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DrudgeReport.com

 Rumsfeld Considers Leaving South Korea | Antiwar Types Plan Major Disruptions
  Iraqi Soldiers Try to Surrender Before War | Iraqi Torture and Terror

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HEAVILY armed al Qaeda thugs practiced storming a school, shooting children and taking hostages in a videotaped training exercise, The Post has learned.

The terror rehearsal took place under the mandate of al Qaeda's operations chief, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks.

Mohammed, who was arrested in Pakistan March 1, is being interrogated by U.S. authorities at a secret location as the United States tries to learn of other attacks he may have been plotting.

This sounds like it’s a form of aiding an enemy of the United States. If it is it is treason.

They have marched and chanted, hoping to use persuasion to prevent war. If that fails, though, activists are readying a more aggressive strategy of sit-ins and social disruptions, meant to restore peace in Iraq.

Protest sit-ins, especially at federal buildings, defense recruiting offices and military bases, have been mapped out for dozens of cities in the first day or two of any war, anti-war organizers say. Some also foresee widespread walkouts at schools and workplaces. A smaller number talk of blocking roads and bridges.

"Once war happens, there will be civil disobedience. It's bringing to a higher level what people have been doing," said coordinator Bal Pinguel at the American Friends Service Committee, an arm of the pacifist Quaker church.

…

On Saturday, demonstrators gathered by the hundreds in cities across the nation, an increasingly common sight as the conflict looms closer. In Washington, police and organizers estimated between 4,000 and 10,000 demonstrators turned out in conjunction with International Women's Day; by late afternoon, 25 people were arrested on charges of crossing a police line in front of the White House.

The event was organized by the group CodePink, whose name protests the government's terror alert system. "The White House is definitely afraid of women in pink and the power of love," said CodePink co-founder Jodie Evans.

Mike Hamilton reports from Camp Coyote in Kuwait

TERRIFIED Iraqi soldiers have crossed the Kuwait border and tried to surrender to British forces - because they thought the war had already started.

The motley band of a dozen troops waved the white flag as British paratroopers tested their weapons during a routine exercise.

The stunned Paras from 16 Air Assault Brigade were forced to tell the Iraqis they were not firing at them, and ordered them back to their home country telling them it was too early to surrender.

In the Baghdad prison known as The Palace of the End, in the first years of Saddam Hussein’s reign, his torturers sometimes used a crude but effective biological weapon. They’d take an inmate with tuberculosis, who was coughing blood, and force him to spit into the mouths of others. Not all prisoners caught the disease, but all were infected with the terror.

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Still, a steady stream of fresh intelligence suggests there are reasons to be worried. Last summer the CIA learned that Baghdad had ordered its spies at the Iraqi Embassy in Ottawa, Canada, to begin using female agents to penetrate Canada’s Iraqi emigre community. U.S. officials believe the broader scheme was to infiltrate agents into the United States. “Because of its belief that the U.S. is about to attack Iraq, the Iraqi Intelligence Service is now exploring possible retaliatory responses, including conducting terrorist-style attacks against U.S. targets,” said an FBI internal report. Last week, recalling the intelligence, a U.S. counterterrorism source wondered aloud to NEWSWEEK whether an “Iraqi femme fatale” might slip across the border with a vial of smallpox and contaminate thousands of Americans.

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 OpinionJournal.com

Radical Feminist Hypocrisy | American Bar Wants to Trash Geneva Convention
  Norman Podhoretz on Idolatry

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Today feminists celebrate International Women's Day. But don't expect to see any banners proclaiming the rights and dignity of women in the Muslim world, even though many women there are not allowed to drive, vote or venture out of the house alone. Nor will there be any mention of women who are expected to cheerfully endure, in the discreet words of the Arab News, "a light beating" from disapproving husbands.

As the feminists of the Western world take to the streets, there will be no speeches denouncing Saddam Hussein who, in an attempt to garner support from Islamists, accuses female dissidents of adultery and has them stoned to death. And don't wait for any proclamations condemning the widespread and state-ignored practice of honor killings, the murder of young women who have ostensibly violated family honor, because they have held hands with or kissed a boy or, worse yet, because they have been raped.

Feminists had an extraordinary opportunity after Sept. 11, when pictures of other-worldly creatures in blue burkhas shocked even beer-chugging Super Bowl fans into becoming women's rights advocates. But instead of seizing the moment to revive an anemic movement by raising their voices against genuine female oppression, they have given the ultimate illustration of their preference for partisan politics and smug resentments over principles.

