Uh oh…..

The Saskatchewan Wheat Pool has emerged as one of the companies involved in Iraq oil- for-food deals now under investigation by a U.S. congressional committee probing the United Nations aid program, which Saddam Hussein manipulated to skim off billions of dollars for himself.
The focus on the company comes as the UN announced Friday it had discovered a staff-rule violation by Canadian businessperson and international diplomat Maurice Strong, whose long record at the world body is being reviewed after he, too, was recently swept up in the swirl of oil-for-food allegations and inquiries.
Six U.S. congressional committees and the UN itself are investigating the $50.92-billion program following allegations of mismanagement and corruption that helped Saddam siphon off funds through kickbacks and other forms of manipulation. A U.S. federal investigation is also underway in New York, and has already issued several indictments.
[…]
The congressional hearing in which the Saskatchewan Wheat Pool was mentioned Thursday saw BNP Paribas, the bank the UN used to broker deals in the oil-for-food program, acknowledge it improperly made 403 payments to third parties or their banks rather than to companies approved by the UN to deliver goods for Iraq.
Four of those payments are listed as going to the Saskatchewan Wheat Pool from 1999- 2000, total value $23.15 million, and another two went to a Canadian-registered company called Limpex Trading in 2001, total value $124.1 million.
No allegation of corruption has surfaced, but congressional officials want to know more about the payments.
Officials of the Pool, Saskatchewan’s largest grain handler and marketer, say that “as an accredited exporter for the Canadian Wheat Board,” the Pool sent wheat to Iraq at that time.
They explain five vessels carried the shipments under the oil-for-food program, which the UN launched in late 1996 as a way to provide food and medicine to ordinary Iraqis as it pressed sanctions against the Saddam regime over weapons inspections.
“We received all the required verified approvals, and I have no reason to question the documentation wasn’t valid,” Mayo Schmidt, chief executive officer of the Saskatchewan Wheat Pool, said Friday in an interview.
“We disclosed in our annual report of 2000 that there were shipments to Iraq. In fact, we ended up suffering an $8.7-million loss because portions of the CWB wheat were rejected, and there were costs related to unloading delays and the transfer of the wheat to alternative buyers.”

All those folks who bailed on their SWP shares 10 days ago will be feeling pretty lucky, I think.
Background links
uswheat.org: ” Saddam Hussein forbade any purchases of U.S. wheat in 1998, others had a virtual lock on the closed market, working through the Oil for Food Program”
From an article on the investigation into involvement by the Australian Wheat Board – “everyone who participated in this program benefited. You were not a player unless you were giving something to Saddam.”

Senator Norm Coleman, Chairman of the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations has subpoenaed the two lead Oil-For-Food investigators who resigned from Volcker’s committee.
Volker has directed them not to testify. Coleman is not amused.

I spoke with Mr. Volcker yesterday and expressed my grave and growing concerns about the credibility and independence of the investigation into the criminal misconduct that occurred in the U.N. Oil-for-Food program. Robert Parton and Miranda Duncan’s resignation from the Independent Inquiry Committee (IIC), and a lack of adequate explanation for their departure, only fuels concerns about the credibility of the IIC led by Mr. Volcker. His refusal to permit Mr. Parton and Ms. Miranda to cooperate with the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigation (PSI) cannot stand. I have directed staff to issue subpoenas as soon as possible to Mr. Parton and Ms. Miranda to compel them to cooperate with PSI investigators. In order to preserve public confidence in the IIC investigation and the United Nations, it is vital to hear from these two individuals immediately.

Claudia Rosett is, as usual, at the forefront on UNScam reporting;

