Piro spent almost seven months debriefing Saddam in a plan based on winning his confidence by convincing him that Piro was an important envoy who answered to President Bush. This and being Saddam’s sole provider of items like writing materials and toiletries made the toppled Iraqi president open up to Piro, a Lebanese-American and one of the few FBI agents who spoke Arabic.

“He told me he initially miscalculated… President Bush’s intentions. He thought the United States would retaliate with the same type of attack as we did in 1998…a four-day aerial attack,” says Piro. “He survived that one and he was willing to accept that type of attack.” “He didn’t believe the U.S. would invade?” asks Pelley, “No, not initially,” answers Piro.

[…]

Saddam still wouldn’t admit he had no weapons of mass destruction, even when it was obvious there would be military action against him because of the perception he did. Because, says Piro, “For him, it was critical that he was seen as still the strong, defiant Saddam. He thought that [faking having the weapons] would prevent the Iranians from reinvading Iraq,” he tells Pelley.

He also intended and had the wherewithal to restart the weapons program. “Saddam] still had the engineers. The folks that he needed to reconstitute his program are still there,” says Piro. “He wanted to pursue all of WMD…to reconstitute his entire WMD program.” This included chemical, biological and nuclear weapons, Piro says.

Also see, “Spies, Lies, and Weapons: What Went Wrong,” (PDF) by Kenneth Pollack, on this topic in general.

It’s not often that I find myself recommending a French state-owned industry as the answer to major U.S. problems, but I guess there’s an exception to every rule.

In this case the exception is the French nuclear energy company Areva, which provides about 80 percent of the country’s electricity from 58 nuclear power plants. . .

Contrast that with the United States, where just 20 percent of electricity comes from nuclear plants, no commercial reactor has come on line since 1996, no new reactor has been ordered for decades, and debate about nuclear power remains paralyzing. . .

[. . .]

Nuclear power has proved safe in both France and America — not one radiation-related death has occurred in the history of U.S. commercial nuclear power. It constitutes a vital alternative to the greenhouse-gas spewing coal-power plants that account for over 50 percent of U.S. electricity generation. Thousands of people die annually breathing the noxious particles of coal-fire installations.

[. . .]

“Nuclear power is the most efficient energy source we have,” said Gwyneth Cravens, author of “Power to Save the World: The Truth About Nuclear Power.” “Uranium is energy-dense. If you got all your electricity from nuclear for your lifetime, your share of the waste would fit in a soda can.”

America needs to start building nuclear power plant, in large numbers and soon.

But the big two are Yahoo Mail and Gmail. Long time provider Yahoo Mail (not sure when it was launched, but I got my account in late 1998) currently has about three times as many users as Gmail, which came about in April 2004. Yahoo Mail has in the past few months added (or re-added) many features that originally drew users to Gmail, so most comparisons of the two are outdated.

I’ve been using the new Gmail and the new Yahoo Mail, both of which are based on Ajax and have fairly simple interfaces. Both have pros and cons:

Sending from other accounts: Since I have a few email addresses from my own domains, and often take extended business trips, the most important feature I’m interested is being able to “send as” those other accounts. Both let you do this (e.g., send from username@areastudies.org, etc.). You can use a pull-down menu to select which account to send from, including the @gmail or @yahoo account. However, Gmail has a fatal flaw in this area; some versions of MS Outlook will display:

From: username@gmail.com [mailto:username@gmail.com] On
Behalf Of username@your_domain

This reveals your Gmail address to those you send to, something I’d prefer not occur, and Gmail does not seem to be interested in fixing it. Yahoo Mail does not do this; if you “send as” that is exactly how the mail will be delivered. After I discovered this, I found myself manually switching from Gmail to Yahoo Mail to reply to some emails in order to protect my Gmail username. For me this was the last straw in giving up Gmail for Yahoo Mail.

(more…)

Six years after new rules made it much easier to get a license to carry concealed weapons, the number of Michiganders legally packing heat has increased more than six-fold.

