Disney to acquire Marvel in $4 billion deal | read this item
NEW YORK/LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Walt Disney Co on Monday agreed to buy Marvel Entertainment Inc for $4 billion in the year’s biggest media deal, banking on Marvel’s pantheon of superheroes to broaden its lineup of movie franchises that appeal to boys.
Late Labor Day seen pulling down August sales | read this item
CHICAGO (Reuters) – U.S. retailers are likely to get an “incomplete” mark for the key back-to-school season when they report August sales this week, as a later Labor Day is expected to pull some sales into September, pressuring August results.
Yes, Harsh Interrogations Work -- By: Rich Lowry | read this item
EDITOR’S NOTE:This column is available exclusively through King Features Syndicate. For permission to reprint or excerpt this copyrighted material, please contact: kfsreprint@hearstsc.com, or phone 800-708-7311, ext. 246.
If Dick Cheney had a fantasy scenario for how the Bush administration interrogation program worked, it might go like this: A top-level al-Qaeda operative is captured, but resists traditional interrogation. He is then waterboarded, after which he becomes an invaluable resource. Eventually, the terrorist conducts tutorials on al-Qaeda doctrine and operations for the benefit of American intelligence officers.
Except it’s not a fable. It describes the course of 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s post-capture career, according to the Washington Post. The Post report, together with CIA documents released during the past week, demolishes a key argument of opponents of so-called enhanced interrogation techniques — that “‘torture’ never works.”
This contention always betrayed an insecurity. For all their thundering about the criminal immorality of coercive interrogations, opponents never dared admit that they could have elicited important, perhaps lifesaving, information. They treated it as a kind of metaphysical impossibility.
In so doing, they left a hostage to fortune. They had to hope that Cheney was wrong when he said that classified documents proved the effectiveness of the interrogations, and failing that, had to hope the documents would never be declassified. On this front, the release of the 2004 Central Intelligence Agency inspector general report — declassified thanks to an American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit — has been a disaster for them. In the intelligence business, it’s called blowback.
The IG report said detainees in the interrogation program made the CIA aware of plots to attack the U.S. consulate in Karachi, Pakistan; to fly hijacked aircraft into Heathrow Airport; to derail a train in the U.S.; to blow up gas stations in the U.S.; to fly an airplane into the tallest building in California; and to collapse bridges in New York. If any of the planned attacks in the U.S. had come off, many of the same critics braying about the CIA’s interrogation program would be outraged about its failure to “connect the dots.”
The IG report doesn’t flatly assert that the enhanced interrogations were responsible for this intelligence haul, but the facts make it obvious. Top terrorists were withholding information prior to the application of the toughest techniques, and were compliant afterward. Surely, their decision to talk didn’t result from a sudden fit of conscience. According to the report, KSM was “an accomplished resistor,” who provided mostly “outdated, inaccurate, or incomplete” information until he was waterboarded. Subsequently, he became the “most prolific” source of important leads.
According to the IG report, KSM’s cooperation led to the arrest of a truck driver in the U.S. named Iyman Faris who was plotting attacks on New York landmarks; of a sleeper operative in New York named Saleh Almari; of an operative named Majid Khan who had easy entree into the U.S.; and of two Pakistani businessmen whom KSM “planned to use to smuggle explosives into the United States.”
Overall, according to another CIA document released last week, “detainees in mid-2003 helped us build a list of 70 individuals — many of who we had never heard of before — that al-Qaeda deemed suitable for Western operations.” In the War on Terror, learning the identities of these operatives is almost the equivalent of the ULTRA program breaking German codes in World War II.
The former CIA inspector general John Helgerson tells the Washington Post that “waterboarding and sleep deprivation were the two most powerful techniques and elicited a lot of information.” Such extreme methods should obviously be used only in a carefully controlled setting against top detainees harboring information about ongoing plots. Detainees like KSM and a few of his confederates, who provided intelligence valuable enough to justify their harsh treatment.
