Apparently the heat is being turned up on Condi Rice by various parties in Bush's own garage.. The charge appears to be lead by Richard Perle, whom I was amused to learn carries the nickname "The Prince of Darkness". That does seem fitting. An op-ed he published in the Washington Post is rumored to be circling around within the West Wing and DoD circles. The obvious thrust, right out of the Iraq playbook, is to get more push for regime change in Iran. Both sides of the partisan divide have been linking this article from Insight the past day:

The conservatives, who include Newt Gingrich, Richard Perle and leading current and former members of the Pentagon and National Security Council, have urged the president to transfer Miss Rice out of the State Department and to an advisory role. They said Miss Rice, stemming from her lack of understanding of the Middle East, has misled the president on Iran and the Arab-Israeli conflict.

"The president has yet to understand that people make policy and not the other way around," a senior national security policy analyst said. "Unlike [former Secretary of State Colin] Powell, Condi is loyal to the president. She is just incompetent on most foreign policy issues."

The criticism of Miss Rice has been intense and comes from a range of Republican loyalists, including current and former aides in the Defense Department and the office of Vice President Dick Cheney. They have warned that Iran has been exploiting Miss Rice's inexperience and incompetence to accelerate its nuclear weapons program. They expect a collapse of her policy over the next few months.

A leading public critic of Miss Rice has been Richard Perle, a former chairman of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board and regarded as close to Mr. Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Mr. Perle, pointing to the effort by the State Department to undermine the Reagan administration’s policy toward the Soviet Union in the late 1980s, has accused Miss Rice of succumbing to a long-time State Department agenda of meaningless agreements meant to appease enemies of the United States.

Mr. Perle's article was said to have reflected the views of many of Mr. Bush's appointees in the White House, Defense Department and State Department. Mr. Perle maintains close contacts to U.S. ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton, Undersecretary of State for Arms Control Robert Joseph, Deputy National Security Advisor Elliot Abrams and Mr. Cheney's national security adviser, John Hannah.

A major problem, critics said, is Miss Rice's ignorance of the Middle East. They said the secretary relies completely on Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns, who is largely regarded as the architect of U.S. foreign policy. Miss Rice also consults regularly with her supporters on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Chairman Richard Lugar and the No. 2 Republican, Sen. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska.

Rolling Stone is also running an article on the behind the scenes dirty dealing within the DoD pushing for regime change in Iran.

The Counterterrorism Blog has posted a transcript of the tape made by the SITE Institute. The full video can be found via Laura Mansfield's site.

Here are some snippets, starting with Laura Mansfield:

This morning’s video tape is a striking contrast to the normal Al Qaeda videos of Zawahiri, which for several years have featured the terror leader in front of a curtain or fabric backdrop. The tape shows Zawahiri in what appears to be a studio, in front of a backdrop with photographs of Bin Laden's chief aid, Abu Hafs al Masri (who was killed in a 2001 US air raid in Afghanistan) and the World Trade Center exploding in flames.

In the message, Al Qaeda second-in-command Ayman al Zawahiri threatens the Israelis and the west in retaliation for the war in Lebanon.

Zawahiri’s key points are:

* The world is a battle field open in front of us.
* This war with Israel cannot be ended by ceasefires or treaties.
* This is a jihad and will continue until the religion of Allah rules the world
* Everyone taking part in these attacks will pay the price

Evan Kohlmann on the Counterterrorism Blog:

Many observers of the recent violence in Lebanon wondered if and when Sunni Muslims -- particularly Al-Qaida -- might respond sympathetically to their Shiite brethren among Hezbollah in south Lebanon. Some have quickly jumped at the news of a new video from Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri discussing the conflict in Lebanon as incontrovertible evidence of a "seismic shift" within the Muslim world towards a united Shiite-Sunni front against Israel and the West.

However, once again, it would behoove us all to listen to the language and words coming from Al-Qaida supporters and sympathizers, rather than trying to interpret Zawahiri's speech from a outside Western perspective. The truth is, within the community that supports Al-Qaida, there is no precise consensus yet on the meaning of Zawahiri's speech. However, the one comment that seems to resonate most frequently among extremist Sunnis is that, in no way, does this video take away from the dire, existential conflict between Sunnis and Shiites. At a maximum, this is being termed a public relations move by Al-Qaida intended to encourage its operatives to temporarily focus their anger on America and its allies, and waiting until later to deliver the same violent fate to ... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ]

The following page on globalsecurity.org has some background on the Katyusha rockets. Some pictures of the missile launchers suspected of being used by Hizballah can be found on the AP Wire: 1, 2, 3. More portable single missile launchers exist as well.

The Katyusha, or Little Kate, was a rocket launcher mounted on a heavy truck that fired volleys of up to 48 rockets nearly four miles. The Katyusha was infamous among German troopers who quickly learned to dread its distinctive scream. They named the Katyusha “Stalin’s Organ.” Soviet guards mortar units were equipped with multiple rocket launchers, the famous katyushas, named after the title of a popular song of the time. Some military scholars credit the Katyusha for the relief of Stalingrad.

The word Katyusha is the tender diminutive of the female name Ekatherina (Katherine). For example, the diminutive for Natalia is Natasha, and the tender diminutive for Natasha is Natashenka. In the case of Ekaterina, Katya is the nickname and Katyusha, a tender diminutive. Katyusha is a Soviet song about a girl longing for her beloved, who is away on military service. The music was composed in 1938 by Matvei Blanter and the lyrics were written by Mikhail Isakovsky.

Yes, the Germans used to call the original version of the rocket what amounted to "Stalin's Cock". Considering the rockets currently used by Hizballah are radically different models from the ones the Russian's created, they should come up with a new name. Since the original version came from a song, keeping with that scheme makes sense. I suggest the "Oops, I did it again". Too long?