At the United Nations itself, heads have already been rolling, as one scandal after another has bubbled up from the oil-for-food morass. Several high-ranking U.N. officials close to Secretary-General Annan have been forced to “step aside” – as U.N. lingo has it. Federal prosecutors are investigating allegations that Saddam sent millions in bribes to two as-yet-unnamed high-ranking U.N. officials to help shape the program in his favor. But all the investigating so far has barely begun to expose the full extent of the corruption and mismanagement involved in oil for food, under which Saddam grafted billions out of more than $110 billion in U.N.-approved oil sales and relief purchases meant to help the people of Iraq.
“Follow the money,” says Mr. Rohrabacher, who adds, “Sometimes it’s easy to miss the fact that the bank is right in the middle of it.”
That bank is the New York branch of the French bank, BNP Paribas (formerly the Banque Nationale de Paris). Asked to answer questions related to BNP’s role in oil for food and its handling of such matters as letters of credit and banking fees, BNP officials responded via a public relations firm, saying they “really don’t want to talk to anybody before the hearing.”
Among questions the subcommittee is likely to pursue is why BNP, straying outside its contract with the United Nations, reassigned letters of credit – meaning that payments from the Iraq escrow account guaranteed to one contractor approved by the United Nations for a given deal were instead sent to an unapproved third party. Under a U.N. sanctions regime, in which the basic aim of oil for food was to monitor Saddam’s deals, such rogue payments, running right through the bank entrusted with the account, should have raised red flags. But the United Nations made no complaint. According to the U.N.-authorized inquiry led by Paul Volcker, the world body did not even bother to review BNP’s handling of the letters of credit. And, like most of the more telling details of oil for food, the specifics of BNP’s activities under the program were kept secret by the United Nations.
Three instances of reassigned oil-for-food letters of credit have already come to light, disclosed last November at a hearing of the House International Relations Committee, where members questioned BNP’s chief executive officer for North America, Everett Schenk, who did not provide an explanation. In all three cases, the letters of credit – totaling millions – guaranteed funds from the Iraq account meant to pay one of Saddam’s U.N.-approved suppliers of relief, the Saudi Arabia-based firm Al Riyadh International Flowers. Instead, BNP reassigned the letters of credit to a Malaysia-based firm, East Star Trading Company. Why?

Information from reader “Brightleaf” about East Star Trading Company reveals it’s registered in the Cayman Islands.

BNP was picked in 1996 for the role of chief oil-for-food banker by the former U.N. secretary-general Boutros Boutros-Ghali. The U.N. inquiry into oil for food led by Mr. Volcker has reported that in choosing BNP, Mr. Boutros-Ghali bypassed U.N. procedure for competitive bidding. Mr. Boutros-Ghali has also been described in a recent Associated Press dispatch as “the subject of speculation” regarding likely targets of the federal bribery investigation. The AP further described him as “good friends” with the accused bagman for Saddam, South Korean Tongsun Park.

Mr. Park has also been revealed to be an associate of Canadian businessman and Kyoto architect, Maurice Strong. BNP Paribas on Oil-For-Food HotseatParibas is controlled by Canadian Power Corporation, of which Strong (and his star pupil, Paul Martin) is an alumni of sorts.

Damian Brooks has read the overview of Canada’s newly released International Policy Statement . For the most part, he’s impressed with what he sees.
Me? I’m settling into Grimm’s Fairy Tales while others wait for the $400 million in Canadian tsunami aid announced 4 months ago.

I was approached by angry and frustrated young Canadian soldiers asking me if I would donate some money, along with theirs, so they could buy parts for the 1960s motors they were working on.
They also asked me if I would take pictures of them giving their groundsheets to the people in a displaced persons’ camp. I refused. I know from experience what would happen to their careers when the bureaucrats in Ottawa found out.
All 200 of us realized very quickly that the money promised on Jan. 3 by the Prime Minister of Canada was not going to arrive, even though the interest alone on the original $80 million would have accomplished miracles.
What we received instead were arrogant and nasty members of the non-governmental organization community, led by the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA). The NGOs made it very clear that they did not like working with the military. This was not going to be a joint effort.
The DART asked CIDA for spark plugs, points, condensers, alternators and distributors to get the Sri Lankan fishermen back on the water. The answer from the CIDA representative: “I’ve sent a request to Ottawa.”
Three and a half weeks into the Canadian mandate, a meagre $50,000 was released with great pomp. It probably represented two days’ interest on the amount of money CIDA is sitting on.
Average Canadians donated their money to get tsunami victims immediate help, not years later. The Sri Lankans have been told by their own media that Canadians have donated hundreds of millions of dollars to help them. Four months later the bureaucrats in Hull are playing God, not just with taxpayers’ dollars, but with donated money that came with no strings attached–windfall for CIDA and its contractors.
Where is the $425 million? The NGOs and CIDA have an automatic response: “We’re here for the long term.” In other words, don’t ask, because it’s none of your business.
Meanwhile, the people of Sri Lanka are in exactly the same condition they were in one week after their lives were shattered by a wave 32 feet high travelling at 500 miles an hour. If you were among the millions of Canadians who donated to tsunami relief, aren’t you curious about what happened to your money?

