Virginia muslim gets 30 years for assassination conspiracy

Next up on the good news list:

Prosecutors had asked for the maximum — a life sentence — for Ahmed Omar Abu Ali, a 25-year-old U.S. citizen who was born to a Jordanian father and raised in Falls Church, Va.

"The facts of this case are still astonishing," prosecutor David Laufman said. "Barely a year after Sept. 11 the defendant joined the organization responsible for 3,000 deaths."

But U.S. District Judge Gerald Bruce Lee said 30 years was sufficient punishment. He compared the Abu Ali case to "American Taliban" John Walker Lindh, who received a 20-year sentence… Prosecutors had asked for the maximum — a life sentence — for Ahmed Omar Abu Ali, a 25-year-old U.S. citizen who was born to a Jordanian father and raised in Falls Church, Va.

"The facts of this case are still astonishing," prosecutor David Laufman said. "Barely a year after Sept. 11 the defendant joined the organization responsible for 3,000 deaths."

But U.S. District Judge Gerald Bruce Lee said 30 years was sufficient punishment. He compared the Abu Ali case to "American Taliban" John Walker Lindh, who received a 20-year sentence. [Link]

Much more information is available here at the Jawa Report. There’s been some commentary about the proper sentence for treason being the death penalty, and I agree. However, that’s not was Ali was charged with. I guess you’d have to take that up with the prosecutors. My reaction to the judge’s comment, comparing Ali to Walker Lindh, isn’t a matter of Ali getting 10 more years than Lindh. It’s that Lindh only got 20 years. That guy tried to light off a bomb in a passenger aircraft and he only got 20 years?

Note this little item near the end of the story:

In February, defense lawyers asked for a review of the conviction in light of the disclosure that the Bush administration had eavesdropped on suspected terrorists' conversations without search warrants. Abu Ali's lawyers said they suspected, but had no firm evidence, that Abu Ali had been a target of the surveillance program.

The government's response was not made public, but the judge decided to go ahead with the sentencing after receiving it.

Thank you, New York Times, for handing the defense a ready-made trial-delaying tool. Unfortunately, this probably backfired on them when the general consensus came out in the judiciary that the surveillance program was legal. The judge in this case likely got to get a brief on the communications Ali had been having with known terror cells abroad and that couldn’t have been too helpful to the defense. Come to think of it, that might have weighed in on the judge’s decision on the length of the sentence.

Hostage Jill Carroll freed (Updated)

Just got on-line this morning (and, for the 1st time in a few days, on my own computer instead of a company one working a project from the second I wake up) and noted this bit of good news:

Kidnapped U.S. reporter Jill Carroll has been released after nearly three months in captivity, Iraq police and the leader of the Islamic Party said Thursday. Her editor said she was in good condition.

"She was released this morning, she's talked to her father and she's fine," said David Cook, Washington bureau chief of The Christian Science Monitor.

Carroll was kidnapped on Jan. 7 in Baghdad's western Adil neighborhood while going to interview Sunni Arab politician Adnan al-Dulaimi. Her translator was killed in the attack about 300 yards from al-Dulaimi's office. [Link]

This has not yet been confirmed by the State Department or the DoD, so I’ll keep looking for more information.

Update: Obviously this has been long confirmed by now and has also shown a disturbing tendency by bloggers to jump all over someone who's been recently released from a harrowing condition. Have a look at Captain Ed over at Captain's Quarters to see what I mean.

Catch-and-release, again?

Deja vu, all over again?

When a Colorado state trooper pulled over a van crammed with 15 illegal aliens headed for Iowa City, it looked like their plans to visit the Hawkeye State had come to a screeching halt.

Instead, Trooper John Lopez released the van and its occupants after an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent told the Colorado State Patrol that he didn't have the staff to detain the admitted illegal aliens.

Immigration officials now say that the decision Thursday to let them go was based on a miscommunication about the van's location. Even so, the release has fueled frustration over what critics see as the federal agency's inability to handle the unabated flow of undocumented workers. [Link]

The problem is the state troopers don’t have the jurisdiction to do anything about illegals when they find them. The proposed legislation coming up in the Senate would address that. Moreover, we clearly need to prioritize funding and focus into ICE. Of course, if we were serious about our border security, we wouldn’t be having so many calls in Colorado that ICE’s agents can’t respond.

Additional immigration protest views

Michelle Malkin has been, for as long as I’ve read her stuff, a strong advocate for immigrations laws enforcement and for a strong border security posture. She writes a wonderful post here on the matter of the immigration laws protests I mentioned below.

