All posts by Rand Simberg

General

Not So Lucky After All

It’s starting to look as though some of the worst predictions for New Orleans are coming to pass, even though they missed the worst of the winds. The north levee has been breached, and the city is filling with water from Ponchartrain. More could die if they can’t evacuate the city from the rising waters. In addition, many homes in the city are on fire, with no way to put them out, other than perhaps helicopter or aircraft water drops. It reminds me of San Francisco in the 1906 quake, and it’s going to get apocalyptic pretty quickly.

Space

Speak No Evil

Keith Cowing says that NASA continues to dig itself deeper into its hole of irrelevancy to our future in space.

[Update at 9:15 AM PDT]

As Keith correctly notes in comments, those are my words, not his. I should have written that he provides evidence of that (in my opinion), not that he says it.

Political Commentary

A Conspicuous Absence

Stephen Hayes provides more reason to think that we need a commission to investigate the 9/11 Commission:

Why would the 9/11 Commission fail to mention Abdul Rahman Yasin, who admitted his role in the first World Trade Center attack, which killed 6 people, injured more than 1,000, and blew a hole seven stories deep in the North Tower? It’s an odd omission, especially since the commission named no fewer than five of his accomplices.

Why would the 9/11 Commission neglect Ahmed Hikmat Shakir, a man who was photographed assisting a 9/11 hijacker and attended perhaps the most important 9/11 planning meeting?

And why would the 9/11 Commission fail to mention the overlap between the two successful plots to attack the World Trade Center?

The answer is simple: The Iraqi link didn’t fit the commission’s narrative….

…From the evidence now available, it seems clear that Saddam Hussein did not direct the 9/11 attacks. Few people have ever claimed he did. But some four years after the attacks of September 11, 2001, and one year after the 9/11 Commission released its final report, there is much we do not know. The determination of these officials to write out of the history any Iraqi involvement in terrorism against America has contributed mightily to public misperceptions about the former Iraqi regime and the war on terror.

While we’re at it, it would be nice to complete the investigation of the OK City bombing, and find who else was involved besides McVeigh and Nichols.