Wednesday, December 15, 2004

 
Dangnabbit, I wuz gonna' quote some of Mark Steyn's stuff from NR's paid subscription issue, but it took only one Armenian(my mind prejudiced by some of Derb's stereotyping)to beat me to it regarding CIA agents "licensed to kill time." I've reproduced some fine Steyn lines before and will risk violating "fair use" guidelines with the rest of what I hadn't gotten around to:

"On NPR the other day, a member of the intelligence community was recycling for the umpteenth time the line that the Islamist terrorist groups were simply too tightly-knit to penetrate: They're motivated by ideology, so you can't bribe them, and you can't infiltrate them because they're all cousins from the same tribe. That is, as they say in England, bollocks on stilts. For over a decade, anyone could sign up with Osama: Throughout the Nineties, tens of thousands of young men graduated from his Afghan terrorist training camps, and hardly any were Afghans, never mind cousins. They were Algerian and Sudanese, Chechen and Indonesian. Quite a few were British and French. Some were of Arab Muslim background, but others were converts. You didn't have to be called Ahmed or Bashir. "Richard Reid" would do nicely. So would "John Walker Lindh."....."

In the unlikely event that any of NRO's writers(or less implausibly: starving interns)read this, perhaps they'll accept it for the plug for their subscription that it is. And if in court they get a nickel for every time someone reads this site, I doubt the judgment would buy a cup of coffee or good cigar -prices circa 1800s.