Me, curious? Not really. I just know it’s the last donation I’ll ever give to an organization that promises matching Canadian government funding.

National Post;

This week, Mr. Strong, a long-time mentor and associate of Mr. Martin, admitted ongoing links to Tongsun Park, a Korean lobbyist charged in connection with oil-for-food. Mr. Park previously enjoyed 15 minutes of infamy in the 1970s as the conduit for bribes to U.S. Congressional officials, an affair dubbed “Koreagate.” This time, according to Paul Volcker’s independent inquiry, Mr. Park transferred funds from Iraq to high-ranking UN officials.
Mr. Park has apparently admitted that he invested US$1-million in a Canadian company associated with the son of a UN official. Mr. Strong himself immediately came forward and declared that he was the official, and that the company was Cordex Petroleums. Intriguingly, other investors in the company included CSL Group Inc., the holding company controlled by Paul Martin (which was at that time being managed in trust). Cordex’s directors included Bill Hopper, the ousted former head of Petro-Canada, the state oil company of which Mr. Strong was the founding chairman and CEO.

document snapshot (pop-up)
PDF of Park Complaint

CBC;

Documents released by the Arar Commission suggest former foreign affairs minister Bill Graham asked for Washington’s help in staving off a public inquiry into the case.
[…]
At the time, the federal government was resisting growing calls for a public inquiry into Arar’s case and the previously secret memos indicate Graham hoped to find another way to deal with the pressure.
In December 2003, public pressure was mounting both in Ottawa and Washington to explain how U.S. officials had been able to send a Canadian citizen to a Syrian military prison.
In a memo marked ‘secret’ the director of Canada’s Foreign Affairs Intelligence Division writes that Graham spoke directly with former U.S. secretary of state Colin Powell about negotiating a protocol for handling future problematic security cases.
The memo says Graham pointed out to Powell that “agreeing to negotiate such a protocol would [provide] a way to deal with the pressure for a public inquiry in Canada and to turn the page of this issue.”

Via Coyne who has more.

This Canada Free Press item has been landing in my mailbox all day. I’ve been out of the loop for much of the afternoon, so don’t know if Martin has been asked to respond to it or not. A small advisory though : Judy McLeod sometimes comes up with some off the wall stuff. But still – where you see Maurice Strong involved….

Cordex Petroleum Inc., launched with Saddam’s million by Prime Minister Paul Martin’s mentor Maurice Strong’s son Fred Strong, is listed among Martin’s assets to the Federal Ethics committee on November 4, 2003.
Among Martin’s Public Declaration of Declarable Assets are: “The Canada Steamship Lines Group Inc. (Montreal, Canada) 100 percent owned”; “Canada Steamship Lines Inc. (Montreal, Canada) 100 percent owned” – Cordex Petroleums Inc. (Alberta, Canada) 4.6 percent owned by the CSL Group Inc.”
Yesterday, Strong admitted that Tongsun Park, the Korean man accused by U.S. federal authorities of illegally acting as an Iraqi agent, invested in Cordex, the company he owned with his son, in 1997.

(Don’t forget Friends of Saddam for updates on Oil-For-Food.)

Maurice Strong is stepping down from his UN post.

Maurice Strong, a long-time Canadian businessman and currently the top UN envoy for North Korea, will suspend his work for the United Nations while investigators look into his ties to a South Korean businessman accused in the UN oil-for-food scandal in Iraq.

Previous post here and here.
The Sri Lankans would like to talk to him, too.

Even as the association of Canadian Maurice Strong with “Koreagate Man” Tungsun Park was coming under world limelight, Sri Lankans were starting to demand answers about where the $425 million promised by Canada to tsunami victims is.
Four months after the tsunami hit, Sri Lankans still don’t have their money. Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin rushed to the scene for a weeklong photo op. Generous Canadians donated record amounts of money on line.
The Canadian government promised to match dollar for dollar, donations from the public. But the promised mega millions never arrived.
According to veteran newsman Garth Pritchard, in Sri Lanka in the aftermath of last December’s tsunami, the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) is allegedly holding the $425-million.
Kofi Annan’s special envoy to Korea Maurice Strong, also a senior advisor to Prime Minister Paul Martin, was the founding president of CIDA.

