Discovery Blog

Now comes Howard Chapman of Fort Wayne, Indiana—a Discovery Institute Adjunct Fellow—and an anguished account of the conflict raging on in his own heart. Since we are brothers, I am trying to be sympathetic.

Read the article here.

Vice President Cheney’s former Chief of Staff, Scooter Libby, is under criminal indictment for what effectively is a political crime—trying to rebut unfair charges and improper influences on foreign policy by former Ambassador/activist Joe Wilson and his wife, Valerie Plame. A federal prosecutor investigating whether someone had blown the cover on Ms Plame—an employee of the CIA—charged Libby with lying about the timing of his mentions to reporters of Plame’s CIA connection. If ever there was a lawsuit desperately in search of a crime, this is it.

The appalling fact is that in the run-up to the Iraq invasion Plame contrived to use her influence at the CIA to help get her husband, Joe Wilson, hired for a study trip to Niger to determine whether Saddam Hussein was attempting to obtain uranium. She succeeded and Wilson later exploited his Niger trip to write a misleading article for the New York Times attacking President Bush’s credibility about the Niger story. This set-up by the Wilsons is the real ethical stinker in the whole matter, but it is hardly ever mentioned. Plame obviously knew her husband’s political bias against Bush and his policies and saw a chance to use him to attack the President, the head of the government for which she supposedly works. Her action did indeed place her husband in a position to try to discredit Bush later. It therefore was entirely appropriate for Libby or anyone else to reveal her role.

The trial has excited relatively little public interest it is hard for people outside the Beltway to follow. It is about a technicality, a process question, not the outing of Plame as an undercover agent, as it first appeared. Almost from the start of the investigation we learned that “outing” Valerie Plame was not a crime under federal law because she hadn’t even been under cover for many years. Her husband had simply exaggerated or misrepresented her position at the CIA to spark misguided indignation among his fellow anti-war friends in the media. What was really outrageous, therefore, was nothing that Libby did but rather the deceitful behavior of Wilson and Plame, much of which was substantiated in a Congressional report. In addition to trying to mislead the Congress, the Wilsons tried to slander the President and Vice President and thereby affect public policy. Further, this suit itself has taken up truly precious time and resources from people in the White House and elsewhere. It has wasted your and my tax money. Distracting their foes from their duties may indeed part of the Wilsons’ game from the start.

But the Wilsons’ activities are almost forgotten in the present lawsuit. Instead, prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald has made a federal case out whether one person—Libby—misrepresented to the prosecutor the timing of his role in talking to reporters about the Wilsons. That is the molehill out of which Fitzgerald, stymied in efforts to find some truly consequential crime to go after, is trying to turn into a mountain. It is not a mountain and it probably is not even a molehill.

Anyone who has worked in the White House or any other frantically busy place knows that there are literally scores of conversations, dozens of phone calls and many meetings—some simultaneously!--in a given day. To expect someone to recall later all the details of who said what to whom and in what order is truly unrealistic.

What some years ago Mark Helprin, the novelist and commentator, called “the criminalization of policy differences” is often followed—as in this case—by strangulation by litigation. You tie up a political opponent in court. Thanks to this suit Libby had to leave the White House and go deeply in debt to pay legal bills. His boss had to do without his services. Other White House aides, such as Karl Rove, have been burdened by repeated trips the grand jury. The message: phony political attacks work and public policies can be hampered if you can find a way to invoke legal intervention on some technicality or process accusation.

I am afraid we are going to see much more of this is the months and years ahead.

Mona Charen is a columnist who once served on a White House staff herself. In fact, we were colleagues in the Reagan Administration. We both watched the sort of grotesque and indecent pettifogging now being used against Libby employed against nominees for the Supreme Court and cabinet posts under President Reagan.

Read Mona Charen's latest column "A Farce and an Outrage" here.

Would you put Iraq out of your mind for just a moment and recall that the war on terror is taking place in many countries, not just one (Iraq) or two (Afghanistan)? In truth, the anti-terror side of the struggle won a significant and under-reported victory a few weeks ago when the Somali Transitional government and its Ethiopian allies—with covert American support—defeated the Islamic Court, a Taliban-like group attached to al Qaeda. It was a true victory for a common front of moderate Moslems and others in Africa and the West.

