Real Clear Politics;

On May 17th, Sandy Berger, President Bill Clinton’s National Security Adviser, voluntarily gave up his law license and with it the right to practice law. That is a stunning move for an accomplished lawyer, one of the nation’s most influential public officials. Someone should take note. In fact, everyone should.
Berger previously entered a deal with the Department of Justice after he was caught stealing and destroying highly sensitive classified material regarding the Clinton Administration’s handling of terrorism issues. That deal allowed him to avoid jail time, pay a modest fine, and keep his law license. It also allowed him to avoid full explanation of what he had taken and why he had taken it.
What information was worth risking his reputation, his career, and his freedom to keep hidden? And who was he risking that for?
Recently, the Board of the DC Bar, which had granted Berger his license, began asking those questions. There was only one way to stop that investigation, to keep from answering questions about what he did and why he did it, to keep the Bar from questioning his colleagues in the Clinton Administration about what had been in the documents Berger destroyed.

It’s astonishing – even given the overwhelming liberal-left bias of the American media – that the Plame non-crime received so much attention, and this much more serious scandal so little. Read the whole thing.

In the future, just shoot them – while you still have the chance.
In the comments reader DThomas takes disagrees: “I think a child brought up by a terrorist should not be blamed for the situation he is in.”
If they’re old enough to pick up a grenade – they’re old enough to take a bullet.

WNBC.COM

According to NewsChannel4’s Jonathan Dienst, sources said federal investigators have made arrests in an alleged terror plot on Kennedy Airport. Four people have been charged. One is in custody in New York. Three suspects in total are in custody. One is still at large.
According to sources, the suspects have been identified as: Russell Defreitas, Abdul Nur, Kareem Ibrihim and Abdul Kadir.
[…]
Sources said the plot involved a plan to blow up a jet-fuel pipeline at JFK setting off a potential massive explosion.

A related development –

A newly released inspector general report backs eyewitness accounts of suspicious behavior by 13 Middle Eastern men on a Northwest Airlines flight in 2004 […] a background check in the FBI’s National Crime Information Center database, which was performed June 18 as part of a visa-extension application, produced “positive hits” for past criminal records or suspicious behavior for eight of the 12 Syrians, who were traveling in the U.S. as a musical group.
In addition, the band’s promoter was listed in a separate FBI database on case investigations for acting suspiciously aboard a flight months earlier.

(Background here for those not familiar with the incident.)

Now online;

The Global Terrorism Database developed by START, the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism based at the University of Maryland, with funding from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Available online: http://www.start.umd.edu/data/gtd/.
The database, five years in the making, includes 80,000 terror incidents from 1970 through 2004. START plans to update the database through 2007 within the next 12 months. The Internet site is designed to be as user friendly as possible. Each attack is coded on more than 100 variables to aid in the identification and explanation of trends in domestic and international terrorism.
“This is a powerful new weapon in the hands of researchers and policy-makers who must respond to the threat of terrorism,” says Gary LaFree, director of START, a University of Maryland professor and a criminologist by training. “We’re not just counting up the number of attacks. We’re looking at a long list of specific details, as well as social and economic considerations that may help us understand the ‘whys’ and ‘hows’ of terrorism. This can especially help counterterrorism experts and researchers improve their understanding of violent radical groups and movements, and to predict the nature of future incidents.”

Cool tool for a few bloggers I can think of, too.

Backign up earlier commentary by MIchael Yon, more good news from the heart of the Sunni insurgency;

The level of violence has plummeted in recent weeks. An alliance of U.S. troops and local tribes has been very effective in moving against the al-Qaeda foreign fighters. A senior U.S. military official told me—confirming reports from several other sources—that there have been “a couple of days recently during which there were zero effective attacks and less than 10 attacks overall in the province (keep in mind that an attack can be as little as one round fired). This is a result of sheiks stepping up and opposing AQI [al-Qaeda in Iraq] and volunteering their young men to serve in the police and army units there.” The success in Anbar has led sheiks in at least two other Sunni-dominated provinces, Nineveh and Salahaddin, to ask for similar alliances against the foreign fighters.

In Time magazine, of all places.

But let the guns do the talking;

The Taliban’s much-vaunted spring offensive has stalled apparently due to lack of organisation after dozens of middle-ranking commanders were killed by British troops in the past year, according to military sources.
The death last week of the key Taliban leader Mullah Dadullah at the hands of American special forces has harmed the Taliban’s morale to the point that local commanders are having to tell their troops to “remain professional” despite the loss.
After suffering more than 1,000 dead in battles with the Parachute Regiment and Royal Marines in the last year, the Taliban retired to regroup and re-equip last winter.
A spring offensive was ordered by the Taliban leadership based in Quetta, Pakistan, and was meant to be launched in late March.
But a lack of mid-level commanders has meant that there has been little co-ordination to bring about the offensive.
“They are getting strategic guidance from Quetta but this is not translating on the ground,” a military source said.
“It’s a bit premature to discuss the Taliban as a spent force. I believe that they are struggling but still maintain a capability to carry out attacks on a daily basis. But I would suggest in the long term the Taliban may just peter out.”

