Was surprised (and gratified) to see the usually-typically-anti-American Berliner Morgenpost's headline (only in German) for Sunday about Putin, Schroeder, Chirac meeting: "Summit of Losers Ends"

Also glad to note that protests have decreased from several hundred thousand protestors in Feb. to 50,000 in March to 15,000 this Saturday. I just wish the demonstrators would notice how silly and ironic it is that the marchs always end at Berlin's Victory Column. (Victory over who would be a fair question.)

During the Dark Ages, Roman Catholic monks kept civilization alive by gathering and copying books within their monastery fastnesses, until such time as literacy and learning could re-emerge. One thinks of them, perhaps, when reading this story, which reports the news that the eminent literary critic Harold Bloom, who is not a Christian, has chosen to donate his library not to Yale, where he teaches, but to a small Catholic college in Vermont. Writes Dinitia Smith in the Times:

Harold Bloom has always railed against what he calls "the school of resentment," Marxist, feminist, Afrocentric and deconstructionist scholars who, he says, deny the aesthetic and spiritual values inherent in great literature. So when it came time for Mr. Bloom, 72, to choose a place to donate his immense personal library and his archives, he bypassed several larger prominent universities that in his opinion house those very practitioners of resentment in favor of a small, relatively unknown Catholic college in Colchester, Vt.

"Dear child," Mr. Bloom said in a telephone interview, using the appellation he applies to friend, stranger, male and female, alike, "with rare exceptions the universities and colleges in the English-speaking world that have sustained some sense of literature as a matter of powerful cognition and extraordinary aesthetic beauty tend to be the Roman Catholic institutions."

I assume the 12 hour break was either, a: a pause to let your logistics catch up, or, b: the beginning of a quagmire.

In remarks to the annual convention of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, Mr. Rove lamented what he described as news organizations' changing interpretations of how the war was proceeding. He said "the euphoria of April 9," when news coverage was dominated by images of a statue of Saddam Hussein being pulled to the ground in Baghdad, did not match the earlier "flood of commentary that the military was bogged down and the strategy flawed." "So much information is coming so fast and from so many different directions that it can also make it difficult to maintain perspective," Mr. Rove said. "Ultimately, we must have the capacity to stand back and see the deep currents and the important shape of events."

I will be speaking on Monday, the 14th, at Metro State College in Denver. It will be at 1:00 PM at some place called Tivoli Turnhalle. It's open to the public, except for people named Tod who only use one D in their name.

From a reader:

Jonah, regarding Ritter. (Insert spitting sound here). The many Marines (and ex-Marines) I am proud to know, upon seeing children in any such predicament as Saddam's kiddie gulag, would have taken "direct action", regardless of the personal or political consequences to themselves. He is not worthy of the characterization "ex-Marine".

Andrew Sullivan has dug up an unbelievable quote about the Kiddie Gulag they found in Iraq. It's from Scott Ritter in an interview with Time magazine from last year:

"The prison in question was inspected by my team in Jan. 1998. It appeared to be a prison for children - toddlers up to pre-adolescents - whose only crime was to be the offspring of those who have spoken out politically against the regime of Saddam Hussein. It was a horrific scene. Actually I'm not going to describe what I saw there because what I saw was so horrible that it can be used by those who would want to promote war with Iraq, and right now I'm waging peace."

Parse the morality here: I saw an unspeakably horrible kiddie torture house. I could tell you about it, but that might result in people trying to do something about it. And, since that would not be peaceful, better I keep quiet and help perpetuate a regime which will torture more children. If this doesn't constitute peace-at-all-costs idiocy, I don't know what does. But the jerk is right about one thing, if I'd known about a chamber of horrors, I would have used the information to advocate doing something about it.

The relatively quick fall of Baghdad shows that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was a "paper tiger" rather than a major threat to world peace, Democratic Sen. Tom Harkin of Iowa said Thursday. "What we were told and what you saw in the press last fall and earlier this year is that he had a massive war machine," said Harkin, the most outspoken critic of the war in Iraq among members of the Iowa congressional delegation. "It looks now like this was just a Third World country - there were people fighting with tennis shoes on, on the Iraqi side," Harkin told reporters. "I don't know what else we're going to find, but they didn't fly even one airplane in the air. They had almost nothing. "So if they were that weak, where we could just roll over them like that, tell me again how he was such a big threat in the past?" the senator added.