But the United States of America still has not officially recognized the transitional government as the legitimate government of the country —even though we helped to install it. The United Nations recognizes it, as do the European Union, the African Union and even the Arab League. But not the U.S. of A. What’s our problem?

While the outcome of the fighting was still in doubt, the reason for withholding recognition supposedly was that the American government was not sure of the ability of the transitional government to persevere and prevail. We didn’t want to have egg on our face in case they were defeated. Of course, if we did get some Somali egg on our face, who would have noticed, what with all the other egg (including some old eggs from Somalia a few years ago) that has collected on Uncle Sam’s capacious mug? Nonetheless, fear of embarrassment was a reason, if not a particularly good one for failure to commit publicly. In time, the U.S. did decide to help the transitional government, but not officially. News stories, too, downplayed our role.

Now there really is no excuse for a policy of studied neglect. Yet the United States is still failing to bring its full diplomatic weight to bear on the issue. Sadly, it also is failing to follow up adequately on the initial victory it enabled by helping the still-nominal goverenment. Instead, our government seems to be dithering, effectively throwing the victory away. The mainstream media are just as neglectful, so the USG apparently feels little pressure from that source. The Islamist radicals meanwhile are mounting an insurgency, as was predictable. (See the excellent and unusual Reuters story here, that puts a human face on it.) But we are unmoved.

The Somalis reportedly have not asked for troops, please note, just financial help to get their newly national regime up and running. In response, the U.S. is tying in red tape even the mere $40 million it has pledged so far for reconstruction. Much more important than winning today, it seems, is making sure that the Congress and the GAO don’t find waste in appropriations procedures sometime in the future. You can appreciate their caution when you realize that media and Congressional watchdogs that are indifferent to Somalia’s fate now will be very interested indeed if eventually they can find some money for uniforms that got diverted to sewer construction or a provincial governor who got bribed with funds meant for pensions. With knowledge of this tendency, bureaucrats and careerist politicians often are more eager to do nothing wrong that is highlighted in an eventual report, than to do something helpful in a crisis.

Never mind. There are plenty of members of Congress who care about Africa, even if they don’t much care about winning the war on terror. Why can’t they be involved? Why can’t the US Government (dare I mention that we have a Central Intelligence Agency?) free up some money to feed people, pay the transitional government troops directly before they give up and go home (or change sides) and pick up garbage and repair roads? Could someone in the National Security Council of the White House please place a phone call to Langley?

Maybe the NSC could even convene a meeting and ask themselves whether it really would be more cost-effective to have the Islamic Courts—with radical Saudi money—come back and bring al Qaeda with them. When that happens we might as well forget about Iraq anyhow, because the terrorists will have found a new state in which to base operations. They were close to establishing it before. We helped take it away from them. Good for us. But now we seem so bureaucratically and politically hamstrung that we are going to let them back in. Talk about snatching defeat from the jaws of victory!

Here is my question: Who is in Charge of U.S. Policy in Somalia and Why are They Dawdling?

Ask that person to tell me in reply that I am misinformed (and so are the Somalis) and that adequate help is on the way, and so is recognition. And tell me that we are not sending our aid through the UN, please, but directly to the people who need it.

The only way you might know that the Surge is already underway in Baghdad and that it is succeeding is that the bombings Sunday were trumpeted as big news in the mainstream U.S. media. It would not have been worth so much notice before, but now the war is being tested against a higher standard.

"No news is good news," indeed.

The best on-the-spot-reporting in iraq is often in Iraq the Model, the blog by the estimable Fadhil brothers, all three of whom are doctors who had to learn English to get through medical school and now manage to tell the story as Western reporters seldom see it...or report it.

The Transitional Government of Somalia is collecting tariffs these days on goods coming over the docks and through the newly re-opened Mogadishu airport. But that limited income is about all that is funding the government now that the Islamic Courts extremists have been defeated. It is not enough to pay for more than minimal expenses, according to Koshin Mohamed, special representative of President Abduallahi Yusef here in the U.S. The Yusef government cannot even afford to operate an office in Washington while it prepares for official U.S. recognition.

Somalia is no longer the dangerous location of "Black Hawk Down" fame. It's in bad shape after a generation of civil wars and anarchy, and there have been intermittent attacks by insurgents. Most of the country is peaceful. But the newly successful government needs help in reviving the economy and setting up a system that can even begin to collect taxes and fund the normal institutions of a modern country.

