At a party to celebrate the elevation of a friend to the National Security Council staff, I ran into an official at the Department of Homeland Security. (I am using no names because it is understood that parties are off-the-record events.)

Would it be better to capture bin Laden alive or dead? Alive seems the obvious, though entirely unlikely, best option. He is a walking treasure house of information about future attacks, the identity and location of key operatives, secret sources of funds and so on.

She, the DHS person, argued otherwise. While she was somewhat concerned about what torturing bin Laden would do to our standing in the world, she was even more concerned about the kidnappings and bombings that would occur as his followers try to free him.

This is a valid concern. Elements of Al Qaeda carried out an Air India hijacking to free one of its mid-level operatives, back in the 1990s. Palestinian terrorists kindap Israelis in order to get their comrades released.

Wouldn’t the intelligence value of a live UBL outweigh the potential harms caused by his followers? And wouldn’t they, not us, be responsible for the evil they do?

No, she insisted. Their actions would be triggered by our capture of bin Laden.

Here party-politeness stopped me from saying a number of things, from pressing the argument. Triggered? I thought.

Why do people act as if al Qaeda and its ilk are robots, beings you simply react and can’t be held morally responsible?

And why isn’t the intelligence and propaganda value of capturing bin Laden considered? Then, it hit me. The terror attacks that followed his capture would be bad for some people’s careers.

Makes you wonder just how much of our government really believes that it is at war?

All I can say is read this.

It is a great story of heroism and leadership.

You may think you know all there is to know about Guadacanal, but there are some fresh details in here, especially in the last paragraph.

Every once in a while someone comes out of the Washington maw and says something so transparently true, but politically incorrect, that no one politics can meaningfully respond.

This week it was Dave Helfert’s turn. Helfert, who for works for Rep. Neil Ambroncrobie (D-Hawaii), wrote a memo criticizing the Democratic party message on the S-CHIP debate. It has been bouncing around the Democratic precincts of Capitol Hill for the past few days.

Here is an interesting quote that the Politico buried at the end of its story:

His memo is sharply critical of Republican policies but also suggests a neurological explanation for Republican message success: By using emotional appeals and warning of dire threats, Republicans can trigger neurons called “amygdalae” in the temporal lobe, which is the seat of the “fight or flight” response in the brain.

“Almost every Republican message contains a simple and direct moral imperative, a stark contrast between good and evil, right and wrong, common sense and fuzzy liberal thinking,” Helfert wrote. “Meanwhile, we’re trying to ignite passions with analyses of optimum pupil-teacher ratios.”

I guess moral relativism doesn’t sell as well as voters as it does to gullible college students.

In the wake of the release of the Sept. 7 transcripts between Beauchamp, the fabricator, and his New Republic editors, it hard to look at TNR the same way.

If editor Frank Foer had simply investigated Beauchamp’s account and said the equivalent of “Oops, we goofed,” than this would never have become a “New Republic scandal.” It would have been a “Beauchamp” scandal. Why did Foer import the scandal into sacred walls of the historic New Republic?

Was he so interested in denying he had been snookered that he overlooked the long-term needs of the institution, that he, as editor, was duty-bound to defend? In other words, is Foer so profoundly selfish that he chose to give a cancer to his magazine to avoid a slight to himself?

Peggy Noonan has some interesting thoughts, to which I would concur that she might be right that upper-income Ivy Leaguers are uniquely susceptible to journalistic fraud. The best and the brightest usually don’t have good b.s. detectors.

But, finally, let’s keep in mind what debt we owe Bob Owens over at Confederate Yankee, the Weekly Standard and a few other bloggers. We the reading public owe them two debts: one, by castigating the TNR for publishing a fraud masquerading as a fact, they keep all other reporters on their toes; and two, Owens et al almost certainly stopped Beauchamp from selling the movie rights.

If the fabricator’s tale became another “Jarhead” or “Apocalpyse Now,” soon its flickering fiction would be seen as reality. We have a lot of people in the country who don’t want to leave Plato’s cave and a good number who want to supply diversions for the cave dwellers.

Thanks to Owens, Beauchamp won’t be one of them. This is how false history is stopped.

Instaputz and Hairy Fishnuts are not bloggers I regularly visit. In fact, I had never heard of them.

So I bit surprised to learn that there is a little attack on me up on Instaputz, combined with an old photograph taken in Brussels. Perhaps they are doing a bit of blog-climbing, trying to attack their way to higher ratings. If so, best of luck to them. But check out the attack on me because I think it reveals what is wrong with the national conversation today.

First comes the inability to read carefully. In the Code Pink post below, I wasn’t making fun of the Code Pinkers weight per se, but illustrating how their bodies and their clothes did not match. In other words, grandmothers dressing as their granddaughters. Next, I contended that this kind of arrested development seems to infect their thinking about the war.

