Scrapbook
Scrapbook The Agent Who Wouldn't Wear a Wire For almost a year now, a handful of current and former federal investigators and prosecutors based in Chicago have been complaining that an unnamed...
...Yes, we're stuck...
...It was extremely harmful...
...Washington PR king Hugh Newton, for one, is miffed, and thinks the Bush judicial nominee is worth making opponents mount a real filibuster, a subject he knows something about as one of the organizers with Reed Larson of the epic 1965-66 Dirksen Right to Work filibuster...
...Do they have the mental tenacity to keep it going for hours...
...That's because Senate comity lives, rumors of its demise to the contrary notwithstanding, and the Republican leadership has been unwilling to stay up all night and force the filibusterers to follow the example of, say, Strom Thurmond, who once orated for 24 straight hours...
...So France is wrong to oppose the United States...
...And, if so, against whom...
...Tampa Tribune correspondent Michael Fechter—whose dogged, years-long coverage of Al-Arian surely deserves a Pulitzer Prize—reports that Abdel-Hafiz, attending an unspecified "conference in Washington" in 1998, two years before the aborted wiretapping incident in Chicago, was approached by Al-Arian, who asked him for inside information about the FBI's Tampa-area terrorism case files...
...But there's something worse than a very bad solution, and that's leaving in place a dictator who massacres his people...
...He describes it this way: "I'd say one in three conversations wound up the same way, basically that 'America is the devil.' So I'd ask folks to think about the Marshall Plan a bit and get back to me...
...And finally we've opened a big rift with the United States...
...In the second part of the showdown, which was way too macho, France's pushing got out of hand...
...embassy in Riyadh...
...No, probably not...
...He was inundated with antiwar talk from the Brits...
...The role of France, above all, is to involve itself where there are violations of the rights of man, and to fight dictatorships...
...At one point we even brandished our U.N...
...Vince Vaughn, currently starring in the hilarious Old School, spent time in England working on his next project...
...By combining a military threat—which wouldn't inevitably have to be carried out—with diplomatic and public pressure, I think we could still come up with a common front that would get Saddam Hussein out of there...
...I blame [President Chirac] for that...
...I detest war, and over the past 40 years I've come to know war better than anybody...
...Filibustering for Wimps Funny thing about the Miguel Estrada filibuster: If you tuned in C-SPAN in the wee hours in recent weeks, you didn't get to see, as in filibusters of yore, Joe Biden or Chuck Schumer reading from the phone book...
...Hollywood Diversity Just as there's an occasional outbreak of common sense in the pages of Le Monde, so too the entertainment world is not quite unanimously antiwar...
...We bullied the Eastern European countries that are just emerging from their own dictatorships...
...Thurmond, he says, was one of the "stalwart" participants, "even demanding something to help him stay on the floor for ten or so hours—we got him a 'motorman's friend.'" As The Scrapbook has noted before, this "motorman's friend" was something used by trolley operators in the early 20th century in lieu of bathroom breaks...
...So France is stuck...
...Over the past two weeks, however, ABC News and the Tampa Tribune have reported that the "Muslim FBI agent," whose name turns out to be Gamal Abdel-Hafiz, has been recalled from Saudi Arabia and suspended from duty by the FBI...
...Kouchner was one of the founders of the humanitarian group Doctors Without Borders and served in the last Socialist government...
...Couldn't have been much for the man to do there, after all, if investigating fellow Muslims wasn't going to be part of his job description...
...For now, what's keeping him there, what's giving him aid and comfort, is the fact that we in the West are divided...
...Carmody tells the Tribune that Abdel-Hafiz's suspension is "long overdue" and says "I don't think he should have gone to Riyadh in the first place...
...I hope we can listen to the most important actors in this whole drama, the first in the line of fire: the Iraqis who are suffering under this dictatorship...
...The weeks, the days, are running out...
...Why would he go...
...veto...
...This causes me infinite regret...
...Unfortunately, it is credible, since all these weapons have already been used, and against the Iraqi people themselves...
...This week, we inaugurate the French edition with Bernard Kouchner's March 3 interview in Le Monde...
...Fechter further reports that Barry Carmody, lead Bureau investigator on the Al-Arian case at the time, later asked Abdel-Hafiz to place a bugged, follow-up phone call to Al-Arian—but that Abdel-Hafiz refused to do it...
...And most important, what brave assistant would be willing to help out, say, Ted Kennedy with the "motorman's friend...
...Sometime in 2000, according to his accusers, the agent in question refused to wear a wire for electronic surveillance in the Al-Kadi investigation, on grounds that "Muslims do not eavesdrop on other Muslims"—that sort of thing...
...That was another mistake...
...Yoking ourselves to German pacifists was a mistake...
...These people further contend that they reported the matter through channels to FBI headquarters at the time, but senior Bureau officials unaccountably backed up their recalcitrant Muslim employee—and ordered that the probe of Al-Kadi, who has ties to the Saudi royal family, be shut down...
...France is stuck" After September 11, we had a semi-regular feature on this page, chronicling the "Surprisingly Good Guys"— i.e., lefties who played against type and supported the war on terror...
...It's proof, first of all, that they had the missiles and, on top of that, that they had anthrax and biochemical weapons...
...War is a very bad solution...
...Could the Democrats possibly be prepared for such an ordeal...
...Scrapbook The Agent Who Wouldn't Wear a Wire For almost a year now, a handful of current and former federal investigators and prosecutors based in Chicago have been complaining that an unnamed "Muslim FBI agent" had stymied their pre-9/11 probe of businesses associated with Saudi multimillionaire Yassin Al-Kadi...
...Meanwhile, Jean Claude van Damme—aka the Muscles from Brussels—says that clueless movie stars who oppose the war "are part of the axis of ignorance...
...Iraq is scrapping its missiles...
...We broadened the rift in Europe, rather than healing it...
...Weirder still, the refusenik agent was subsequently promoted and reassigned to a sensitive post as an attache to the U.S...
...So toppling Saddam Hussein is more important than disarming him...
...Is it credible that Iraq would use these weapons...
...How about your Socialist friends...
...France's first diplomatic move was perfect—bringing the Americans back into the framework of the U.N...
...You're pro-war...
...There's maybe a 10 percent chance that war can be avoided...
...Isn't this proof that the inspections are working...
...Where he remained until very recently, even though the State Department long ago —just a few months after the World Trade Center attacks—did indeed wind up formally identifying Al-Kadi as a major al Qaeda financier...
...Yes, it's the main goal...
...And while the Justice Department, citing pending litigation and ongoing internal reviews, declines to talk about the matter in public, it appears that the job action against Abdel-Hafiz may actually be related to . . . University of South Florida professor Sami Al-Arian, a favorite Weekly STANDARD subject and, since February 20, a federal prison inmate awaiting trial on a 50-count terrorism-conspiracy indictment...
...Them, too...
Vol. 8 • March 2003 • No. 26