Years of bombast and distortion have nonetheless killed the enhanced-interrogation program. The Obama administration has put the CIA out of the interrogation business and will henceforth endeavor to limit itself to the minimalist methods in the Army Field Manual. Thus it enshrines an interrogation regime that wouldn’t have gotten KSM to cooperate so quickly, if at all. And turns its back on what worked.
The Bill for Truth -- By: Interview | read this item
You may recognize William Donohue as the one-man Catholic anti-defamation league, in a state of perpetual outrage. He is notorious for his sound bites and press releases, fired off in response to any insult to the Catholic Church. But in a new book, Secular Sabotage: How Liberals Are Destroying Religion and Culture in America, the president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights gets in more than a few sound bites. Donohue believes that the very concept of moral truth is held in contempt by too many who have a leading influence in the popular culture and — well, you get the idea from the book’s subtitle. Bill Donohue took some questions from National Review Online’s Kathryn Jean Lopez on the occasion of the book’s release.
KATHRYN JEAN LOPEZ: What is secular sabotage?
WILLIAM DONOHUE: It is a determined effort on the part of radical activists to upend the Judeo-Christian tradition.
LOPEZ: Is it really fair to blame “liberals”? What does that even mean?
DONOHUE: As I say in the opening chapter, I am not blaming all liberals. Just the extremists.
LOPEZ: You cite one former Democrat who refers to the Democratic party as “the Anti-Christian party.” Can that even pass a laugh test after the clearly Christian display we saw last weekend surrounding the death of Senator Kennedy?
DONOHUE: Your colleague Ramesh Ponnuru called those who support abortion “The Party of Death.” David Carlin, a longtime Democrat, feels betrayed by his former party and wrote a book about it. A lot of people missed what happened on Saturday: Only a handful of priests were in procession at Kennedy’s funeral. Normally, there would have been about 300 — these processions go on for at least a half-hour. But not for Teddy. That was deliberate, and it was justified.
LOPEZ: When you look around at the Republican party, religious conservatives seem to be doing their part to destroy religion and culture with their infidelities, crimes, and other sins. Is that your “Christian party”?
DONOHUE: Personal failings have nothing whatsoever to do with policy decisions. It is not the Republicans who ask Catholic universities to put a drape over the name of Jesus before the president agrees to speak. And it is only the Democrats who align themselves with the most anti-Catholic group in the nation — Catholics for a Free Choice. Besides, I’m not a Republican.
LOPEZ: How are Catholics guilty of self-sabotage?
DONOHUE: Left-wing priests, laypeople, and nuns who promote abortion, gay marriage, and the like are termites.
LOPEZ: Yet you report that these folks who are eating away at the foundations are no longer thriving. Are dissidents really a dying breed?
DONOHUE: Yes. Young people may be indifferent, but they are not joining orders of priests and nuns that seek to radically restructure the Catholic Church. If they join at all, they join the most conservative orders of priests and nuns.
LOPEZ: Why should anyone who is not Catholic care about the Catholic League and anything you have to say?
DONOHUE: Non-Catholics should care about the Catholic League for the same reason they should care about any anti-defamation or civil-rights group: It offends American values whenever any racial, ethnic, or religious group is trashed for no reason other than to elicit some sick, visceral response. Criticism is one thing. Insulting, demeaning, and disparaging commentary is quite another.
LOPEZ: Why does the president of the Catholic League devote a chapter to Protestants?
DONOHUE: To demonstrate that the saboteurs are gunning for Christianity, as the first chapter says. Had I left out Protestants, the work would have been incomplete. Also, while I am president of the Catholic League, this is not a Catholic League publication. Therefore, I am free to say what I want as a sociologist.
LOPEZ: What on earth are you talking about when you write: “There is something bizarre going on when the average student studying to become an auto mechanic is far more likely to believe in God than the average student studying to become a minister”?