Again the problem of reading comprehension reappears. I never said one had to go to Iraq to have a viable opinion on the war. But if you are going on national television and run a national advocacy group devoted to any position on the war, one needs to be sure one has a firm foundation for one’s views. Going to Iraq and interviewing the decision makers is one way. Meeting and talking to American and Iraqi politicians and military officers when they visit the U.S. is another way. Reading a lot of history and official reports is another. Just reading the newspaper and watching tv doesn’t cut it , at least for a serious person.

Instead of engaging these points, Instaputz twists my words to make some cheap shots. And, notice the anger and the bitterness in his voice? Instaputz could be a partisan of the left or the right, it doesn’t matter. They both do this. Poor reading skills, mixed with anger and cheap shots. It doesn’t portend well for the future of the country.

The first thing I saw was the dried-out stalks of legs, suspending a ludicrously tiny mini-skirt. Above the mini-miniskirt was a tight t-shirt, stretched across a late middle-aged swollen watermelon of tummy. Still higher, was a grandmother’s face framed by a teenaged bob and a hat that said “Code Pink.”

I was in Fox News Channels’ Green Room, which is normally a place a suits and power dresses.

Upon beholding the two women from Code Pink–one destined for the airwaves, the other said she was her “support” (for the emotionally grueling job of appearing on television)–my first thought was that they should be in a psychiatrist’s waiting room, not Fox’s.

It wasn’t what they had to say that made them mildly insane. It was how they dressed. While a 20-year old in a mini-skirt might get a respectful hearing on her Iraq war views, if only because she is seen as transitioning between teenhood and adulthood, a 60-year old in a mini-skirt is simply laughable and sad. Sorry, Code Pink activists should not be raiding their granddaughters’ closets. If they can’t see how the world sees them when they do, well, it is more evidence that age and wisdom have become unlinked.

It is also the way the Code Pinkers talked. Each one said that they were “frightened” by President Bush and that the war was “ugly.” These are literally childish complaints.

I couldn’t resist, so I asked: “When was the last time that you were in Iraq?”

Oh, they said, they would never go. It was too dangerous and so on.

But, I asked, how can you be sure if your views are correct if you haven’t seen the war first-hand?

They seemed puzzled by the question. They went on to cite television and print reports and activists they knew and so on.

Finally, I cut in. “You know that there are intelligence failures related to Iraq. What if there are media failures as well?”

Oh, don’t worry, the older one said. “We don’t watch Fox.”

Even their thinking is childish. So why does any respectable media outlet give them air time?

Ramzi Yousef, the mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, says that he has converted to Christianity in prison.

While he wouldn’t be the first prisoner to make the journey to Jesus, it is unusual among Islamic radicals to ever recant their faith in Allah. (Most prison converts are atheists or agnostics.)

Is the conversion sincere? Only God knows for sure. But he has misjudged American prison authorities if he thinks that a conversion to Christianity will put him on the path to parole. Who does he think we are, Saudi Arabia? For American prison authorities the important question is not who he prays to but who he has killed.

It wouldn’t be the first time that Yousef misjudged how America works. When he was captured by the FBI in Pakistan in 1995, he said that he thought the bombing of the Twin Towers would drive the U.S. out of the Middle East.

On the off chance that Yousef’s conversion is sincere, we should test his understanding of Christian repentance. Will he publicly apologize to the family of Monica Smith, the World Trade Center secretary who was seven months pregnant and about to eat her lunch, when Yousef detonated the truck bomb?

If this report is true, allied forces have made a major capture in Iraq–an al Qaeda money man who used his leather business to launder more than $100 million for the terror network.

If true, this is a real victory.

Here’s an interesting bit:

A statement from the military said the man, who was detained in the central Baghdad neighbourhood of Al-Kindi, was suspected of handing over 50,000 dollars a month to Al-Qaeda using his leather merchant business as a front.

Law professor Jonathan Turley is a bona fide liberal. He’s argued that critically ill killers on death row should be set free, for, get this, humanitarian reasons. He has participated in some of the most important cases that give terrorist prisoners in Gitmo and elsewhere something approaching the legal rights that U.S. citizens would get in court and so on.

Still, he can be thoughtful and reflective. In my few encounters with him, we have always gotten along well.

Still, this article was surprise.

Here’s the money quote:

None of this is easy for someone raised to believe that the Second Amendment was the dividing line between the enlightenment and the dark ages of American culture. Yet, it is time to honestly reconsider this amendment and admit that … here’s the really hard part … the NRA may have been right. This does not mean that Charlton Heston is the new Rosa Parks or that no restrictions can be placed on gun ownership. But it does appear that gun ownership was made a protected right by the Framers and, while we might not celebrate it, it is time that we recognize it.

At least, attack them verbally. Check out this interesting report by Evan Kohlmann over at the Counter-Terrorism blog.