Rumsfeld is picking up some flack for having a piece of debris from the 9/11 attack on the Pentagon on his desk. His accusers say that it is no different than an FBI guy picking up some debris at Ground Zero and keeping it, etc. His opponents ought to be ambarrased by this. I hope the President has a something on his desk reminding him; vertainly John Kerry could use one. I have a piece of the Berlin Wall chipped off by a friend.

This New York Post article mentions that the attacks in Spain occured on 3/11 and 2 1/2 years after 9/ll and exactly 911 days after 9/11. It is being reported in Norway that there are al Qaeda links to the Spain attacks. Powerline has a great photo of the huge Spanish demosntrations against terrorism. I heard that about 20 percent of the population turned out. A Basque expert claims in Newsweek that the attack in Spain could not have been perpetrated by ETA. U.S. Special Forces are folling around in Algeria, according to the Boston Globe, because Algeria (especially its Southern border with Mali) happens to be a great recruiting base for terrorists. And if you are wondering where John Kerry stands on any of this, be sure to read David Brooks latest groin-kick. The first paragraph gives you a hint: "The 1990’s were a confusing decade. The certainties of the cold war were gone and new threats appeared. It fell to one man, John Kerry, the Human Nebula, to bring fog out of the darkness, opacity out of the confusion, bewilderment out of the void.

Le Monde, I guess now imitating Kerry in changing its mind, says this (via Andrew Sullivan): ""If the trail back to Al-Qaida is confirmed, Europeans should rethink the war against Islamic fundamentalist terrorism, as did the United States after the attacks of September 11, 2001. . . . Will March 11 have in Europe the same effect as September 11 in the US? After having spontaneously expressed their solidarity with the Americans, the Europeans, preoccupied with other forms of terrorism, found that the Americans had become consumed with paranoia. Contrary to the latter in 2001, Europeans today discover not only their own vulnerability, but also that they are confronted with a new phenomenon, mass terrorism. Like the Americans, they may now be forced to admit that a new form of world war has been declared, not against Islam but against totalitarian and violent fundamentalism. That the world’s democracies are confronted with the same menace and should act together, using military means and waging at the same time a war for their ideals."