely no scientific, completely scientific study that links secondhand smoke to cancer. The city has never come up with one credible statistic.

But there has been a complete scientific study - from Mount Sinai research that shows that at least 70 percent of the thousands who labored at Ground Zero as first responders reported, and proved, that they had awful trouble breathing or worse.

Some are dead.

Bloomberg thinks these highly respected doctors are so crazy that they're barbecuing with the leprechauns.

"I don't believe that you can say specifically a particular problem came from this particular effect. There is no way to tell for sure and you've got to be very careful . . . If I say, 'I've got something because of this,' that's not just the way it works," said Dr. Bloomberg.

So now I have it perfectly clear: You ban smoking in bars with no statistics on secondhand smoke, but you are telling Mount Sinai, one of the best facilities in the world, they don't know their ear from their elbow when it comes to poison attacking the lungs like a spear.

# posted by Robert A. George @ 10:45 AM

The right to a full and fair hearing requires the accused have access to the evidence used to convict them, even if it is classified information, the military advisors told the U.S. House of Representatives Armed Services Committee.
"I'm not aware of any situation in the world where there is a system of jurisprudence that is recognized by civilized people where an individual can be tried and convicted without seeing the evidence against him," said Brig. Gen. James Walker, U.S. Marine Corps staff judge advocate.

"I don't think the United States needs to become the first in that scenario," he said.

One of those is John McCain (R-Ariz.), a former Vietnam War prisoner and a 2008 presidential hopeful who faces a political dilemma. He has won acclaim for standing up to Bush on issues such as humane treatment of detainees, but he also is eager to build conservative support for the GOP primaries. Several colleagues cautioned McCain and the others to stick with Bush on the tribunals question, and House leaders scheduled a vote in two weeks on legislation likely to mirror the White House's proposal.
The day's events suggest that Republicans may spend a good portion of the 109th Congress's final weeks trying to resolve an issue that could factor heavily in the Nov. 7 elections. Earlier divisions among Senate Republicans on issues such as immigration have contributed to legislative stalemates, and party leaders are eager to avoid a similar impasse over detainee trials.

# posted by Robert A. George @ 10:30 AM

Days before the fifth anniversary of the destruction of New York's World Trade Center by terrorists, city officials gathered on the site where the Twin Towers once stood to dedicate the newly completed 9/11 Memorial Hole.

"From the wreckage and ashes of the World Trade Center, we have created a recess in the ground befitting the American spirit," said New York Governor George Pataki from a cinderblock-and-plastic-bucket-supported plywood platform near the Hole's precipice. "This vast chasm, dug at the very spot where the gleaming Twin Towers once rose to the sky, is a symbol of what we can accomplish if we work together."

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Begun only days after the 2001 attacks, the Hole covers almost the entire footprint of the original World Trade Center, contains over 16 acres of empty space, and is visible as far away as Hoboken, NJ. Over $175 million has been spent on the Hole's development, and thousands of pages of proposals and designs concerning the site in which the Hole was excavated were reviewed in over 2,800 hours of meetings. Work crews comprising more than 7,500 welders, equipment operators, excavators, and other construction specialists spent long, often unpaid shifts in its depths.

"These five years have been admittedly difficult," Pataki said. "Inevitably, we heard from the naysayers who said we would never accomplish anything on this site. To those people, I invite them to gaze down at this magnificent pit if they want proof of New Yorkers' dedication to this project."

# posted by Robert A. George @ 7:00 PM

Roughly 70 percent of nearly 10,000 workers tested at Mount Sinai from 2002 to 2004 reported that they had new or substantially worsened respiratory problems while or after working at ground zero.

The rate is similar to that found among a smaller sample of 1,100 such workers released by Mount Sinai in 2004, but the scale of the current study gives it far more weight; it also indicates significant problems not reflected in the original study.

For example, one-third of the patients in the new study showed diminished lung capacity in tests designed to measure the amount of air a person can exhale. Among nonsmokers, 28 percent were found to have some breathing impairment, more than double the rate for nonsmokers in the general population.

The study is among the first to show that many of the respiratory ailments — like sinusitis and asthma, and gastrointestinal problems related to them — initially reported by ground zero workers persisted or grew worse in the years after 9/11.

Members of the New York Congressional delegation, who have been fighting to get the federal government to recognize the scope of the health problem created by toxic materials at ground zero, saw the Mount Sinai study as proof that the federal government has been too slow to address the issue.

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, who participated in the news conference at Mount Sinai yesterday morning, along with Representatives Jerrold Nadler and Carolyn B. Maloney, said that the results made the need for federal assistance for treatment more critical than ever.

“This study, I hope, puts to rest any doubt about what is happening to those who were exposed,” said Mrs. Clinton, who was among those who pushed for $52 million in federal funding for health treatment for the ground zero workers, the first treatment money provided by the Bush administration. “This report underscores the need for continued long-term monitoring and treatment options — they go hand in hand,” she said.

Several members of the delegation are scheduled to meet in Washington tomorrow morning with Michael O. Levitt, the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, to press for more aid.

In that respect, Sen. Hillary Clinton danced an unseemly two-step yesterday, charging at the Mount Sinai press conference that "our government was not telling us the truth" about Ground Zero - then releasing a campaign ad . . . in which she alleges that "the government didn't tell the truth" about Ground Zero.

# posted by Robert A. George @ 10:27 AM

[A] quiet counter-realignment has been under way in the Northeast and Midwest. Post political writer Dan Balz was one of the first to notice after Bill Clinton's 1996 reelection that longtime Republican suburban bastions in Pennsylvania, Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, New York and New Jersey were moving the Democrats' way.

If Democrats take the House this fall, it will be the culmination of this trend. To put it in historical terms, if Democrats have suffered in the states of the Old Confederacy, many of their best opportunities in November are in states carried by the first Republican president, Abraham Lincoln, in the 1860 election.

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The realignment of the South has been more important than any other factor in the rise of the Republican Party to majority status in Congress. It would be one of history's ironies if that majority were imperiled by the reassertion of the Lincoln states.

# posted by Robert A. George @ 10:25 AM