It is widely reported that Hizballah possesses over 5,000 Katyusha rockets, some of whcih can threaten the Galilee down to Haifa. In April 1996, in response to an increasingly intolerable attacks on northern Israel by Hizballah Katyusha rockets, the Israeli government launched Operation GRAPES OF WRATH. The operation involved heavy bombardment of south Lebanon. Israel maintained a security zone in southern Lebanon thereafter. Israel needs to protect civilians on its northern borders against terrorist rocket attacks, but the demonstrated failure of the Israel Defense Forces (the most powerful military force in the Middle East) to prevent Hizb'allah Katyusha attacks against northern Israel during Operation Grapes of Wrath demonstrated the magnitude of the challenge. Katyusha rockets, fired by Hizbollah extremists, slammed into northern Israel regularly until the Israeli pullout in June 2000.

On 03 January 2002, in Operation Noah’s Ark, Israel captured... [ Read More (0.3k in body) ]

Katyusha Rocket

Or: How Acidus [*] learned how to port scan company intranets using JavaScript!

Imagine visiting a blog on a social site like MySpace.com or checking your email on a portal like Yahoo’s Webmail. While you are reading the Web page JavaScript code is downloaded and executed by your Web browser. It scans your entire home network, detects and determines your Linksys router model number, and then sends commands to the router to turn on wireless networking and turn off all encryption. Now imagine that this happens to 1 million people across the United States in less than 24 hours.

This scenario is no longer one of fiction.

You can visit the proof of concept page he created and test drive it now.

Quite impressive.

Detecting, Analyzing, and Exploiting Intranet Applications using JavaScript

UN peacekeepers in south Lebanon contacted Israeli troops 10 times before an Israeli bomb killed four of them, an initial UN report says.

The post was hit by a precision-guided missile after six hours of shelling, diplomats familiar with the probe say.

The four unarmed UN observers from Austria, Canada, China and Finland, died after their UN post in the town of Khiam was hit by an Israeli air strike on Tuesday.

The UN report says each time the UN contacted Israeli forces, they were assured the firing would stop.

A senior Irish soldier working for the UN forces had warned the Israelis six times that their bombardment was endangering the lives of UN staff, Ireland's foreign ministry said.

Had Israel responded to the requests, "rather than deliberately ignoring them", the observers would still be alive, a diplomat familiar with the report said.

This is really not good.

BBC NEWS | Middle East | Israel troops 'ignored' UN plea

The Onion on Wikipedia...

Wikipedia, the online, reader-edited encyclopedia, honored the 750th anniversary of American independence on July 25 with a special featured section on its main page Tuesday.

"It would have been a major oversight to ignore this portentous anniversary," said Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, whose site now boasts over 4,300,000 articles in multiple languages, over one-quarter of which are in English, including 11,000 concerning popular toys of the 1980s alone. "At 750 years, the U.S. is by far the world's oldest surviving democracy, and is certainly deserving of our recognition," Wales said. "According to our database, that's 212 years older than the Eiffel Tower, 347 years older than the earliest-known woolly-mammoth fossil, and a full 493 years older than the microwave oven."

The special anniversary tribute refutes many myths about the period and American history. According to the entry, the American Revolution was in fact instigated by Chuck Norris, who incinerated the Stamp Act by looking at it, then roundhouse-kicked the entire British army into the Atlantic Ocean. A group of Massachusetts Minutemaids then unleashed the zombie-generating T-Virus on London, crippling the British economy and severely limiting its naval capabilities.

The entry also addresses several traditionally taboo subjects, such as the influence of LSD on the drafting of the Constitution and the role of funk-slaves in painting the White House black.

Founder Wales, a closeted homosexual and hot-dog freak, according to his user-edited bio on the site, also hosted a symposium of amateur historians at the New School in New York on Saturday.

Wikipedia Celebrates 750 Years Of American Independence | The Onion

The air marshals, whose identities are being concealed, told 7NEWS that they're required to submit at least one report a month. If they don't, there's no raise, no bonus, no awards and no special assignments.

"Innocent passengers are being entered into an international intelligence database as suspicious persons, acting in a suspicious manner on an aircraft ... and they did nothing wrong," said one federal air marshal.

27B Stroke 6 blogged this yesterday but didn't link the actual story they were quoting. Its worth clicking through to some of the other stories at the bottom of this story. Basically, the Atlanta Air Marshall Director has quit his job and is raising a public stir about bad policies at the Air Marshal's service.

TheDenverChannel.com - News - Marshals: Innocent People Placed On 'Watch List' To Meet Quota

A bit of the old Ultraviolence.

Korova Milk Bar | East Village, NYC

In an interview broadcast on Friday, Case, who was shoved aside as chairman in 2003 and who left the board entirely in 2005, said, "Yes, I'm sorry I did it," referring to the 2001 merger of Time Warner Inc (Charts). and AOL.

Another episode of Charlie Rose I need to watch..

I can't think of anyone I was conversing with at the time who though the AOL/TW merger was a good idea, myself included.

Case and Turner should go horseback riding together.

AOL founder says he is 'sorry' for Time Warner merger - Jul. 24, 2006

White House spokesman Tony Snow Monday confirmed former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein is on a feeding tube as the result of a hunger strike.

When it comes to hunger strikes, I guess practice makes perfect..

Snow told the daily press briefing Saddam agreed to be put on a feeding tube but said he did not know whether the procedure was performed at the detention facility where Saddam is being held or whether the former Iraqi leader had been hospitalized.

[Insert Terri Schiavo joke here]

UPI - WH confirms Saddam on feeding tube