From the WSJ Opinion Archives
7/7
and the G8
Thirty-seven people are confirmed dead, and the toll is likely to rise considerably,
in four coordinated terrorist bombings that hit London this morning. The first
three hit Underground (subway) stations, and the fourth a double-decker bus.
Here's a description of the last explosion:
Describing the Russell Square bus blast, eyewitness Belinda Seabrook told the UK's press association news agency that she saw an explosion rip through the bus as it approached the square.
"I was on the bus in front and heard an incredible bang, I turned round and half the double-decker bus was in the air," she said.
She said the bus was travelling from Euston to Russell Square and had been "packed" with people turned away from tube stops.
This recalls the tactic sometimes employed by Palestinian Arab terrorists of setting off a second bomb to hit the emergency crew responding to the first. The BBC has more eyewitness accounts.
CNN reports that "a previously unknown group calling itself the 'Secret Organization group al Qaeda Organization in Europe' " has confessed to the bombings, though "CNN could not confirm the authenticity of the statement":
The statement said Islam and "Arabism" could "receive the glad tidings."
"It is time of revenge against the crusader and Zionist British government has come in response to the massacres committed by Iraq and Afghanistan," said the statement, translated from Arabic by CNN. . . .
"We still warn the governments of Denmark and Italy and all the crusader governments that they will receive the same punishment if they do not withdraw their troops from Iraq and Afghanistan," it said. "We gave the warning, so we should not be blamed."
Perhaps this will finally quiet those who keep insisting that the liberation of Iraq has nothing to do with the war on terrorism. Yeah, well, one can always hope.
Why today? Prime Minister Tony Blair was with President Bush and other leaders in Gleneagles, Scotland, for the Group of Eight summit, and the BBC quotes Blair as saying, "Just as it's reasonably clear this is a series of terrorist attacks, it's also reasonably clear, that it is designed and meant to coincide with the G8."
Blair returned to London, though the summit will go on, and Blair is expected back in Scotland by tomorrow. It seems likely that the attack will divert attention from the matters that were to have been the summit's focus, both important (poverty in Africa) and trivial ("global warming"). Blair issued a statement of resolve:
It's important . . . that those engaged in terrorism realize that our determination to defend our values and our way of life is greater than their determination to cause death and destruction to innocent people in a desire to impose extremism on the world.
Whatever they do, it is our determination that they will never succeed in destroying what we hold dear in this country and in other civilized nations throughout the world.
Worth noting are some other events that were designed and meant to coincide with the G8. This is from a Monday report in the Scotsman:
Anarchist protesters brought chaos to the [Edinburgh] city centre today as they clashed with police in a series of violent confrontations. Every business in the city centre was advised to close their doors as riot police confronted protesters along Princes Street and in the West End. . . .
One anarchist managed to climb onto the roof of an annex building and egged on the crowd. He threatened to urinate over the police, but instead resorted to dropping his trousers and showing his behind.
One anarchist from Sussex said: "I don't have a problem with violence against property because the people with the money can pay for it to get it fixed. We're all autonomous individuals."
And here's a report from Gleneagles in today's Daily Telegraph of Australia:
Anti-G8 protesters pelted police with rocks in a pitched battle north of Edinburgh yesterday as the world's most powerful politicians converged on Scotland for the historic summit.
More than 200 hard-core demonstrators who had camped at a soccer stadium in Stirling, 30km [19 miles] south of Gleneagles, clashed with police as they attempted to leave the town about 4am. . . .
As police formed barricades blocking roads from Stirling, the hooded anarchists started rioting through the centre of the town, smashing shops and attacking police trucks and cars.
It seems fair to observe that there is something of an ideological convergence between the nihilists who ran riot in Scotland this week and those who committed mass murder in London this morning.
Can
We Get Serious Again, Please?
Today's atrocity could have occurred in New York--or in Washington, Chicago,
San Francisco or any other major American city. Indeed, we shouldn't have to
remind anyone that an attack on a much worse scale happened in the U.S. less
than four years ago--though it often seems as though certain people don't remember.
After all, what were American politicians doing while the terrorists were planning this morning's attack? The House, led by self-described socialist Bernie Sanders, was voting to prevent terror investigators from looking at library records. Rep. Charles Rangel was likening the liberation of Iraq to the Holocaust. Dick Durbin, the No. 2 Democrat in the Senate, was urging the administration to treat al Qaeda terrorists as civilians and comparing American servicemen to Nazis.
Closer to London, the Associated Press reported on Tuesday that "a Belgian lawmaker's report calls for the United States to shut down its detention camp at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba and send detainees to their home countries":
"We recommend terminating the Guantanamo detention facility," said the report's author, Anne Marie Lizin, who is also the Socialist president of the Belgian Senate. She said keeping the camp open was damaging the reputation of the United States and causing the "radicalization" of detainees.