The oddity of the current situation cannot be over-stated. The U.S. helped the Yusef government (then headquartered in Baidoa) and soldiers from neighboring Ethiopia to defeat the Islamic Courts three months ago. We even placed a Navy carrier off the coast to keep the foreign-trained fighters from escaping.

The U.S. had good reason to fear the direction that the Islamic Courts was taking Somalia. Not only was Taliban style "justice" imposed on women who failed to wear the burkha (although wearing it is not the Somali tradition) or on anyone listening to recorded music, but the Islamic Courts crowd was getting a direct infusion of Al-Qaeda recruits from Arab states. And it was sending Somalis to train in terror states. While the US was busy in Iraq and Afghanistan, Mogadishu was becoming a new terrorist hub in East Africa.

An article in the Sunday Times (London) of February 18 describes the "hundreds of Islamist fighters (that) were flown, with Eritrean assistance, from Somalia to Syria and Libya for military training."

"Iran," the Times story continues, "supplied 125 shoulder-fired surface-to-air missiles, 80 of which arrived by sea in dhows and the rest by air." A United Nations report has substantiated rumors of this activity.

Many of the terrorists were killed in the early winter fighting. Some have since defected to the Transitional Government. Some others have been arrested in recent weeks.

One American, at least, was arrested for training as a terrorist in Somalia, lest we think these events are not connected to the worldwide war on terror.

But how many Americans are awake to the relevance of Somalia? Even when the Islamic Courts was in charge and left wing English reporters were covering the country and sending positive films back about the way the Courts was feeding the population, one could see in the footage of grain sacks being unloaded on the docks that they bore a US AID banner and US flags on them. One only hopes that such aid has resumed, along with new commitments from the private charities that mostly abandoned the country many months ago.

The Transitional Government is now planning a peace conference for all those factions in Somalia that want to participate in a democratic order. The US and European and UN authorities will back it. According to Koshin Mohamed, it could take place yet this spring. US recognition of the new government may have to wait until the peace conference.

But meanwhile, Somalia is in dire need of funds. If US money is being unloaded along with grain bags, it isn't evident. A collection among Somalis living in the U.S. had to be taken up as a short-term provision for the government leadership, and it cannot have amounted to much, given that Somalis are one of the newest immigrant groups in the United States.

The US Congress plainly should be taking a greater interest in this problem, as should the State Department and the National Security Council. Senators Russ Feingold of Wisconsin and Norm Coleman of Minnesota are to be congratulated for introducing a bill to help Somalia. But the Administration clearly doesn’t have to wait for action on that bill to get moving. America often seems quite ready to help nationalists resist a radical take-over in various countries or to support local warriors, at least if they are opposing a group with terrorist ties. But once the fighting is over, the ways of bureaucracy seems to re-emerge. The U.S. should help now, not months from now. In Somalia, failure to pursue peace vigorously could imperil the victory the war won.

Pardon the pun, but the US needs to raise some semolians for Somalia.

Senator John McCain signing autographs after his speech on foreign policy at the Seattle Westin Hotel.

"Defcon," the Campaign to Defend the Constitution (such a high sounding name!), put out a press release and blog post this week that attempted to sandbag Sen. John McCain, criticizing him for speaking to a Seattle policy luncheon today where Discovery Institute was one of the "co-presenters". Defcon scolded McCain for attending an event in which Discovery was involved and for thereby "lending credence (sic) to this organization". Defcon called on McCain to cancel the speech. At the definitely un-cancelled event today I asked Sen. McCain if he had heard of Defcon. He hadn't.

Defcon is a creature of Fenton Communications, the left and far-left operation that backs the likes of Cindy Sheehan, Moveon.org, the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), the ACLU, Rainforest Action Network and Global Exchange (the anti-WTO demonstrators). Fenton is also famous for attacking U.S. corporations with bogus environmental and consumerist claims. "To Change an Industry, Target One Company," is a favorite Fenton motto. Among the fake scandals Fenton has shopped was the Alar scare that unfairly damaged the U.S. apple industry. Fenton recently helped create Defcon, to combat, among other things, us.

The press contact for Defcon's broadside against Sen. McCain this week is Timi Gerson, who is a Fenton veteran of Moveon.org. So you begin to get the picture. It is fair to say that we would not be Fenton’s favorite think tank on almost any topic.

