The American Spectator

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Wayne's World

9.22.06 @ 12:01AM

THE BALUCH CONNECTION
Re: Laurie Mylroie's Al Qaeda's Hidden Roots:

The cooperation the article suggests makes very good sense. It seems to me to explain how even though Yousef had nothing to do with bin Laden, as the article notes, Iraq could still be involved in both WTC attacks through the Baluch who designed them. Yousef and KSM left together for Manila from Islamabad, the same place Yousef was later captured. It wouldn't be too surprising to learn that during the Cold War, the KGB handled Bulgarian assassins through the Soviet Embassy in Sofia. And it wouldn't be any more surprising if evidence were found that the IIS was doing the same with Yousef through the Iraqi Embassy in Islamabad.

Ahmed Hikbat Shakir, an Iraqi, also seems to connect Iraq to 9/11 and Al Qaeda, as well as to the Baluch. An al-Mudair at the Iraqi Embassy in Kuala Lumpur controlled Shakir's schedule as a "facilitator" at the airport in January, 2000. Shakir helped at least one of the two 9/11 hijackers who came there attend an al Qaeda meeting about both the Cole bombing and 9/11. A few days later, Shakir quit the job, and the two hijackers flew to L.A. and met a man who got them settled in San Diego.

Apparently, this same Shakir had phoned Musab Yasin's number not long before 2/26/93. And when Qatari authorities detained him about 9/17/01, they found contact information for relatives of KSM and Yousef -- and for Musab Yasin. I believe that Shakir also has ties to the close friend of Bin Laden's who stabbed a prison guard in the eye.

Maybe all those Americans who think that Hussein was somehow behind 9/11, for which liberal intellectuals deride them as dumb and foolish, have hit on the truth but can't say how. The earth would be no less round, even if half the people on it could not say just why they believed it was.
-- Mike Hollins

JOHN WAYNE AT WORK
Re: Sean Higgins's The Searchers at 50:

Thanks very much for Sean Higgins's reflections on John Wayne's 1956 movie The Searchers. I think Mr. Higgins is right on the mark in his assessment of liberal reasons for extolling the flick. But those reasons are selective, driven by a dimwitted ideology. In fact, it's still a terrific flick, one of Wayne's best, with reliably strong support performances by Jeffrey Hunter and such Ford regulars as Hank Worden and Ward Bond. The extraordinarily talented (and underrated) stage actor Henry Brandon (more than 20 years earlier, in 1933 at age 21, he was the definitive Silas Barnaby in the classic Laurel and Hardy vehicle March of the Wooden Soldiers) plays the Comanche chief Scar with perfect menace and not an ounce of liberal sentimentality. But I have a more serious bone to pick with Higgins's piece.

"Redemption" in the normal sense of the word -- the only useful sense -- is a sudden change of heart brought about by a discovery external to oneself and transformative despite oneself. Ethan's redemption in The Searchers -- dramatized in the reunion with Debbie -- doesn't require that he think "any differently about Indians," and the movie would be psychologically absurd to suggest otherwise. We are almost at the end of the film when the redemption occurs. The famous concluding shot tightly framed by the cabin door with Ethan grasping his upper arm (Wayne imitating a signature gesture of his own cowboy hero, Harry Carey), slowly turning, and sauntering into the vast western expanse is a statement of moral certainty: Ethan will never again act in the same way on his feelings about Indians -- feelings which he's acquired pretty honestly, by the way. The change of heart is entirely plausible, and the moral framing is predictably lost on liberal critics going over their political perceptions of the flick.

In response to Mr. Higgins's concluding rhetorical question, I have seen Fort Apache at least as many times as I have seen The Searchers. They are both first-rate Wayne flicks -- but, as with my children, I like them differently.
-- John R. Dunlap
San Jose, California

I am not politically liberal but I love The Searchers. If liberals love it too, the perhaps we have some common ground at last.

I have always thought Ethan relentlessly hunts down the raiding party that murdered Ethan's brother and his family because, as the film makes obvious, Ethan is in love with his brother's wife and she with him. He is also apparently influenced, alas adversely, toward the raiders as he recounts to his companions in the search, how he used his Confederate army coat (Ethan was an enlisted man, a sergeant, by the way) as a burial shroud for his raped and murdered niece Lucy (two girls were kidnapped in the attack).

This is a great movie that should have won an Oscar from John Wayne, but so should The High and the Mighty. Thanks for letting me know that a new edition is out. The Searchers is also a great book. Somewhat dark in its mood, but actually even better that the movie.
-- D. Tracey

In Mr. Higgins's otherwise fine piece, as in many examinations of the film, I think too much is made of Ethan Edwards' presumed racism, and too little is made of what I see as the genuine cause of his rage.

Mr. Higgins says merely that when Ethan and the posse return to the homestead from the Indians' decoy raid they find the family "slaughtered -- all except the youngest, Debbie, who's been carried off by the Indians." That's basically true, but a bit simplistic. There were two young girls -- very young Debbie, and a teenage girl who was, I think, Debbie's sister. Debbie was carried off, as was presumably the older girl. Only a bit later in the film do we learn from Ethan that the older girl had also been murdered back at the homestead, and that he had secretly buried her. Upon hearing this, the older girl's beau (played by Harry Carey Jr.) presses Ethan for more information, to which Ethan replies (this is close to an exact quote): "Don't ask me what I saw back there! Don't ever ask me! As long as you live don't ask me!" The clear implication is that the older girl had been horribly abused before being murdered. When the full import of this registers with the young beau, he essentially loses his mind in an instant, and goes charging alone into the Indian camp, only to be shot down before he gets halfway there.

Yes, the Ethan Edwards character displayed a racism towards the Indians (back then how many white men did not?). But Ethan was more consistent with the "live-and-let-live-but-don't-cross-me" characters typically played by The Duke than many observers see, or are willing to acknowledge. It wasn't racism that drove Ethan on for five years, it was the search for revenge against the people who had slaughtered and raped his own.
-- C.

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