As if al Qaeda was moderate before the Guantanamo camp opened. Andrew Sullivan said it well back in January 2002:
The debate over whether to treat the al Qaeda terrorists and murderers at Camp X-Ray as prisoners of war seems to me a no-brainer. To be a prisoner of war requires that you observe the rules of war. A critical part of those rules is that you wear insignia clearly identifying you as a member of a particular army. Al Qaeda did no such thing. Another critical component is that you obey the laws of war. Among those rules, in Yale professor Ruth Wedgwood's words, are also: "never deliberately attack civilians, and never seek disproportionate damage to civilians in pursuit of another objective."
Al Qaeda, of course, massacred thousands of civilians as a deliberate act. These terrorists are not soldiers. They are beneath such an honorific. They are not even criminals. In that respect, Dick Cheney's and Donald Rumsfeld's contempt for the whines of those complaining about poor treatment is fully justified. And vast majorities of Britons and Americans agree with them.
National Review's Jonah Goldberg quotes a reader who points out that violence such as London saw this morning "is what the people in Gitmo would rather be doing." It shouldn't take another terrorist attack to remind us of that fact.
The
BBC Calls It by Its Name
"London Rocked by Terror Attacks" reads a headline on the BBC's Web
site. This seems unremarkable, except that, as the Mediacrity
blog points out, the BBC's "editorial
guidelines," in Reutervillian style, state:
The word "terrorist" itself can be a barrier rather than an aid to understanding. We should try to avoid the term, without attribution. We should let other people characterise while we report the facts as we know them.
The Beeb does apply this rule sometimes, such as in this timeline of attacks against Israel, which nowhere refers by name to terror, terrorism or terrorists.
Even Reuters is leaving out the scare quotes in some dispatches: "Police said they suspected terrorists were behind the bombings," the "news" service reports from London.
What
Would We Do Without Analysts?
"London Blasts Fit al Qaeda Pattern--Analysts"--headline, Reuters,
July 7
Saved
by the Cole
Remember the USS Cole?
It is the American destroyer that was hit by an al Qaeda bomb in Yemen in October
2000, killing 17. Damaged but not destroyed, the Cole returned
to service in December 2003. Columnist Michael Smerconish writes in the
Philadelphia Daily News about the Cole's most recent mission:
Before arriving in Philadelphia, the Cole participated in the annual Baltic Sea operations, a joint exercise of 11 nations. But the Cole took an unexpected detour on the way here, for reasons that offer a symbolic story about the U.S. military, one which hasn't been told until now. Here is the way [Cmdr. Brian] Solo spelled out the itinerary in an e-mail to me:
"At 2300 hours on 27 June, COLE received word via the Coast Guard regarding a medical emergency aboard a civilian sailboat in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean... more than 300 [nautical miles] to the southeast of COLE's position. The patient was initially reported to have appendicitis. Due in Philadelphia, COLE nevertheless turned and headed, at best speed (30+ knots) towards the position of the sailboat. Simultaneously, the merchant vessel CHIQUITA NEDERLAND, who was in the vicinity of the sailing vessel, took the patient, a 16-year-old French national, on board, and then headed at best speed to the northwest to meet COLE."
Yes, one of the Navy's finest--in the midst of the war on terror--changed course to save a French teenager. (This isn't a picture of the military the mainstream media is anxious to portray. It's far too sympathetic.)
Hey France, de rien.
Jail
for Judy
Yesterday a judge ordered New York Times reporter Judith Miller to jail for
refusing to reveal her sources to the special prosecutor investigating the Valerie
Plame kerfuffle. While her stand on principle is an admirable one, the Times
gets a bit carried away with itself in an editorial today:
By accepting her sentence, Ms. Miller bowed to the authority of the court. But she acted in the great tradition of civil disobedience that began with this nation's founding, which holds that the common good is best served in some instances by private citizens who are willing to defy a legal, but unjust or unwise, order.
This tradition stretches from the Boston Tea Party to the Underground Railroad, to the Americans who defied the McCarthy inquisitions and to the civil rights movement. It has called forth ordinary citizens, like Rosa Parks; government officials, like Daniel Ellsberg and Mark Felt; and statesmen, like Martin Luther King.
C'mon, is Miller really on the same level as Dr. King? Also, isn't Mark Felt's name out of place there? He might have done the nation a service as "Deep Throat," but his was not an act of civil disobedience--which is to say, he did not violate an unjust law openly and accept the punishment.
The Times acknowledges that "responsible journalists recognize that press freedoms are not absolute and must be exercised responsibly":
This newspaper will not, for example, print the details of American troop movements in advance of a battle, because publication would endanger lives and national security. But these limits cannot be dictated by the whim of a branch of government, especially behind a screen of secrecy.