If you’ve been holding forth the benefit of the doubt towards Paul Volcker’s investigation into corruption at the UN in the oil-for-food scheme, you may officially yank it now. Roger Simon reports that two of the three lead investigators have resigned – “Robert Parton (senior investigative counsel) and Miranda Duncan (deputy counsel) have resigned because information was not being followed up by the Volcker Committee!!! “

Claudia Rosett has Canadian content for today’s WSJ Opinion Journal;

In the course of telling the press on Monday that he “cannot recall a single instance” of contact or discussion with officials responsible for the scandal- plagued Oil for Food program, Mr. Strong did confirm that he has been friendly for years and had a business relationship back in 1997 with a Korean, Tongsun Park. Mr. Park achieved prominence in the 1970s as the go-between who shuttled hundreds of thousands in bribes from the regime of former South Korean dictator Park Chung-Hee to assorted members of the U.S. Congress, in the scandal that became known as Koreagate.
Even if Mr. Strong had the best of intentions, his decision as a high-ranking U.N. official to be involved in any business relationship with the star bag man of Koreagate suggests seriously odd judgment. That should have been obvious even before U.S. federal prosecutors charged Mr. Park last week with accepting some $2 million from Saddam Hussein to convey yet more millions to two (so-far unnamed) high-ranking U.N. officials in an effort to shape the 1996-2003 Oil for Food program to facilitate Saddam’s sanctions-busting embezzlement of billions meant for the people of Iraq.

Glenn Reynolds notices that the “Canadian scandals … do seem to overlap with the oil-for-food scandals”.
It’s almost as if they all knew each other.

Roger Simon;

Who are the mysterious figures known only as U. N. officials #1 and #2 fingered by the grand jury investigating Oil-for-Food? And more importantly is anybody talking?
According to (who else?) Claudia Rosett in this morning’s NY Sun:
At the United Nations, Secretary-General Kofi Annan and his staff responded to questions about the identities of the mystery officials by saying they have received no information on this from federal prosecutors and are as much in the dark as anyone else. On Friday, Mr. Annan’s spokesman, Fred Eckhard, told the press: “I wish I knew. I don’t think anyone in this building knows.”

Now, you Conservative party snoozers strategists, may I suggest that it’s time to get Mr.Dithers on the record with a glowing endorsement of his good friend and advisor, Maruice Strong?
If someone in that party hasn’t been assigned to an Oil-For-Food/Librano file, they don’t deserve to be the government.

Blogging the Cedar Revolution from tent city. Michael Totten is also on the scene, for Spirit of America. Lots of photos, too.
In private emails he warns that there is much he can’t report on, and suggests that the situation in Lebanon is rather tense. We can help in our own small way, by directing attention to their site. Link early, link often.

CBC

A website critical of Calgary’s police chief and his senior managers has been shut down, after the chief used a rare legal tactic to seize a computer from a private home.
Chief Jack Beaton obtained a civil court order this month to enter the home of a civilian police employee and seize the computer.
A sweeping gag order issued at the same time prevents anyone from talking about the case or reading documents related to it, which have been sealed.
CBC and other city media are arguing against that order.

You read that right – seizure of property and gag order in a civil case.
All I can say is… Yay for Google!

Continue reading →

Greg Weston is reporting that Canadian Louise Frechette is back in the crosshairs of the Oil-For-Food investigation.