Peter Jennings could find not one second for the pro-war rally at Ground Zero yesterday with a crowd estimated by AP at 15,000. But hours before the war began, Jennings demonstrated that no anti-war demonstration is too small for him to consider it newsworthy as he picked up on a solitary effort: "And in San Francisco, a man apparently leaped to his death from the Golden Gate Bridge. Our affiliate there, KGO, reports that he read an anti-war statement before jumping."

A reader informs me that NRODT can't be an acronym because it's not a "word" like Scuba etc. I don't know what he's talking about. We've always pronounced it Nrrr-RAH-Dt.

I've been told the Baghdad looting joke was on Leno last night.

If you were ever confused by what NRODT stood for, you can look it up in this handy acronym finder:

"NRODT National Review on Dead Tree (slang for the paper version of National Review magazine)"

It's about time the military clamped down on the chaos in Baghdad. We haven't seen looting and vandalism like this since the last few days of the Clintons in the White House.

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Hundreds of desperate Iraqi civilians stormed the headquarters of Iraq's military intelligence on Friday and started digging the ground to try to find relatives they believe are trapped in dungeons below.

U.S. soldiers, who took Baghdad on Wednesday and are trying to secure and restore order to the city, later moved into the sprawling compound in the northwestern district of Kadhimiya with tanks and armored vehicles.

Family and friends of detained Iraqis earlier appealed for help from the U.S. military to rescue people they said were in underground jails. As they dug, voices could be heard below the surface.

"I am afraid the people in here are going to die," said a man in the crowd who gave his name as Mohammed Saleh.

Egyptians with close professional or cultural ties to the United States say the U.S.-led war on Iraq has tarnished their image of the country they most admired.

"Before the war, I was undecided about America's commitment to its promises," said Mai Ezz el-Din, 29, who works for a U.S. insurance firm in Cairo.

"Now I have seen them breaking their word and changing their stance. I don't believe what they say anymore."

I'm still having a hard time understanding the ethical justfication for keeping this stuff secret. If CNN had gotten kicked out for standing up to such brutality against its own employees and associates, I don't see such a huge downside. What were the CNN stories that had to be reported from the scene that compensated for the dishonesty of not telling the whole story? Besides if CNN left on such principle, it would make other media organizations look like lapdogs. The tumult from that would have either forced more honest coverage from those organizations or resulted in more organizations leaving Iraq. Ultimately, this would have been a PR disaster for Iraq which desperately needed to win over world opinion and they would have had to have treated all employees of foreign media more gingerly. There was a similar dilemma during the Cold War when journalists were accused of "writing for their visa" -- i.e. softening their reportage in order to stay in the Soviet Union. This was always justified on the grounds of getting out the bigger story. The problem with this approach is it tends to make evil countries seem like normal countries and hence foster a climate of moral equivalence.

Full disclosure: I work for CNN and I would like to continue doing so, but I can't in good conscience say that Jordan's explanation, as offered in the Times, is persuasive. I don't mind the use of journalistic ground rules, but I do think it is unethical not to tell the reader or viewer what those ground rules are. For example, when Barbara Walters types interview stars she'll agree to a host of ground rules about what they will and won't discuss. That's fine. But if you don't tell the viewer what those ground rules are, you are implying that the issues which are off limits are in fact not newsworthy. If CNN agreed not to report certain events or to soften its reporting in anyway, it should have made it clear early and often that it is impossible to provide a clear picture because of the climate of fear and intimidation. I am sure that some disclosures along these lines were offered over the years on CNN, but I don't think there were a lot of them.

Where Jordan might deserve credit is for at least being the first of many to come forward. He suggests that this was a problem for numerous "international press services." It will be very interesting to see what kinds of confessions we get -- and don't get -- from other networks and newspapers. It seems to me this has the potential -- small though it may be -- of becoming a journalistic Enron scandal. Of course, when all of the media is complicit in something, it rarely becomes a big deal.

Funny how that works.

I think you were asking about our negotiations to be able to stay, with everything possible, we pointed out it was in everybody's interest and CNN's interest and Iraq's interest and certainly the interest of the world and of the American people to see what was going on in Baghdad and it was very important to have set of independent eyes and ears to report this. That's a point that we've always made to the Iraqi authorities throughout the years that we have been in Baghdad. We certainly made that point last night. In all of the years we worked there, we pointed out we have reported fairly. We followed the rules and it was in their interests, as well as ours.