The silliness began with a contradictory attempt to a) suggest that we had finagled a speech by an unsuspecting Sen. McCain to talk about intelligent design; and b) that we really were not involved in the luncheon event, after all, or had misrepresented our role. In fact, the major sponsors were Seattle's World Affairs Council and City Club. They asked us to join them as a "co-presenter", as we often do, and we agreed. This is SOP for non-profit groups in this area who want to build a crowd for a nationally prominent speaker. We do the same when we are the main sponsor of an event. (A World Affairs Council leader called after the event to express dismay that one of his staffers had made an "inappropriate" comment to a reporter that Discovery had merely "hopped on" the event.)

As for why we would be participating in a speech on foreign policy by Sen. McCain, it apparently is unknown to many observers that Discovery holds a number of foreign policy events; most recently ones on Somalia, the dissident groups in Iran and on current difficulties in U.S.-Russian relations. Our involvement in foreign policy issues is even older than our interest in science and culture.

Anyhow, for better or worse, intelligent design didn't even come up at the McCain event today, though a reporter may have asked about it afterwards.

On the margins of the event I did have a chance to discuss Iran with the Senator (and with Iranian-American leader, Shayan Arya, shown below).

And Tom Till of our Cascadia Center on Transportation had chance to talk with Sen. McCain about two issues we care about: energy conservation and passenger rail reform. Tom is seen below explaining our proposal for Plug-In Hybrid Vehicles (PHEVs). It's a proposal backed by several in Congress, including Senators Lieberman and Brownback, and Washington Congressmen Jay Inslee and Dave Reichert. Discovery and the Senator share a strong interest in passenger rail reform. Senator McCain showed interest. It’s all that we could ask.

One final thought about Defcon. Reporters should be wary of the ways Defcon represents us and our positions. We speak for ourselves and our positions are often very different from what Defcon tells the press.

The days you do not hear on the news of some new killing of American troops
in Baghdad is a day when the news really should announce: "No Americans Were
Killed in Baghdad Today" or even "In Iraq Today." Such days are progress, a
change in the situation on the ground. We are getting many more of them.

Iraq the Model carries this report (Feb. 23 post) on the Surge. As you will
see, it is news, the sort of thing Americans would be interested to see in
the mainstream media if the MSM--especially editors--wished to report it.

"Military wise the (Iraqi) spokesman for the operation said the first week
left 42 militants killed and over 250 militants and suspects captured and
good amounts of weapons and munitions were found. The troops had also
defused 13 car bombs and many IED's.

"The best part of the results remains the return of displaced families to
their homes; the latest count for this shows that more than 600 families
have returned so far.

"While the return went with little problems for most families some forty
families are complaining about receiving new threats from terrorists
immediately after they returned to al-Adl district.

"More occupied mosques are also being returned to their original keepers and
earlier today Sunni and Shia worshippers gathered to hold joint prayers in
several places in Baghdad as we saw on TV.

"Last week, Maliki made his first public appearance on the streets of
Baghdad when he visited the area of Palestine Street in Resafa the day that
followed the bombings in the New Baghdad district. The same day general
Aboud Qanbar, the commander of the operation walked in Haifa Street.
These public appearances are apparently part of a PR campaign to show that
senior officials are not afraid of leaving the green zone anymore, and
frankly this has left a good impression among the public."

This latter development that shows political and military leaders appearing
in public in the Red Zone (anything outside the highly protected Green Zone)
seems especially significant to me. When I was in Baghdad two and a half
years ago, it was unsafe for an American to go anywhere near Haifa Street,
even though it is a key shopping district. It apparently is safe enough now
for the Iraqi leadership to make a staged appearance, at least. I hope to
learn soon that ordinary people--even American reporters--can travel about
the city with a modicum of safety.

My point is that things slowly are getting better and the Surge may, indeed,
succeed. Who would like to bet on the date when the first MSM stories begin
to report the good news? If, in fact, there continue to be days with no
killings of Americans, and especially if there are days with no attacks on
Iraqis INSIDE BAGHDAD, where the Surge is taking place, I personally expect
to see MSM coverage within a week. Even if, as one British reporter told me
in late 2004, editors at home only want stories about blood, the actual
improvement of the military situation is of such interest--and such a
novelty!--that it has to be reported as news. And there really are a number
of fine reporters who want to tell about it.

Of course, there will be many more days of bad news, too. Never fear, THAT
will be covered.

