Henry Hanks and Stephen St. Onge both let me know about this story. Apparently, the British have uncovered evidence of an Iraqi program to develop a long-range missile. Which, of course, would have violated the U.N. resolutions.

British military officers have uncovered an attempt by Saddam Hussein to build a missile capable of hitting targets throughout the Middle East, including Israel, The Telegraph can reveal.

Plans for the surface-to-surface missile were one of the regime’s most closely-guarded secrets and were unknown to United Nations weapons inspectors. Its range of 600 miles would have been far greater than that of the al-Samoud rocket - which already breached the 93-mile limit imposed by the UN on any Iraqi missiles.

Saddam’s masterplan for the new missile, which was being developed by Iraq’s Military Industrialisation Commission (MIC), the body responsible for weapons procurement, constitutes the most serious breach uncovered so far of the tight restrictions imposed on Iraq’s military capability after the 1991 Gulf war. The range of Saddam’s missiles was restricted to prevent him from using them as a delivery system for weapons of mass destruction.

Between this and the near consensus that the mobile biolabs discovered were for the purposes of making biological weapons, combined with the pre-war intelligence demonstrates that Iraq did have a program in place for manufacturing weapons of mass destruction. The extent of their success and what else they may have been working on, of course, may never be known due to the destruction of most of the suspected WMD sites.

Reader Stephen St. Onge sends me this article which provides still more evidence on the links between Iraq and al-Qaeda. There’s a lot in this article, but what was most interesting to me was this bit:

The Hijazi meeting wasn’t the only Iraq-al Qaeda around that time. Eleven months before bin Laden spoke to Time, then-President Bill Clinton traveled to the Pentagon, where he gave a speech preparing the nation for war with Iraq. Clinton told the world that Saddam Hussein would work with an “unholy axis of terrorists, drug traffickers, and organized international criminals.” His warning was stern.

We have to defend our future from these predators of the 21st century. . . . They will be all the more lethal if we allow them to build arsenals of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons and the missiles to deliver them. We simply cannot allow that to happen. There is no more clear example of this threat than Saddam Hussein.

The timing, once again, is critical. Clinton’s speech came on February 18, 1998. The next day, according to documents uncovered earlier this week in Baghdad, Saddam Hussein reached out to bin Laden. A document dated February 19, 1998, and labeled “Top Secret and Urgent” tells of a plan for an al Qaeda operative to travel from Sudan to Iraq for talks with Iraqi intelligence. The memo focused on Saudi Arabia, another common bin Laden and Hussein foe, and declared that the Mukhabarat would pick up “all the travel and hotel costs inside Iraq to gain the knowledge of the message from bin Laden and to convey to his envoy an oral message from us to bin Laden.” The document further explained that the message “would relate to the future of our relationship with him, bin Laden, and to achieve a direct meeting with him.” The document also held open the possibility that the al Qaeda representative could be “a way to maintain contacts with bin Laden.”

There’s more interesting things in the article, too. But posession of actual documents of Hussein’s regime seeking contact in 1998 helps to confirm the story that was told by Powell and others about the timeline of events between the Ba’athists and al-Qaeda. The connection between Iraq and al-Qaeda was, to me, the most compelling justification for war with Iraq. And all the evidence produced since the war has strengthened, rather than weakened, the case for such a connection.

Glenn Reynolds links to the actual transcript of the Vanity Fair interview with Wolfowitz. And, controversy aside, the transcript should be read because it is really just fascinating. Go check it out.

“Most people would find it bizarre to speak of tolerating blonds. For whatever reason, hair color has not been a basis of tribal identity or group politics in our culture; the concept of tolerance is never invoked in this context because there is too obviously nothing to tolerate. In a rational culture, the same would be true of race, ethnicity, and the like.”
– David Kelley

Sure, you get a tiny bag of pretzels and the whole thing stinks like jet fuel, and usually you sit next to a screaming baby and some huge guy oozing into the seat next to you, but at least you can get sex now!

For 350,000 pesos ($500) a client is entitled to an hour-and-a-half session in a small but lavishly decorated aircraft complete with a cooler for fruit and champagne.

And for the low ticket price of $500. I can barely fly to L.A. for that cheap. The mile-high club just got a lot less exclusive.

But this made my day!

A federal judge Thursday turned down a last-ditch effort to reverse the expulsion of a high school senior who joined in a videotaped hazing incident at a park earlier this month.
U.S. District Chief Judge Charles P. Kocoras warned an attorney for Liat Gendelman, 18, that going on with the case could damage the student’s reputation.

Take your diploma and go home, asshat. And I hope you get the crap hazed out of you when you try and join a sorority in college.

The parents of a U. of Washington student who died in a fall that they attribute to his drinking are suing the fraternity he was at, saying that they encouraged him to drink. Here are some of the more ironic bits of the story:

While seeking unspecified damages, they said Wednesday the main purpose is to get fraternities to stop featuring alcohol at social events.