According to an interim report of the Volcker inquiry, released in February, UN auditors began smelling something amiss early in the program — and ultimately produced a total of 55 audits of it.
But for almost four years, as the humanitarian scheme became riddled with kickbacks and mismanagement, the auditors were stifled by the program’s now-disgraced director, Benon Sevan.
Finally in frustration, the chief spending watchdog announced in late 2000 that future audits would be sent over Sevan’s head, directly to the UN Security Council.
This time, it was Frechette who intervened. The Volcker inquiry reports that Frechette personally telephoned the head of audits, “denying this proposal.”
“(The auditor) then abandoned the effort to report directly to the Security Council on (oil-for-food) related matters.”
The UN audits remained under wraps for another four years until the Volcker inquiry began making them public only weeks ago. (Frechette said recently she believed the audits “were a management tool to be used only by internal managers.”)
Frechette was Canada’s deputy minister of defence in 1997 when Jean Chretien’s government shut down the Somalia inquiry. She is also no stranger to the man heading the Volcker team of 75 investigators and forensic accountants.
Reid Morden is the former director of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service.
He was also Frechette’s boss in 1993, when she was a diplomat and he was deputy minister of Foreign Affairs.
In a wide-ranging interview with me yesterday, Morden said the inquiry has so far tried to follow the money from the sale of Iraqi oil and purchase of humanitarian aid.
“What we will do now is try to give an overall picture of the management, mismanagement and possible corruption within the program overall,” Morden said.
“And in that, we will be following up with Louise Frechette on whatever her role might have been or was not. “What we’ll try to focus on is … was the management structure appropriate and sufficient for a program of that size and complexity? And I think it is more on that side that we will be taking a look at her role.”

Call me suspicious, but considering the incestuous relationships of the characters involved, I wonder how much of this would have been “focused on” without Norm Coleman’s gun at their back.

LifeSite News:

A supporter of same-sex marriage is using the human rights process to take away Bishop Frederick Henry’s right to freedom of religion and free speech.� Despite the Catholic Church’s established role in preparing men and women for marriage and conducting religious marriage ceremonies between men and women, it appears that supporters of same-sex marriage do not want religious leaders to be part of the debate on this issue.�
Bishop Frederick Henry wrote a letter to the Catholics in his Diocese in January, 2005 outlining the opposition of the Catholic Church to same-sex marriages (see coverage).� Bishop Henry called on Catholics to talk to their political representatives and express their opposition to legislation to change the definition of marriage to allow persons of same-sex to marry.� A Complaint filed with the Alberta Human Rights Commission alleges that Bishop Henry’s letter discriminates against homosexuals.�

Local radio is reporting there are two complaints.
[Part I]
Hugh Hewitt has a related article in the Weekly Standard.

All of these charges–from the most incoherent to the most measured–arrive without definition as to what “the religious right” is, and without argument as to why the agenda of this ill-defined group is less legitimate than the pro-gay marriage, pro-cloning, pro-partial-birth abortion, pro-euthanasia agenda of other political actors. Danforth’s position is, apparently, that the agenda of the left on these matters ought not to be resisted, which means that it will
be enacted. “For politicians to advance the cause of one religious group,” Danforth intones, “is often to oppose the cause of another.” That is inescapably true. To come to the defense of the unborn, as Senator Danforth correctly notes he always did during his legislative career, is to oppose abortion on demand. To come to the aid of the Christians in Sudan is to oppose the wishes of the Muslims who sought their destruction. Every political conflict is a choice between competing moral codes.

Ammar Abdulhamid, a dissident blogger in Syria, recounts a recent interrogation at the hands of a “higher fuck”.

This regime is so cut off from reality that it always ends up making what seems so unlikely well-nigh inevitable. That is the essence of my intuition. The withdrawal from Lebanon is not the end of the ordeal, as some want, but the real beginning of it. The wolves who are interrogating me today will once again be sent loose among the sheep to help ensure our continued patriotism.
And the leadership’s line of defense against its critics at this stage will be, as is usually the case in these circumstances, to plead ignorance, albeit it is taking place will be taking place in their name.
Indeed, they might be right. Indeed they will not know all the details.
For ours is not simply a system where the right hand does not know what the left hand is doing, it is a system where the thumb, or the middle finger if you like, does know what the other fingers of the selfsame hand are doing. And so it goes. In order to assure yourself that you have true deniability, you have to grant too much autonomy to the worst most ignorant and sadistic elements in the system.
Yes. Yes. These days are coming back, just when we thought and hoped they were gone never to come back. Few of us might end up going first to this cross, but all shall soon follow. It does not take a prophet to predict this.
No. This is not a comforting thought. Nothing about this is comforting. Comfort has no place here. But then, when the noose tightens, comfort is not exactly what’s at stake.

Via Roger Simon.

Another large earthquake in Indonesia, according to Fox, and the seismic map at the left. Let’s hope folks know which way to run this time….