Believing that the peacetime criminal justice system's rules should govern, the American Bar Association has just overwhelmingly passed a resolution, urging that unlawful combatants be given access to counsel and greater opportunities for judicial review, all to better challenge their detention. Numerous human-rights groups decry the Bush administration's vigorous interrogations of unlawful combatants, even though these have helped to avert deadly attacks against Americans and resulted in the capture of numerous al Qaeda and Taliban operatives.

Meanwhile, many nongovernmental organizations assert that the laws of war should be changed to accommodate armed, irregular nonstate actors, so as to bring them within the "system," and thereby moderate their conduct. It is, of course, unclear how much moderation can be induced in people who fly civilian airplanes into buildings and subscribe to the view that all "infidels" are fair game.

…

To put it bluntly, while holding the armed forces of law-abiding states to ever more elaborate restrictions, our allies seek to treat unlawful combatants as well as, or even better than, lawful ones. The obvious rejoinder to these efforts to privilege unlawful combatants is that they have already deliberately rejected the most important aspects of "international humanitarian law," including the injunction against targeting civilians, and that offering them any concessions simply encourages their unlawful conduct.

Policy arguments aside, the Bush administration is on very firm legal ground here. Both long-standing customary international law, and the 1949 Geneva Conventions, fully recognize the difference between regular soldiers, who comply with the laws of war and are entitled to POW status, and guerrillas or terrorists, who operate without uniforms, concealing their arms, and deliberately target civilians, who are not. The U.S. courts, in recent cases involving both captured al Qaeda and Taliban operatives, have recognized and upheld this distinction.

Most of our allies, however, have accepted "Protocol One," the 1977 addition to the Geneva Conventions "relating to the protection of victims of international armed conflicts." While this treaty also distinguishes between lawful and unlawful combatants--and the International Committee of the Red Cross assured the world that Protocol One would not legitimize or legalize terrorism--it has been interpreted by "humanitarian" activists as providing more advantageous treatment for "unlawful combatants."

But idolatry is something different: It is to engage in “abominations,” rituals that debase or negate human life, and to display the whole range of social conduct that such rituals make permissible.

The Vietnam Era demonstrations negated human life in Indochina.

The concept of "prophecy," Mr. Podhoretz notes, can be misleading. In most biblical texts it did not have to do primarily with oracles, intimations of things to come and warnings about wars or revolutions. Rather, prophecy referred to spiritual awareness at large. As such, it could take different forms: an inspiration, a dream, a vision of God or a dialogue with him. The Jewish canon thus lists as prophetical many biblical books we regard as merely historical or political: from Judges to Samuel to Kings. And the rabbis deem many figures from the Bible's "nonprophetical" books, not least Abraham and Moses, to be prophets on a level with Isaiah or Ezekiel, if not higher.

The essence of the prophetic awakening is to warn and comfort: to warn against idolatry and to comfort sinners by teaching them how to repent or return to the one God. Taking up both themes, Mr. Podhoretz shows an impressive command of classic and modern commentators and historians, both Jewish and Christian.

Idolatry, he remarks, is not paganism. The biblical authors can be patient with nonmonotheistic spirituality. Balaam, for instance, a pagan summoned to curse Israel by the Moabite king, is regarded as a prophet. (God commands him to bless Israel, and he obeys.) But idolatry is something different: It is to engage in "abominations," rituals that debase or negate human life, and to display the whole range of social conduct that such rituals make permissible.

Idolatry is not so much, Mr. Podhoretz says, to "go after other gods" as to make a god of oneself. The "worshippers of idols . . . were bowing down to the work of their own hands. What they were worshiping was themselves. And in worshiping themselves, in trusting in themselves as though they were gods, they not only failed to acquire superhuman status, but they lost even such powers as were granted to human beings, becoming as dead to the world as the idols they constructed."

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FrontPageMag.com

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Last week's capture of al-Qaida bigwig Khalid Shaikh Mohammed suggests that the Democrats may have been overhasty in claiming the war with Iraq was distracting President Bush from the task of pursuing the "real terrorists." Mohammed is described as the CEO of al-Qaida, with Osama bin Laden as chairman of the board. Mohammed was the mastermind of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the bombings of American embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, and the attack on the USS Cole.

If impeached former president Bill Clinton had ever caught a fish as big as Mohammed, he would still go down in history as America's worst president, but at least he would have a single foreign policy accomplishment. Last September, Clinton was among those braying that it was insanity to go to war with Iraq rather than concentrating on al-Qaida: "Saddam Hussein didn't kill 3,100 people on Sept. 11; Osama bin Laden did."

The Democrats love this argument. Their infantile obsession with Osama bin Laden to the exclusion of all other Arab terrorists allows them to sound like hawks while opposing all anti-terrorism initiatives. They angrily denounce war with Iraq as an unnecessary distraction from their single-minded focus on capturing Osama bin Laden.

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