Good luck with that, the only time I’ve heard that this happened was when FIJI went dry because that kid at MIT fell down the stairs. So the fraternity went dry nationwide. How did they kick that off? With one last, massive party. That’s what frats are for - giving away cheap beer to college students for over a century!

“As long as they continue to make alcohol the center of the fraternity functions, these kinds of things are going to occur,” said the couple’s lawyer, Mark Johnson.

I think, actually, that fraternity means “let’s get drunk and bang chicks” in Latin, or something like that. How long has this been going on for? Animal House came out decades ago! It seems like every few years something like this happens and there’s a big outcry, and then a bunch of high up people who were in a frat at college step in and calm everything down until it happens again. It’s not going to stop, I think about the only alternative is to get kids to drink responsibly. But after this:

In the lawsuit filed this week in King County Superior Court, Don and Janice Jensen said the May 2002 death of their 19-year-old son, Brett, followed a game called “Century Club,” in which participants are supposed to drink a shot of beer every minute for 100 minutes.

that’s pretty much a wasted effort too. Maybe it’s just that evolutionary filter kicking in.

I think that this trip Bush has planned to mend European ties, update himself on the status of Iraq, and put pressure on Arab nations to cut off terrorist funding to allow the Palestinian/Israeli peace process to move forward is an ambitious but important one.

He’s been under a lot of criticism for allowing bad relations to stew in Europe, and not pressuring our Arab allies to stop terrorism, so I see this as an important first step. Speeches are one thing, but actually having a face to face with the rulers of the respective countries is much more significant.

And before Bush detractors start criticizing this, why not see how the trip works out, and then start complaining?

Looks like the Bush Administration is still refusing to “declassfy” parts of the Congressional 9/11 report. Here are the two parts in question:

AMONG THE PORTIONS of the report the administration refuses to declassify, sources say, are chapters dealing with two politically and diplomatically sensitive issues: the details of daily intelligence briefings given to Bush in the summer of 2001 and evidence pointing to Saudi government ties to Al Qaeda. Bush officials have taken such a hard line, sources say, that they’re refusing to permit the release of matters already in the public domain—including the existence of intelligence documents referred to on the CIA Web site.

Of course, not releasing information already made public doesn’t cause any harm–it just proves that the Administration is acting in a ridiculous manner. Look, I don’t have a lot of faith in the Congressional 9/11 report, because it no doubt is the product of both the calling of political favors by intelligence bureaucrats and the desire of Congress to cover up their own lack of oversight over our nation’s intelligence. But good lord, just release the damn things. It’s understandable if some things that need to be classified (agent’s names, names of contacts, etc.) stay classified. But this Administration’s penchant for secrecy is downright Nixonian.

And I’ll tell ya this, too, I’m really damned tired of the cover-up game being played about the Saudis when it’s damn clear that members of the Saudi government are among the major financiers of international terrorism. Just because Prince Bandar was Colin Powell’s racquetball buddy doesn’t mean that his government should be exempt from U.S. pressure on terrorism.

Ron Bailey is back to form this article, which suggests that we should have truly radical health care reform in this country–by deregulating it.

Perhaps the time has come in which some brave policy makers can step forward and advocate true free market health care. Already, patients and physicians are seceding from today’s barely disguised system for rationing health care, and moving to free market models. Consider the case of SimpleCare, which is spreading across the United States. In SimpleCare, patients agree to pay physicians in full on the spot. This cuts out the morass of administrative paperwork, allowing doctors to slash their fees by between 30 percent and 50 percent. Uninsured people can access SimpleCare physicians by paying an annual $20 fee. Since patients are paying up front for routine maintenance, they can afford to buy high-deductible catastrophic insurance policies to cover emergencies like cancer and heart attacks.

Another promising phenomenon is the rise of “boutique” medicine, in which patients agree to pay primary-care physicians an annual fee, in return for the physicians’ agreeing to limit their number of patients and make themselves available on a 24/7 basis. The fees can also cover expenses like antibiotics, exams, and in-house diagnostic testing, in addition to the easy access.

If such models can flourish in the midst of the current health care mess, think how much more could be accomplished if all the money and time now being wasted were put in the hands of individual patients, who could then make their own health care choices? The government and corporations would be eliminated as third-party payers, and would no longer face uncontrolled health care expenses; health care options would multiply to meet the preferences and needs of individual patients; and the insurance industry, once freed of mandates, could offer a wider variety of coverage to meet the budgets and circumstances of individual clients. SimpleCare and boutique medical practices are pointing the way toward a future of free market medicine and the end of the health care “crisis.” But do we have politicians and policy makers courageous enough to advocate such a future?

Alas, somehow I doubt it. But in the midst of Democratic Presidential candidates campaigning for government controlled and rationed universal health care, Bailey’s article is a breath of fresh air. Go read the whole thing.