DONOHUE: That was not an exaggeration. Talk to anyone who is in the divinity schools, or just read the books they are assigned. It is hardly a secret that the mainline Protestant denominations are dying out, and one of the reasons is the mutiny that exists in the divinity schools. As I pointed out, leading Christian voices do not believe in the Bible.
LOPEZ: What is “the new atheism” and what drives it?
DONOHUE: The new atheism is an aggressive, dogmatic attempt to undermine the Judeo-Christian ethos. What drives it is hatred. They are not shy about admitting it.
LOPEZ: Is it fair to refer to its leading lights as the “Four Horsemen”?
DONOHUE: That was what one prominent Catholic called them. He is entitled to his opinion.
LOPEZ: It’s got to have some resonance, doesn’t it? Christopher Hitchens, after all, had abestseller.
DONOHUE: His book was going nowhere until he went on TV slamming Jerry Falwell right after he died. Moreover, the fact that Hitchens, et al., sold many books actually underscores the drama of my book.
LOPEZ: Isn’t it a bit much to write a headline like “Hollywood Hates Religion,” as you do?
DONOHUE: Not when for the past three decades all Hollywood has delivered is anti-Christian, especially anti-Catholic, fare. The one movie Christians loved — The Passion of the Christ — would not have been made save for Mel Gibson.
LOPEZ: Christians are making movies in Hollywood, though. Hollywood’s got a prayer, hasn’t it?
DONOHUE: There are a few encouraging signs.
LOPEZ: You point out in the book that Dan Brown actually claimed during a Today Show interview that The Da Vinci Codewas based on reality. This explains why you waged what some might call a crusade against it. But do people really believe such things? Does it really matter?
DONOHUE: Do I believe that Brown believes his own lies? And since when is a PR campaign considered a crusade? And why is it that that word is never used when others protest a movie?
LOPEZ: Do you ever worry that you are just giving someone like Dan Brown added attention when you call him out in attention-grabbing press releases?
DONOHUE: I never attack the Madonna wannabes — just Madonna. Christian-hating artists have begged me to attack them; I never do when they are second-class artists. But when someone as big as Brown strikes, not to strike back would undercut the reason for the establishment of the Catholic League. He already has the press — for me to pretend that I am unaware of what he is doing would be deceitful.
LOPEZ: If you don’t like Penn & Teller, why don’t you just change the channel, Bill?
DONOHUE: That could be said about any aspect of our culture. Why doesn’t CBS allow reruns of Amos ’n’ Andy? Because it does not want to feed anti-black sentiments. If a toxin is in the culture, then attempts to eradicate it should be applauded. Ignoring it is silly.
LOPEZ: How do you know we’re at a “boiling point,” as you put it, “between religious conservatives and secular activists”? What accounts for it?
DONOHUE: In my lifetime, I have never seen our culture more polarized.
LOPEZ: Why does the gay-marriage fight matter?
DONOHUE: Because if they win, then there will be no principled reason to oppose every other conceivable partnership from gaining legal recognition, the net effect of which would be to undermine the special status of traditional marriage.
LOPEZ: You get into why you believe secularists are angry and hostile, but on the cover of your book, you look angry. Are you in perpetual-outrage mode? Is that healthy?
DONOHUE: My publisher decided what the cover should be, and I deferred to the marketing people. Quite frankly, those who like me will not be put off and those who don’t like me will just find another reason not to. So what?
LOPEZ: Do you ever worry about tone?
DONOHUE: I worry that some of the people on my side are such cowards. They adore dialogue. I don’t.
LOPEZ: Was there ever a point when you thought, “A boycott of Disney? That’s just crazy! I can’t do that”?
DONOHUE: The boycott was a success. Our membership shot up and Miramax was forced to split from Disney not long after.
LOPEZ: Bill, what motivates you? What gets you up in the morning and what gets you writing “Critics Love Vampire Priest Film”?
DONOHUE: Duplicity, hypocrisy, etc. That’s a form of injustice that motivates me. When I read that a woman who writes a book about the Danish cartoons for Yale University Press is denied the right to publish the inoffensive cartoons in the book, then that just proves my point. Meanwhile, they all reprint the dung on the picture of the Virgin Mary.