Erma Byrd, wife of Senator Robert Byrd, dead at 88

Noted with saddness:

Erma Ora James Byrd, the wife of U.S. Sen. Robert Byrd, has died after battling an illness for five years. She was 88.

Erma Byrd, who met her husband of nearly 69 years when they were in grade school, died Saturday at the couple’s home in McLean, Va., according to Byrd’s spokesman, Tom Gavin. He would not say what the illness was.

The senator and members of their family were with her when she died. [Link]

Some things transcend the question of Republican/Democrat, liberal/conservative, right-wing/left-wing. This is one of those, or should be. My sympathies go to Senator Byrd and his family in this time of loss.

“Eternal rest, grant unto them, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon them. May the souls of the faithful departed through the mercy of God rest in peace. Amen.”

Mass Protests supporting illegal entry

Over the past few days there have been protests regarding new immigration laws, specifically one that would make it felony to illegally enter this country. Some of those protests have seen support numbering in the thousands. My take on it?

Big deal. So what?

First off, just what are these people protesting? The law at the heart of the protests and demands does not make a new classification of crime. It does not, as is constantly cited by so-called “immigrants rights” groups, “criminalize” immigration. There is nothing in the law that makes something that’s legal today illegal tomorrow. What it does is raise the classification on an existing crime to a felony level, permitting the application of law enforcement assets that currently cannot act upon the crime. And that, really, is what the protests are all about. It’s not that any of those people (who have bothered to educate themselves on the matter) are suggesting that illegal entry isn’t or shouldn’t be a crime. It’s that they understand very well that the current classification allows for a rather anemic law enforcement response. Raising it to a felony would put a more serious law enforcement threat onto their radar screens and they want to re-frame this debate so as to hide that essential fact.

Protests organized to keep our nation from effectively enforcing our laws do not impress me much. My stance on illegal entry and immigration – and those are 2 very separate and distinct concepts – are well documented right here on this blog. I approve of the latter when it’s done legally and I disapprove of the former with no reservations. All the sign-carrying in the world won’t change that. If these thousands of people want to make sure that neither they nor anyone they know run afoul of our immigrations law, then they would be better off putting down the signs and helping themselves and others out in complying with the law.

Stonewalling at Yale

Courtesy of a link from Power Line, I bring you this wonderful tale of supression of a free press by that bastion of free thought: Yale.

After getting the door literally slammed in his face in the administrative building that houses the office of Yale President Richard Levin, Evan sauntered outside where he interviewed Natalie Healy, a woman who lost her son Dan – a Navy SEAL – in Afghanistan last year. Naturally, Ms. Healy is outraged that a man who was an official of a murderous regime that killed her son has been given a place at Yale while many thousands of better qualified American kids are sent rejection letters every year.

Apparently this was too much for the Yale administrators who sent the police to give Evan and our cameraman the same message that is sent to ROTC and military recruiters every year: Get off campus! [Link]

Wouldn’t want people to think too much about Yale’s actions, now would we? You gotta love a University that cheerfully accepts public funding sending the cops to shut down a journalist doing an interview.

Christians worship rabbits? Say, what?

I just saw this post over at Power Line wherein they detail the efforts by a St. Paul official in removing a decoration from city hall there:

Sorry we missed this story in our own backyard yesterday: “City hall evicts Easter bunny.” As reported in the St. Paul Pioneer Press story: “A toy rabbit decorating the entrance of the St. Paul City Council offices went hop-hop-hoppin’ on down the bunny trail Wednesday after the city’s human rights director said non-Christians might be offended by it.” [Link]

First, a quick nod to a note from Jay Nordlinger over at Impromptus. Since when does an American city have a public official with a title “human-rights director”? Skipping lightly past that one, may I now bring up the screamingly obvious fact that Christians don’t include rabbits in our religious observances? Easter is about the risen Son of God, not some bunny rabbit hopping around with painted eggs. The whole bunny routine is a secular observance, not a Christian one. The ones who should be offended by this spectacle are the Christians who are getting blamed for some tight-assed city official’s too touchy trigger on her “offend-o-meter.”

I guess Santa Claus is going to get the bum’s rush in St. Paul next.