Very good – may they “negotiate” them to the last man.
Though, expect our own Taliban Jack to be displeased about this setback for a “failing and futile mission”;

Afghanistan’s most famous woman MP has been thrown out of the country’s parliament for saying that her fellow parliamentarians are less competent than farmyard animals.

That’s right – she wasn’t dragged into a soccer stadium and shot.

By the way, what happened to the UN in all of this? Nahr el-Bared is a UN refugee camp, and they’re supposed to keep the inhabitants disarmed.

Always finish up with the fertilizer.
(h/t Maz2)

“And no Western media noticed?”
Business as usual, I’d say.

Pierre Legrand;

Fighting terror with a Law Enforcement Model – who knew we got stupid again?
Here we are again with the FBI trying to fit a law enforcement model over a terror war. In New Jersey the FBI admits that they know of 4 other “accomplices” who were seen in the company of the 6 already arrested but that they don’t have enough evidence to arrest them. Haven’t we been here before?”

Related questions;

Why would Albanian-speaking Muslim refugees from the Balkans try to murder American soldiers? After all, the United States — not bin Laden’s rag-tag jihadists — saved Bosnia and Kosovo? And we did that by bombing the capital of a Christian European nation.
But then, why did a mixed-up Albanian Muslim in Salt Lake City, one Sulejman Talovic, go on a shopping-mall shooting spree? Five innocents were killed in the attack before the murderer himself was shot and killed.
And why, after pouring billions of dollars into Afghanistan, did poor, mixed-up Omeed Aziz Popal, an Afghan Muslim, try to run over several innocents in San Francisco near a Jewish center in September 2006?
Or, for that matter, why did an angry Muslim Pakistani gun down Jews in Seattle?
Or, again, why earlier last year, did a 22-year-old Iranian-American Muslim drive his sport utility vehicle into a crowded pedestrian zone at the University of North Carolina?

(Both links are lengthy, and I’ve quoted just the intros.)

Ed Morrissey on today’s FBI arrests of al-Qaeda wanna-bes in New Jersey;

In what seems a familiar move among al-Qaeda jihadis, they had videotaped their training as well as angry statements denouncing America. And, in what seems like familiar stupidity among tri-state jihadis, they brought the film to a retail store to get it made into DVDs. This recalls the idiot who tried to get his deposit back on the Ryder rental truck used to blow up the World Trade Center garage in 1993. That allowed the FBI to track down the terrorist cell that executed the attack.

This AP account provides the type of detail we don’t often get from a media ordinarily mired in “broad strata” whitewash;

The three brothers owned a roofing business, and the women in the ethnic Albanian family wore head scarves. They kept farm animals in the backyard until others in the neighborhood of tidy two-story houses complained, Levine said.
Authorities say the brothers’ unremarkable blue-collar lives belied the mayhem they allegedly planned to unleash with others in a plot to kill hundreds of soldiers at Fort Dix. They and three other foreign-born Muslims living in the area were arrested Monday night.
[…]
Also arrested were Mohamad Ibrahim Shnewer, 22, of Cherry Hill; Serdar Tatar, 23, of Philadelphia; and Agron Abdullahu, 24, of Buena Vista Township. Shnewer and Tatar were charged in the alleged plot; Abdullah was charged with aiding and abetting the Duka brothers’ illegal possession of weapons.
The Duka brothers were born in the former Yugoslavia and residing illegally in the U.S. Shnewer, a native of Jordan; Tatar, a native of Turkey; and Abdullahu, who was born in the former Yugoslavia, are legal residents.
Dritan and Shain Duka once owned a pizza shop in Turnersville, N.J., about 35 miles from Fort Dix. They sold it in June 2005 to Tony Giordano, who now operates it as Tony Soprano’s Pizza, Giordano said. He said it was “a filthy rat trap” before he remodeled it.
“I had a brief encounter with” Dritan Duka, who goes by Tony, Giordano said. “They weren’t the friendliest people, but then again, who would know something like that?”
Levine recalled seeing some of the Dukas shooting paintballs at trees in their front yard, an incident that seemed harmless at the time. Authorities say the group spoke of playing paintball as a training exercise for the attack.
Shnewer, a cab driver in Philadelphia who comes across in the criminal complaint as the group’s dominant figure, lived just a few miles away.
Neighbors there said four or five families appeared to be living in the house and there were frequent visitors, but they did not mingle with their neighbors.
“They kept to themselves,” said Don Bauer, 40, who lives across the street.

By way of comparison, a decidedly “or so the FBI alleges” CBC account.