LOPEZ: How does one go about restoring a concept of truth? Isn’t that ultimately what has to happen for religion and culture not to be destroyed?
DONOHUE: The fight against the postmodernists’ assault on truth can only be answered by exposing them and telling the truth. If enough of us do so, we can win.
LOPEZ: What do you pray happens with Secular Sabotage?
DONOHUE: My wish is that those on my side get fired up and become more active in pressing for changes and that those in the middle move my way. As for the secular saboteurs, I couldn’t care less what they think of me. This is not a popularity contest I am engaged in — it is an effort to wake people up and demand an equal playing field. When Catholics are treated by the cultural elites as if they were Native Americans — Hell, I’ll settle for Aleutian Islanders — then I will retire. Which means I’ll probably die in this job.
Suicide of the West? -- By: Thomas Sowell | read this item
Britain’s release of Abdel Baset al-Megrahi — the Libyan terrorist whose bomb blew up a plane over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988, killing 270 people — is galling enough in itself. But it is even more profoundly troubling as a sign of a larger mood that has been growing in Western democracies in our time.
In ways large and small, domestically and internationally, the West is surrendering on the installment plan to Islamic extremists.
The late Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn put his finger on the problem when he said: “The timid civilized world has found nothing with which to oppose the onslaught of a sudden revival of barefaced barbarity, other than concessions and smiles.”
He wrote this long before Barack Obama became president of the United States. But this administration epitomizes the “concessions and smiles” approach to countries that are our implacable enemies.
Western Europe has gone down that path before us, but we now seem to be trying to catch up.
Still, the release of a mass-murdering terrorist, who went home to a hero’s welcome in Libya, shows that President Obama is not the only one who wants to move away from the idea of a “war on terror” — as if that will stop the terrorists’ war on us.
The ostensible reason for releasing al-Megrahi was compassion for a man terminally ill. It is ironic that this was said in Scotland, for exactly 250 years ago another Scotsman — Adam Smith — said, “Mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent.”
That lesson seems to have been forgotten in America, as well — where so many people seem far more concerned about whether we have been nice enough to the mass-murdering terrorists in our custody than those critics have ever been about the innocent people beheaded or blown up by the terrorists themselves.
Tragically, those with this strange inversion of values include the attorney general of the United States, Eric Holder. Although President Obama has said that he does not want to revisit the past, this is only the latest example of how his administration’s actions are the direct opposite of his lofty words.
It is not just a question of looking backward. The decision to second-guess CIA agents who extracted information to save American lives is even worse when you look forward.
Years from now, long after Barack Obama is gone, CIA agents dealing with hardened terrorists will have to worry about whether what they do to get information out of terrorists to save American lives will make the agents themselves liable to prosecution that can destroy their careers and ruin their lives.
This is not simply an injustice to those who have tried to keep this country safe, it is a danger recklessly imposed on future Americans whose safety cannot always be guaranteed by sweet and gentle measures against hardened murderers.
Those who are pushing for legal action against CIA agents may talk about “upholding the law,” but they are doing no such thing. Neither the Constitution of the United States nor the Geneva Conventions gives rights to terrorists who operate outside the law.
There was a time when everybody understood this. German soldiers who put on American military uniforms in order to infiltrate American lines during the Battle of the Bulge were simply lined up against a wall and shot — and no one wrung their hands over it. Nor did the U.S. Army try to conceal what they had done. The executions were filmed, and the film has been shown on the History Channel.
So many “rights” have been conjured up out of thin air that many people seem unaware that rights and obligations derive from explicit laws, not from politically correct pieties. If you don’t meet the terms of the Geneva Conventions, then the Geneva Conventions don’t protect you. If you are not an American citizen, then the rights guaranteed to American citizens do not apply to you.
That should be especially obvious if you are part of an international network bent on killing Americans. But bending over backward to be nice to our enemies is one of the many self-indulgences of those who engage in moral preening.