Now, of course, it was a request by the network for an interview with the president. Interestingly enough, the Iraqis have never, as far as we could tell, taken advantage of the foreign media in the sense that all of the world, for example, the Bush administration, they take advantage of the media, they speak every minute that they can get of air time they take to get their point across to the world. This is done all over the world. The Iraqis, I think, has never taken full advantage of this. And I think it's a great missed opportunity because the world can hear and see what's happening if organizations like CNN are allowed to remain in Baghdad. And a great missed opportunity for everybody.

Here's the story

This confession really is staggering. One question I have is for the lefty Nation reading crowd. They've been saying the big time media has been banging the war drums in order to spike their ratings. Implicit -- and sometimes explicit -- to this charge is that the networks were willing to risk Iraqi lives in order to make a buck. Well, doesn't this story run the other way, at least a bit? If CNN put this news forward earlier, it certainly would have been considered "pro-war" to the extent it demonzied Saddam even more. And we all know that the left thinks demonzing Saddam was an illegitimate propagandistic ploy. How does Janeane Garafolo explain this admission? What does she -- and the Susan Sarandon crowd -- think about it?

The guys held responsiblee for attacking the USS Cole escaped from their Yemeni prison today according to the breaking news wires (no link yet). What I don't understand is why the TV networks, Fox included, are calling them "suspects." If they've been in prison for five years for committing the crime, maybe they're not "suspects" anymore?

Anyway, sounds too coincidental to me. Maybe they were sprung by folks upset by the war in Iraq? We'll see.

This has been bothering me for a long time. I say things like "Have you seen this morning's Washington Post?" all the time. I sometimes catch myself and realize that it's the same paper all day. The Post doesn't change in the afternoon. It occurs to me that this might be a holdover from the days when we did have afternoon, evening or late editions. I used to buy two New York Posts every day, for example. I might have picked this up from my parents who used to buy more than one edition of the same paper everyday all the time. Maybe there are other explanations as well, but I think this has to be part of it. "The morning newspaper" is now the only newspaper we have all day (not counting the web stuff) but the phrase hangs around for the same reason we still say "dial" a phone number.

From my syndicated column, fyi:

I want to rub it in the anti-war crowd's face so badly. I want to hear the protesters explain why it's a bad thing we released more than 100 children from an Iraqi gulag for underage political prisoners. I want them to talk about how they were fighting for the Iraqi people as the Iraqi people hug and kiss the American forces in Baghdad and greet the human shields with signs reading "Go Home You Wankers." I want them to explain why it wasn't worth it.

On the Syrian border? Very interesting story about the battle for Qaim on the Syrian border. Could be a fight to defend Baathist leadership or WMD. Once again the news is where the cameras aren't.

Young America's Foundation and Citizens United Foundation are hosting a "Rally for America, Rally for the Troops" (and I suppose now we can add "Victory Rally") from noon to 3:00 p.m. on the Mall at the Capitol (between 3rd and 4th Streets).

G. Gordon Liddy, performance by country music star Aaron Tippin ("Where the Stars and Stripes and the Eagle Fly"), NYPD officer Danny Rodriguez, the singing cop former senator and actor Fred Thompson . Video greetings from Ben Stein and performances for the troops by Toby Keith, Travis Tritt, Charlie Daniels Band.

All information at www.yaf.org.

I leave for 24 hours and the limeys start busting out into the sort of argy-bargy we expect in a Dickens story?

Anyway, I'm home and off to work on my syndicated column.

One of the TV embeds is with my brother’s battalion. This morning they captured the former UN headquarters in Baghdad. The place was overrun with looters, whom they dispersed.

Apparently the phones there at the old U.N. are still working, because our corporal gave us a call today (a bit after 10 AM Chicago/Dallas time, April 10). He tried his wife first but she wasn't home so he called my dad. He only had about 2 minutes. Here is some of what we learned from him:

--The Iraqi citizens love them and treat them like kings.

--His battalion has been involved in the heaviest fighting of the war, both in An Nasiriyah and Baghdad.

--Spirits are very high.

--Any time anybody shoots back at all, embedded reporters call it "fierce resistance."

--Reports that the battalion is walking the streets intentionally trying to draw fire to smoke out the enemy are false; they are not intentionally exposing themselves to fire, but they are patrolling Baghdad in an attempt to find those that want to fight and then engaging and killing them.