Yet earlier in the same editorial, the paper asks for legislative help:
Most states have shield laws that protect reporters' rights to conceal their sources. Those laws need to be reviewed and strengthened, even as members of Congress continue to work to pass a federal shield law.
What is a shield law other than an attempt by a branch of government to dictate the limits of press freedom?
Whoops!
Today's New York Times carries the following "editors' note":
The Op-Ed page in some copies yesterday carried an incorrect version of an article about military recruitment. The writer, an Army reserve officer, did not say, "Imagine my surprise the other day when I received orders to report to Fort Campbell, Ky., next Sunday," nor did he characterize his recent call-up to active duty as the precursor to a "surprise tour of Iraq." That language was added by an editor and was to have been removed before the article was published. Because of a production error, it was not. The Times regrets the error.
There's nothing improper about an editor adding language to a writer's article, so long as the writer sees and approves it beforehand; and the Times editors seem to have made an honest mistake in failing to prevent the objectionable language from appearing. But seeing what the editors wanted the author to say does provide a window into their worldview.
It's
Suspicious, Man
"A West High Street shop that sells hemp products went up in smoke early
today, and police say the blaze was suspicious."--Cincinnati Enquirer,
July 6
They'd
Better Not Have Dessert
"Climate Scientists Fear Fudge at G8 Meeting"--headline, NewScientist.com,
July 5
What
Would Americans, Old and Young, Do Without Experts?
"Experts Say Americans, Old and Young, Can't Shut Up"--headline, Arizona
Republic, July 6
What
Would Women Do Without Bra-Fitting Experts?
"Bra-Fitting Experts Say Many Women Wear Wrong Size"--headline, Houston
Chronicle, July 7
Maybe
They Should Try Having Sex
"Japan Tries to Make Condoms Fun"--headline, Agence France-Presse,
July 5
What a Difference a Day Makes
We thought yesterday's
item would be the last word on the strange story of "Sandra O'Connor,"
but then a reader called our attention to this
page from the Web site of the North Carolina Association of realtors titled
"Getting to Know Region 5 Vice President Sandra O'Connor." It features
a photo of a woman who, again, looks nothing like Justice O'Connor.
At first we figured this was just another woman with the same name. But then we looked at this page, from the site of Remax Garden City Realty, a Canadian real-estate firm, featuring a sales representative called--well, you guessed it: "Sandra O'Connor is respected among her colleagues as being an outstanding professional and a dedicated realtor." What are the odds that there are three women who all have the same name, and two of them work in real estate?
Power
to the People's Court
Back in the 1980s--Sept. 16, 1986, according to the USA
Today Web site--the Harvard Lampoon published a parody issue of USA Today.
We remember reading one of the headlines on the front page, announcing that
"Judge Wapner"--Joseph
A. Wapner, star of a TV show called "The People's Court"--had been
appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Yesteryear's parody is today's Richard Cohen column:
Over the weekend I went to a party, where I was asked who I thought should succeed Sandra Day O'Connor on the Supreme Court. Without hesitation I boldly gave my answer: Judge Judy.
I have no idea if Judy Sheindlin is a Republican or a Democrat, and her legal ideology is a mystery to me. I only know that she gets the job done and can, in the inimitable words of the Ultimate Judge Judy Web page, "see through BS pretty fast." That's the judge for me. I am (mostly) serious.
"Judge Judy," of course, is an eponymous television show in the tradition of "The People's Court." Ah well, two steps forward, one step back. While journalism might have descended into self-parody over the past two decades, all Americans can be proud that women have broken the glass ceiling that once kept them off the TV bench.
(Carol Muller helps compile Best of the Web Today. Thanks to Michael Segal, Allen O'Donnell, Ron Wright, Mordecai Bobrowsky, Brian O'Rourke, Buddy Smith, Ed Lasky, Ron Ackert, Chris Scibelli, Dan O'Shea, Chris Harbaugh, Christopher Fountain, Naftali Friedman, Ethel Fenig, Michael Zukerman, Aaron Ammerman, Barak Moore, C.E. Dobkin, Peter Malloy, John Corso, Eric Bradbury, Jim Orheim, Bill Ferris, Dennis Murphy, Jerry Bier and Brendan Schulman. If you have a tip, write us at opinionjournal@wsj.com, and please include the URL.)
Today on OpinionJournal:
- Walter Olson: Harry Reid may be willing to give up Roe v. Wade to get a trial lawyer on the Supreme Court.
- Rick Baxter and Gary Wolfram: Gov. Jennifer Granholm wants to make Michigan's tax burden even heavier.
- Joseph Bottum: Mark Helprin sweetly satirizes the British royal family.
