Monday Morning Quicknotes

Monday Quick Notes:

According to the Leftists, we didn’t need to worry about Iraq because they weren’t an imminent threat. If that’s the case, why are we worried about North Korea?


The rich were better off under Clinton.



Al-Qaeda leader held in secret US prison

A suspected al Qaeda leader, accused of being involved in September 11 and planning the 2004 Madrid train bombings, has been imprisoned in a secret U.S. jail for the past year, Spain's El Pais newspaper reported on Sunday.
Mustafa Setmarian, 48, a Syrian with Spanish citizenship, was captured in Pakistan in October 2005 and is held in a prison operated by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, Pakistani and European security service officials told El Pais.
Setmarian's 2005 capture was reported in May of this year after the United States put a $5 million bounty on the head of the alleged founder of al Qaeda's Spanish network.

For all their bluster, the Europeans know full well what we're up against and their private actions speak volumes more than their public ones.


Duke Rape Suspects Speak Out

Asked if he thinks the D.A. committed prosecutorial misconduct, Coleman says, "Yes, I mean I think that’s the whole point. And if this case resulted in a conviction, I think there would be a basis to have the conviction overturned based on his conduct. I think in this case, it appears that this prosecutor has set out to develop whatever evidence he could to convict people he already concluded were guilty."

I think when this is over, Nifong is going to find himself in far more trouble than anyone on the team.


It’s OK to defend war crimes if you’re a Democrat candidate:

The Daily Kos have praised Jim Webb for what he did in defending one Marine.. .Daily Kos brags that during his first year of law school, Jim Webb began representing, pro bono, an African American who had been wrongly convicted of war crimes. Putting aside Webb's fiction, here is what really happened in the An Hoa basin that night:
A five-man (all volunteer) team went on a search-and-destroy mission for Viet Cong in a small village, Son Thang, ordering 16 women and children from three huts and executing them. Within a day, the Marines began investigating, resulting in convictions of Pvts. Michael Schwarz and Samuel Green. Schwarz was sentenced to life imprisonment and Green to five years.
Both sentences later were reduced to one year.

Nowhere is it indicated that the man was wrongly convicted. In fact, Webb didn't try to overturn the conviction, only to reduce his sentence.



Noted

He frogmarched me back in. He called my mother. She came down, and, with her on the scene, I was forced to disgorge the contents of my pants -- about six paperbacks from around the waist and down the back of the butt, not counting the one that had slid down into my right cuff. It was a terrible moment, a humiliating moment, as I drew one after the other pack of paper out of my pants. But humiliation was to turn to terror.
It got worse because, after my mother had stood there to witness my degradation, she looked into my eyes and spoke the words any child hates most to hear in this world: "Well, we will have to have a very serious talk about this. We'll start right after your father gets home."
"...Right after your father gets home." In that era any sane kid's first thought after hearing those words was to wonder if he still has time to kill himself before that moment rolled around. You see, in those distant days, the fathers were at work and the mothers were at home, and when the fathers came home from work they were likely to be just a wee bit cranky from "the job." Hence, their mood was always going to hover somewhere between mildly irritated and homicidal, depending on what had happened at the office and in the bar car after work.

My how things have changed. I'll have another anecdote in this vein shortly.