If you get your morals from the media, then the beating of Rodney King justified a riot but the killing of Vicki Weaver was all right. Some of us hillbillies don’t buy that line of argument.

A common argument is that terror should not be fought through war, but rather, terror should be treated as a police matter. But the truth of the matter is that people have the stomach for neither war nor justice.

The assassination of Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq al-Hariri is good case in point. If any other nation’s political leader was killed by agents of another, it would be considered an act of war. But the assassination of Hariri is being treated as a police manner and it is being conducted to the highest standards that any liberal could wish. But in the end, there is likely to be no justice.

And this lack of justice is the not the result of the matter being treated as a crime as opposed to an act of war. The investigation has almost certainly fingered the guilty parties.

Rather the lack of justice will come about because Bush, Israel, and the world at large have no use for justice when it is inconvenient. At least, that is the conclusion that Getting Away With Murder? by Joshua Hammer points towards.

From the Telegraph….

Hundreds of Taliban fighters have stormed a crucial Nato depot outside the Pakistani city of Peshawar, destroying over 100 lorries which would have taken supplies to American and British forces in Afghanistan.

The gunmen overpowered and disarmed the security guards, before setting fire to the vehicles, many of which were laden with Humvee armoured cars intended for Western forces.

About three quarters of all the ammunition, food, weapons and other supplies needed by Nato’s troops in Afghanistan, including 8,000 British soldiers, pass through Pakistan. The Taliban have clearly identified this route as a crucial vulnerability.

I may be getting too paranoid, but I wonder if these attacks were done with the encouragement of Pakistan’s army. It would be good way of reminding the US of how critical Pakistan was for American success in Afghanistan. The Pakistani army might figure that the US needs a reminder given the pressure that the US has started to put on Pakistan. From the Belmont Club….

Whatever the American attitude towards the Government of Pakistan will be, the US already openly believes that certain former (thanks for spotting the difference, readers) Pakistani officials are in fact, terrorists. Bill Roggio reports that “the US wants the United Nations Security Council to designate several senior former officers of Pakistan’s Inter-Service Intelligence agency as international terrorists.”

It may be paranoia to connect these two stories. But Pakistan has openly threated to let to allow the Taliban a free hand if too much pressure is put on it by India. From the New York Times….

Ms. Rice’s diplomatic agenda takes place as Washington is seeking high-level cooperation in different spheres with both India and Pakistan, nuclear-armed neighbors. Washington wants Pakistan to help defeat Al Qaeda and Taliban insurgents along the border with Afghanistan.

But Pakistani security officials have threatened to withdraw troops from the lawless border region to redeploy them if India and Pakistan slide toward their fourth war since independence from Britain in 1947, Reuters reported.

From NewsMax…

The devices, called Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) machines, allow officials to read remotely any passports, pass cards, and driver’s licenses that contain special chips with personal information.

The RFIDs are so sensitive that, even before a vehicle pulls up at a border checkpoint, agents already will have on their computer screen the personal data of the passengers, including each person’s name, date of birth, nationality, passport or ID number, and even a digitized photo.

The new gadgets are in place, or soon will be, at five border crossings: Blaine, Wash.; Buffalo; Detroit; Nogales, Ariz.; and San Ysidro, Calif. They are slated to have a dramatically expanded presence in June.

Lee Tien of the Electronic Frontier Foundation argues that the technology could make Americans less secure because terrorists or other criminals may be able to steal the personal information off the ID cards remotely.

Tien and other critics warn that people up to no good can use their own RFID machines in a process called “skimming” to read the information from as far as 50 feet.

Of course, the government assures you that only their machines can read the data so you have nothing to worry about.

From the Times….

Water supplies to residents in Harare were cut by the authorities yesterday as Zimbabwe’s cholera epidemic tightened its grip and the city witnessed its worst unrest for a decade.

The Zimbabwe National Water Authority turned off the pumps in the capital after it ran out of purifying chemicals. With cholera cases soaring above 11,000 across the country, and an anthrax outbreak ravaging the the countryside, David Parirenyatwa, the Health Minister, urged Zimbabweans to stop shaking hands to avoid spreading disease.

Companies and government offices, especially those in high-rise buildings, were sending workers home by midday as lavatories became blocked. “My office stinks and the toilet is a disgusting site,” said Mary Sakupwene, a secretary. “I won’t go back until the water’s on again.”

You have to give Islam some credit. No Islamic country has ever been mismanaged to the degree that Zimbabwe and North Korea have been. I don’t want to ever live in Pakistan or Iran, but their leaders are the model of good governance in comparison to the Kims and the Mugabes of the world.

From the New York Times…

An explosion of violence connected with Mexico’s powerful drug cartels has left more than 5,000 people dead so far this year, nearly twice the figure from the year before, according to unofficial tallies by Mexican newspapers. The border region of the United States and Mexico, critical to the cartels’ trafficking operation, has been the most violent turf of all, with 60 percent of all killings in the country last month occurring in the states of Chihuahua and Baja California, the government says. And it has raised fears that violence could spill across the border, because dozens of victims of drug violence have been treated at an El Paso hospital in the last year.

From the Washington Post….

The U.S. military expects to have 20,000 uniformed troops inside the United States by 2011 trained to help state and local officials respond to a nuclear terrorist attack or other domestic catastrophe, according to Pentagon officials.

All the usual suspects are up in arms about how this the end of American Freedom. I don’t have much sympathy for this line of argument. Many of those same people where complaining after 9/11 that there was not enough troop left in American to defend the homeland.

You want to worry about the end of your freedom, worry about SWAT teams that are increasingly being misused to make all sorts of arrests that should not be made using paramilitary tactics.

From the New Yorker….

Lashkar is a big organization with multiple arms and priorities and its leadership is undoubtedly divided over how much risk to take in pursuit of violent operations in India, particularly given the comfort and even wealth the group’s leaders enjoy from their unmolested activities inside Pakistan. If the boys in Mumbai had support from Lashkar, did the group’s leader, Hafez Saeed, who runs Jamat, know of the plan? If so, that would be a radical act that would likely mean the end of his charity’s tenuous legitimacy.

This type of absurdity is why Lashkar is such a problem. No one denies that Lashkar has been behind deaths of many people in India. In fact, it is part of their recruiting appeal.

So why is that it would take proof that they were behind the attacks on Mumbai to de-legitimacies the organization? Because it happened on TV? Because white people died in the attack?

The same thing could be said of Hezbollah. Someday they are going to kill a lot of people in the wrong country. But until they do, they have a sort of “legitimacy.” At least among the people who are not being killed.

From Danger Room…..

Iraq’s parliament on Thursday signed off on a Status of Forces Agreement that paves the way for withdrawal of U.S. forces within three years. The pact — which has been in negotiation for nearly a year — provides legal cover to U.S. troops stationed in the country after a U.N. mandate expires at the end of the year.

But here’s the interesting part: the agreement also makes thousands of U.S. contractors subject to Iraqi law. According to the final version of the text, Iraq will have the “primary right to exercise jurisdiction over United States contractors” and their employees.

Oceans of ink were spilled arguing that it was a mistake for the US to depend so heavily on contractors in Iraq because history has demonstrated that mercenaries were unreliable. One thing that almost no one mentioned was that history also demonstrates that mercenaries are historically the first ones thrown under the bus.

This concession is a poisonous gift from President Bush to the left. On one hand leftest commentators are overjoyed that the hated security contractors might now face “justice.” On the other hand, this concession is going to vastly complicate Obama’s life.

I don’t think Bush approved of this agreement with such machivilian thoughts in his mind. But he could have hardly made Obama’s life harder if he tried.