--Most of their heavy fighting is against the Fedayeen, who are rarely Iraqis but rather volunteers from other Arab countries.

--His battalion--and our corporal personally (he acknowledged after being asked)--are killing the Fedayeen "by the bucket load."

--Brian captured an Iraqi general himself at a checkpoint. A man trying to get through a checkpoint that they had set up to allow civilians to leave didn't look right to Brian. Brian searched his stuff and found a very ornately engraved plated pistol. The man insisted that he was just a farmer. Brian wasn't having it, so he called over his battalion intelligence officer who actually is a farmer (his battalion is made up of reservists). The farmer/intel officer said, "Show me your hands." Upon seeing the general's silky smooth hands, he said, showing his own hands, "Those aren't farmers hands; THESE are farmer's hands!" They handcuffed the general who proceeded to bawl like a little girl as they carried him away. Brian later learned that the pistol engravings indicated that it was a gift from Saddam. [PLEASE tell me that he's bringing home that pistol!]

a Lebanese satellite TV channel interviewed a British woman who went to Iraq to serve as a human shield. She said Iraq was free until the U.S.-led troops arrived.

I'm at Albany International Airport. Had a very nice time last night. I think the speech went ok. I'm a terrible judge of these things. But, no one vomited -- in my presence -- so I take that as a good sign. I must say even the antiwar kids were polite. I'm about to dive into the newspapers and I haven't had time to follow much of the news other than a few minutes of the CentCom briefing. But I can report that the pay phones here at the airport have an interesting feature. They have speed dial buttons for a host of services: security, weather reports, NY State travel intro, etc. And right after the button for "thruway road conditions" is a speed dial for "Lottery Info."

I just love the idea of lots of people arriving after a long flight and racing to the phones to get the 411 on their lottery tickets and being ecstatic that it's already on speed dial! I wonder how many people have missed their flights because they had to check for lotto info one more time before getting on the put-put plane to Boston.

The sight of Iraqis pulling down the statue of Saddam Hussein in central Baghdad brought a lump to my throat. As a boy I remember well the day that we heard Hitler was dead. As a young man I saw the plinth on Gellert Hill in Budapest where Hungarians had wrecked the statue of Stalin,leaving nothing but his bronze boots. Grown up, I shall never forget the look on Ceausescu's face when he realised in 1989 that the Romanians in the square below were booing him - or the deep satisfaction of watching people smashing the Berlin Wall. So it is with Saddam. To hell with tyrants, one and all, and so say all free people.

‘Peace’ protestors seem to like clowns and performers on stilts. In Kurdistan the liberation crowd prefer rather different props:

“We have been afraid so long. We have not been able to sleep. Now we can." Behind him a group of youths danced on the roundabout, waving a 4ft replica of a B-52. They grinned and waggled several homemade cardboard cruise missiles. “I want to drop this on Saddam Hussein’s house,” Hoyshar Rashid,20, joked.”

The House voted 414-0 last night on a resolution "Stating the sense of the House of Representatives regarding the systematic human rights violations in Cuba committed by the Castro regime; calling for the immediate release of all political prisoners and supporting free elections for Cuba." The vote was 414-0.

11 Voting "present"
Frank Ballance
John Conyers
Jesse Jackson Jr.
Sheila Jackson-Lee
Eddie Bernice Johnson
Carolyn Kilpatrick
Barbara Lee
Ron Paul
Bobby Rush
Maxine Waters
Albert Wynn

"He told me that he was going to wash his hair and brush his teeth in Saddam's private bathroom," Gloria Presnell said. "The only thing I could say to him was, 'I hope you use your own toothbrush.'"

Arabs clustered at TV sets in shop windows, coffee shops, kitchens and offices to watch the astounding pictures of U.S. troops overwhelming an Arab capital for the first time ever. Feeling betrayed and misled, some turned off their sets in disgust when jubilant crowds in Baghdad celebrated the arrival of U.S. troops.

"We discovered that all what the [Iraqi] information minister was saying was all lies," said Ali Hassan, a government employee in Cairo, Egypt. "Now no one believes Al-Jazeera anymore."

In a live report from Baghdad, correspondent Shaker Hamed of Abu Dhabi Television said: "We are all in shock. How did things come to such an end? How did U.S. tanks enter the center of the city? Where is the resistance? This collapse is puzzling. Was it the result of the collapse of communications between the commanders? Between the political leadership? How come Baghdad falls so easily."