Whiney=Conservative story

I’ve had a few e-mails from folks about why I’m not writing about the recent story on the study released from Berkeley that concludes that whiney (read that: can’t cope with anything without hysterical fear/crying/generally inferior behavior) children will grow up to be conservatives while kids who aren’t (read that: highly intelligent, deep-thinking, easily adaptive to new situations, generally superior) will grow up to be liberals. The answer is simple: it’s pure, unadulterated bullshit masquerading as an allegedly scientific study. And I don’t need to go very far into the study to find all the proof I need of it.

At first, I didn’t write about it because the story, which appeared in a newspaper, didn’t provide a link back to the source material. Searches for the study on-line proved fruitless. So, this was a giant assertion without any back-up. Why waste my breath? Anyone who reads that story and triumphantly points to it with a big “Ah-HAAAAA” expression on their faces without so much as looking for the source material have already made up their minds. The story is merely something physical for them to point to rather than having to rely on their own expounding to make their points. These people can’t be rationally argued with, so why bother?

Fortunately, there are bloggers who actually do care about the debate in question and will act rationally even in the face of a study asserting that which might be abhorent to them. Thus it is that Michelle Malkin goes to the trouble of not only addressing the argument but also posting the actual study so the source material can be seen. Go have a read for yourself, if you like.

Here’s the basic foundational problem with this study: it is statistically insignificant and it suffers from the lack of solid definitions of terms. It also commits the logical fallacy of assuming causation that does not conclusively explain a result.

The study takes data from 95 individuals from the Berkeley area. 95 people. That’s the sample being used to assess the behavior of a population of millions. Billions, actually, since the study isn’t purporting to explain behavior of only the population of the United States, but of humans in general. Selecting 95 people from a geographically very small area doesn’t even rise to the level of absurdity in terms of a reasonable statistical sample. It would take over 1500 such individuals selected from as wide a geographic area as possible (within the target area) to even rate as a blip on the statistical relevance screen. The fact that these 95 people are all from the Berkeley area would tend to create the expection of similar behaviors and value sets which may or (more likely) may not reflect the value sets held by the majority of the wider population. What’s considered “conservative” in Berkeley might not pass for even moderate in Kansas. That’s the definition problem I spoke of.

Then there’s the logical problem of assuming that whatever makes the kid whine in preschool is going to be the determining factor in his or her politics in college. What is it that makes the kid “whiney” to begin with? Who decided that one kid’s whines met the criteria where another’s did not? This measure is extremely subjective which makes it a poor benchmark. What if the thing that makes a kid whine is a set of parents being consistent in what they allow and disallow as opposed to simply caving in to whatever desire strikes the kid at the moment? If the former set of parents are considered conservative and the latter liberal, then we’ve just proven that the parents’ politics forms the basis for the child’s politics in life, a fact we’ve already known for centuries.

It’s been suggested that the reason child whiners grow up to be conservatives is that they’ve gotten their whining out of the way in preschool instead of making it a lifelong effort like liberals. What, in this study, contradicts this conclusion? Nothing, that’s what. I would imagine the Kos Kids wouldn’t be cheering the study were it to be used to advance that conclusion.

So, it’s all just so much gas vented into the atmosphere and just so much wasted paper. Having seen the study, I am left with exactly the same sense of the situation I had before it was available. It’s a waste of time.

You and your bags: separate itineraries

If you have the impression that the airlines lose a lot of passengers’ bags, you’re right. How right you are might surprise you, however:

An estimated 30 million bags were temporarily lost by airlines in 2005, and 200,000 of those bags were never reunited with their owners, according to an industry report released Monday.

The report by SITA Inc., a company that provides technology solutions for the air transport industry, also noted that “the problem of mishandled baggage is worsening on both sides of the Atlantic.”

The 30 million misdirected bags comprised only 1 percent of the 3 billion bags processed last year by airports, up from 0.7 percent in 2004, said SITA, which is promoting technology it says would reduce the problem.

Last year, mishandled luggage cost world airlines $2.5 billion, compared with $1.6 billion in 2004, SITA said, in a report released before Tuesday’s airline and airport passenger services exposition in Paris. The jump partly reflects improvements in data collection, but also the increasing costs resulting from inadequate baggage management. [Link]

When I worked in the airline industry years ago, our goal was a .3% (that’s point-three percent) mishandle rate and we generally hit that. In this age of increased security, it’s a wonder that it would even be that high. I can’t help but wonder how having that $2.5 billion back in their pockets would change the tune the airline industry is singing. Perhaps they need to spend some more time and funds on proper training and procedural review. Sure seems like a better investment than plunking the bucks down for delivery services to get the bags back to their customers.