But getting other people killed so that you can feel puffed up about yourself is profoundly immoral. So is betraying the country you took an oath to protect.
'God's Partners' -- By: Mona Charen | read this item
Well, thank Heaven George W. Bush is no longer president! Gosh, all of that mixing of religion and politics darn near subverted our Constitution — which, as all good liberals know enshrines the “wall of separation” between church and state.
What? That phrase doesn’t appear in the Constitution? No matter. Democrats know that conservative Republicans, particularly Christians, are dangerous religious fanatics.
When Democrats invoke the Almighty, though, it’s altogether different. Religion in a Democrat is evidence of deep moral commitment, even of greatness. Many of the eulogies to Teddy Kennedy mentioned his “quiet Catholic faith.” His self-identified favorite parts of Scripture, we were told, were “Matthew 25 through 35: ‘I was hungry and you gave me to eat, and thirsty and you gave me to drink.’”
The Democrats, perhaps as a political Hail Mary pass in light of the resistance health-care reform has encountered, are now hitting the religion angle pretty hard. At a Tennessee fundraiser over the weekend (at which Bill Clinton arrived early — a modern miracle if you’re looking for one), the reunited team of Clinton and Al Gore pushed health-care reform as a “moral imperative.” Playing off the Kennedy eulogies, Gore invoked the Christian obligation to care for “the least of these” as the force behind H.R. 3200.
President Obama too has donned the preacher’s mantle. Speaking to a coalition of 30 faith-based groups, he thundered that opponents of health-care reform were “frankly, bearing false witness.” He then offered a religious justification for his policy preference that somehow failed to make liberal Democrats uncomfortable about church/state entanglement: “These are all fabrications that have been put out there in order to discourage people from meeting what I consider to be a core ethical and moral obligation: that is, that we look out for one another; that is, I am my brother’s keeper, I am my sister’s keeper. And in the wealthiest nation in the world right now we are neglecting to live up to that call.”
But the president really hit his stride when he spoke by conference call to about a thousand mostly Reform rabbis, asking for their support of health-care reform when they address their congregations at the upcoming High Holiday services. As Tevi Troy blogged on National Review Online, the Jewish New Year observance features a prayer called U’netana tokef which reads, in part, “On Rosh Hashanah will be inscribed and on Yom Kippur will be sealed how many will pass from the Earth and how many will be created; who will live and who will die#…#but repentance, prayer, and charity can remove the evil of the decree.”
According to Rabbi Jack Moline of Alexandria, Va., who Twittered the event but later removed his Tweets from the Internet, President Obama referenced this prayer and then told the rabbis that “I am going to need your help” in getting health-care reform passed. “We are God’s partners in matters of life and death,” the president added.
One cannot even fathom the sort of media firestorm that would have erupted if someone like Sarah Palin had said that. But beyond the blazing double standard, does President Obama really want to venture this deep into moralizing? This is treacherous ground for him. For one thing, a man who is already known for his messiah complex ought to choose his words more carefully. Religious people may think of themselves as striving to do God’s will, but declaring yourself God’s partner is a just a tad presumptuous. Besides, there are very good reasons to believe that Obama’s health reform would lead to worse outcomes, not improved care. More particularly, the administration has recently been drawn into controversy (rightly or wrongly) over “death panels” and also over the Veterans Affairs department’s endorsement of a pamphlet that seemed to encourage the elderly and frail to consider whether their lives were really worth extending and/or whether they were “a burden” to their families. In light of that, some may hear a degree of menace in the phrase “God’s partners.”
But above all, President Obama has previously told us that questions about life were “above his pay grade.” He has now pivoted to claim that his health-care reform is a matter of life and death. If he is now going to invoke religious authority, his opponents are entitled to recall not only that Barack Obama has a perfect pro-abortion voting record, but also that just a few years ago he spearheaded opposition to legislation that would have simply required that an infant who accidentally survived an abortion be given medical attention.