But dire predictions about increased violence and bloodshed have largely gone unfulfilled, according to law enforcement officials and, to the extent they can be measured, crime statistics.

The incidence of violent crime in Michigan in the six years since the law went into effect has been, on average, below the rate of the previous six years. The overall incidence of death from firearms, including suicide and accidents, also has declined.

[. . .]

“I think the general consensus out there from law enforcement is that things were not as bad as we expected,” said Woodhaven Police Chief Michael Martin, cochair of the legislative committee for the Michigan Association of Chiefs of Police. “There are problems with gun violence. But … I think we can breathe a sigh of relief that what we anticipated didn’t happen.”

John Lott, a visiting professor at the University of Maryland who has done extensive research on the role of firearms in American society, said the results in Michigan since the law changed don’t surprise him.

Academic studies of concealed weapons laws that generally allow citizens to obtain permits have shown different results, Lott said. About two-thirds of the studies suggest the laws reduce crime; the rest show no net effect, he said.

But no peer-reviewed study has ever shown that crime increases when jurisdictions enact changes like those put in place by the Legislature and then-Gov. John Engler in 2000, Lott said.

The anguished relationship between the military and the news media appears to be on the mend as battlefield successes from the troop increase in Iraq are reflected in more upbeat news coverage.

This implies that, due to the recent successes of the surge and related positive reporting by the media about it, the military is now reducing hostility towards the media.

This highlights the fundamental misunderstanding (or another one) by the media in general, more specifically the media on the left, on this topic; the focus on the negative for the past several years at the cost of very little reporting on all the successes and other positive stories. The NYT article does finally acknowledge this, though there was almost no reporting on Gen. Sanchez’s (ret.) media related comments at the time:

“The death knell of [the media’s] ethics has been enabled by your parent organizations who have chosen to align themselves with political agendas,” General Sanchez said in comments that earned far less coverage than his equally harsh statement that the Bush administration had mismanaged the war.

“What is clear to me,” General Sanchez told a media group, Military Reporters and Editors, “is that you are perpetuating the corrosive partisan politics that is destroying our country and killing our service members who are at war.”

The military is not looking for preferential treatment and the recent positive response from the DoD is not for positive reporting concerning the surge; it is for fair reporting rather than the ideologically based (i.e., opposed to the war) reporting that has been standard fare since 2003.

Writing in the International Journal of Climatology of the Royal Meteorological Society, professor David H. Douglass (of the University of Rochester), professor John R. Christy (of the University of Alabama), Benjamin D. Pearson and professor S. Fred Singer (of the University of Virginia) report that observed patterns of temperature changes (”fingerprints”) over the last 30 years disagree with what greenhouse models predict and can better be explained by natural factors, such as solar variability.

The conclusion is that climate change is “unstoppable” and cannot be affected or modified by controlling the emission of greenhouse gases, such as CO2, as is proposed in current legislation.

[. . .]

And the third co-author, Dr. S. Fred Singer, said: “The current warming trend is simply part of a natural cycle of climate warming and cooling that has been seen in ice cores, deep-sea sediments, stalagmites, etc., and published in hundreds of papers in peer-reviewed journals.

[. . .]

“Our research demonstrates that the ongoing rise of atmospheric CO2 has only a minor influence on climate change. We must conclude, therefore, that attempts to control CO2 emissions are ineffective and pointless — but very costly.”

Parents at a 12:50 showing of “The Golden Compass” in Fort Worth’s Eastchase district were both shocked and appalled to find that the movie was preceded by a trailer for the upcoming big-screen adaptation of the novel “Prince Caspian”, which some parents fear may cause their children to read a series that promotes spiritual belief and “denigrates Atheism.”

“I just can’t believe this,” said Leah Jones, mother of three and proud atheist. “I can’t believe that they would allow children to be exposed to this kind of thing without warning!” (emphasis added)

The hypocrisy is mind-boggling, the irony is entertaining; it could be from an article at The Onion, but it’s real life. Read the rest here.