Tsunami Warning Bulletin
updates – This earthquake was predicted last week by the University of Ulster’s School of Environmental Sciences.
Google News Feed

FoxNews;

NEW YORK — The committee probing the Oil-for-Food scandal says it will correct omitting the name of a U.N. official involved in the international controversy who has a close relationship with the executive director of the panel.
It’s well known that the Volcker commission’s executive director, Reid Morden, and Louise Frechette have had a “longstanding professional relationship” for 30 years, according to the Independent Inquiry Committee — dubbed the “Volcker commission” after its chief, former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker.
[…]
Committee officials admit that Morden discussed working on the U.N.-commissioned investigation with Frechette before he took the job with Volcker but they insist the friendship has not influenced Volcker’s work at all and that the investigation is being conducted in a thorough and impartial manner.
But in the interim report released by the Volcker commission last month, which highlighted abuses and mismanagement of the Oil-for-Food program, Frechette is treated discreetly. Her name is nowhere to be found — the report mentions only her job title — even when declaring that she stopped U.N. auditors from telling the U.N. Security Council (search) about Oil-for-Food irregularities. That detail can be found on page 186 of the 219-page interim report. She later claimed she was just following U.N. rules.
Congressional critics like Rep. Tim Murphy, who also is a member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee that is investigating Oil-for-Food, has accused the investigation of having an unreported conflict of interest.
“One of the things that occurs when one is part of an investigation is, you disclose in the first page what your relationships are so it’s very clear — it’s very clear — if there’s any potential conflict of interest,” said the Pennsylvania Republican.
“The fact that in this report, they didn’t even refer to her by name or by title, and it seems to be that there is some attempt here to hide that there is any link or relationship there, I think only heightens or magnifies the concerns here that there’s a potential for a conflict of interest.”
Frechette, 58, came to the United Nations following a long career as a Canadian civil servant. The first deputy secretary-general in U.N. history, she has served since 1998 as Annan’s chief administrator. She also chairs the steering committee on U.N. Reform and Management Policy.

FoxNews seems to be the one-stop shopping mart for developments on the Oil-For-Food investigations, complete with background links.
Meanwhile, on the Canadian beat..
cbc.ca :Your search – frechette + volker – did not match any documents.
ctv.ca: Your search has returned no results
thestar.com: Your search for “volker + frechette”�did not match any articles.
canada.com: 0 to 0�results out of�0

An extract from Hansard is in the extended entry, in case we were of the mistaken notion that the Liberal government takes the murder of 4 RCMP seriously enough to effect meaningful and immediate policy change towards dangerous offenders. And why would they? As they do each 11th of November, they’re just so much better at showing up for the cameras at national days of mourning to declare their “profound sympathy” and “deep gratitude for their sacrifice” .
It’s not as though they have to dress for these events often enough to become a nuisance – usually it’s just ordinary Canadians who are shot, beaten, stabbed or dragged to their deaths by dangerous juvenile offenders and habitual criminals. You won’t see Paul Martin or Irwin Cotler at any of those services.
Sometime in the future, after their return to Ottawa from the memorial service in Alberta, they’ll go through a compilation of prospective appointments and run fingers down the list looking for more appropriately left-leaning, socially sensitive, Liberal-friendly lawyers to enhance an entrenched Liberal-friendly justice system that recycles criminals like Jim Roszco back into the community as if they were so many empty pop bottles.
And why not? When it comes to election time, we’ll have the Canadian Media Party manning the microphones and chanting “give us gay marriage, or give us death!”. And true to their trained pony nature, Ontario voters will turn up to support them in sufficient numbers to ensure that we get both.

Continue reading →

Publius has been following protest worldwide.

After years and years of waiting, the Kuwaiti parliament is speeding up legislation for women’s suffrage. About 500 women demonstrated.

Demonstrators here [Egypt] are protesting against the new election law that would have Mubarak run against other candidates. The basis? They believe it will be rigged. I tend to agree.

[Nepal] Even after the declaration of a military dictatorship and the oppression of media, the democratic opposition to the king is preparing for a huge protest tomorrow.

Thousands of women rallied in eastern Pakistan on Monday to demand justice and protection for a woman who said she was gang-raped at the direction of a village council, after a court ordered the release of her alleged attackers

Lots more there.

Totten is right – the western media, pundits and the democratic left would do well pay more attention Victor Davis Hanson. They won’t of course – they’ve shown an unhealthy fondness for worse-case-scenerio wishful thinking punditry.