The new film on the abolition of slavery, “Amazing Grace”, opened in only 791 theaters around the country this past weekend and managed to gain a 10th ranking in national attendance share nonetheless. It deserves to rank first.

Produced by a remarkably prescient entrepreneurial team at Walden Media, “Amazing Grace” is going to be a hit long term. It has appeal to all kinds of film goers, but it’s especially going to be welcomed by Christians. So far, “Amazing Grace” is perceived mainly as a film about slavery. But it is much more. The life of William Wilberforce 200 years ago changed Western civilization. His campaign against slavery in the British Empire helped ignite the abolitionist movement in the United States, and from the issue of slavery the evangelical movement in religion began a peaceful change of spirit within the English Speaking world. We experience its reverberations today in nearly all social reform causes. Before Wilberforce, England society was in a slough of despond. The politically protected slave trade contributed to the demoralization of culture, economics and even the church. London was beset by high crime rates, rampant vice and the kind of poverty that caused the upper and middle classes simply to look away. After Wilberforce and his example, a “revolution in manners” --a campaign against public vice--ushered in the Victorian Era. Since the 1920's that era has been maligned by our “anything goes” culture, but, in historical fact, it inspired Christians to take up social reform in a decadent time and revived the morale of the West for nearly a century.

“Amazing Grace” has the potential to stir controversy in our time. It forces us to ask, what constitutes reform? Does it start with the individual or society? What motivates the reformer? In a Wall Street Journal review article (password required) Charlotte Allen argues that the film underplays the significance of the religious motivation of Wilberforce and also neglects the “revolution of manners" that Wilberforce helped create.

There also has been some concern that the film and its promotional material fail to acknowledge the new forms of slavery that exist in our own time. Slavery today actually afflicts more people—some 21 million according to the U.S. State Depart Office on Human Trafficking that was headed until recently by Ambassador John R. Miller—than at the height of the cross-Atlantic slave trade two centuries ago. Miller is now teaching about human rights at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. and serves as a Discovery Institute senior fellow in Seattle. After previewing “Amazing Grace” he was sufficiently concerned that the educational and other materials for the film didn’t emphasize sufficiently the reality of contemporary slavery—especially sex slavery-- that he contacted the film producers to ask them to rectify the situation. To their great credit, they did so, and now students and other interested groups are about to get a real education in the modern scourge of slavery that—ironically!--is almost as ignored again in the early 21st century as old fashioned slavery was in the early 19th.

As for the Christian message in the film, while it doesn’t hit you over the head, it definitely is there. You can’t listen to the great hymn (you know, the one that seems to be played at every other wedding and funeral) without understanding the religious message of repentance and salvation. To some degree, it resonates with practically everyone. The revelation to the audience that the hymn was written by a Wilberforce mentor and Anglican divine, the Rev. John Newton, who had been a slaver in his youth and was totally autobiographical in his lyrics (“Amazing grace...that saved a wretch like me”), is presented in a way that finally will stick in the public mind. People will think of it whenever they sing “Amazing Grace,” which, as I say, is often.

In any case, there already has been a flood of praise for “Amazing Grace” from all kinds of Christians, and from Jews, as well. That some likely non-religious movie reviewers have lauded it, too, suggests that “Amazing Grace” is not just preaching to the choir.

P.S. I wonder if anyone else has noted the poignancy of Albert Finney's role as the gnarled old Rev. John Newton, a voice for reform in the English church. Forty four years ago Finney was the handsome young star of the hit film, Tom Jones, based on the Fielding novel that, among other things, satirized the hypocrisy of the English church in the 18th century.

(NOTE: Seattle area residents are invited to attend a discussion of "Amazing Grace" at 6:30 p.m. tomorrow at Discovery Institute headquarters, 1511 third Avenue (at Pike). A $10 donation is requested to cover a light dinner of pizza and refreshments. To see the film in conjunction with the discussion, try the Regal Meridian 16 Theater, four blocks east at 7th and Pike Streets. The 4:30 p.m. matinee costs $7.75 at the box office. No prepaid tickets. Reservations for the subsequent discussion at Discovery can be made with Janet Markwardt at Discovery, (206) 292-0401, extension 111.)

I can’t add anything to Discovery Institute Senior Fellow Wesley J. Smith’s excellent post (from First Things). Why it is all right to coerce the consciences of doctors and nurses who oppose abortion on moral and ethical grounds?