You just knew this was coming:

GENEVA (Reuters) – The United Nations’ top human rights official called on the United States Tuesday to give the U.N. details about Osama bin Laden’s killing and said that all counter-terrorism operations must respect international law.
[...]
“This was a complex operation and it would be helpful if we knew the precise facts surrounding his killing. The United Nations has consistently emphasized that all counter-terrorism acts must respect international law,” Pillay said in a statement issued in response to a Reuters request.

These are busy days at the White House, so to save them a little time I’ve taken the liberty of preparing a response that US officials should feel free to send to the United Nations as a reply to their request:

Full size memo here.

**Written by Doug Powers

Twitter @ThePowersThatBe

Meet 11-year-old Xochil Garcia and read this story: Street-smart 4-foot-5 girl fights off 6-foot-2 kidnap suspect, helps in arrest.

Eleven-year-old Xochil Garcia kept herself ready for the worst, constantly rehearsing in her mind how she could escape an attacker or kidnapper.

Little did she know her hours of mental preparation would pay off – possibly saving the Brooklyn girl’s life.

Last night, the 4-foot-5, 80-pound sixth-grader was hailed as a hero for fighting off an attacker twice her size – then having the wits about her to help capture the suspect.

“I always make my plan before there’s a robbery or a kidnap[ping],” Xochil said from her Midwood home. “I think of a plan, like, if anybody kidnaps me, kick them back or scratch them – I’m growing my nails out. I went with Plan B.”

Plan B meant yanking backward with all her might as Bernard Mutterperl, 19, allegedly grabbed her in her apartment stairwell Sunday, dragged her into the lobby and tried to take her to another set of stairs leading to the roof…

…Xochil, who called for her attacker to get a stiff sentence, warned other kids to think safety first. “Try to figure out a plan before somebody tries to kidnap you. That way if somebody tries to touch you, you’re ready to attack them back.

After the kidnapper attempted to escape, Xochil still didn’t go gently into the good night. She helped friends and family identify and catch him, leading to his arrest.

Brava, brava. That’s what I’m talking about.

Says her mom: “I always tell her, whatever happens, whatever these men do, don’t go with them for anything. Thank God she knows how to defend herself.”

And she didn’t need idiot teachers faking gun attacks on field trips to instill elementary self-defense principles in her, either.

There’s no polite way or time to say it: American college and universities have become coddle industries. Big Nanny administrators oversee speech codes, segregrated dorms, politically correct academic departments, and designated “safe spaces” to protect students selectively from hurtful (conservative) opinions—while allowing mob rule for approved leftist positions (textbook case: Columbia University’s anti-Minuteman Project protesters).

Instead of teaching students to defend their beliefs, American educators shield them from vigorous intellectual debate. Instead of encouraging autonomy, our higher institutions of learning stoke passivity and conflict-avoidance.

And as the erosion of intellectual self-defense goes, so goes the erosion of physical self-defense.

As news was breaking about the carnage at Virginia Tech, a reader e-mailed me a news story from last January. State legislators in Virginia had attempted to pass a bill that would have eased handgun restrictions on college campuses. Opposed by outspoken, anti-gun activists and Virginia Tech administrators, that bill failed.

Is it too early to ask: “What if?” What if that bill had passed? What if just one student in one of those classrooms had been in lawful possession of a concealed weapon for the purpose of self-defense?

If it wasn’t too early for Keystone Katie Couric to be jumping all over campus security yesterday for what they woulda/coulda/shoulda done in the immediate aftermath of the shooting, and if it isn’t too early for the New York Times editorial board to be publishing its knee-jerk call for more gun control, it darned well isn’t too early for me to raise questions about how the unrepentant anti-gun lobbying of college officials may have put students at risk.

The back story: Virginia Tech had punished a student for bringing a handgun to class last spring—despite the fact that the student had a valid concealed handgun permit. The bill would have barred public universities from making “rules or regulations limiting or abridging the ability of a student who possesses a valid concealed handgun permit … from lawfully carrying a concealed handgun.” After the proposal died in subcommittee, the school’s governing board reiterated its ban on students or employees carrying guns and prohibiting visitors from bringing them into campus buildings.

Late last summer, a shooting near campus prompted students to clamor again for loosening campus rules against armed self-defense. Virginia Tech officials turned up their noses. In response to student Bradford Wiles’s campus newspaper op-ed piece in support of concealed carry on campus, Virginia Tech associate vice president Larry Hincker scoffed:

“[I]t is absolutely mind-boggling to see the opinions of Bradford Wiles…The editors of this page must have printed this commentary if for no other reason than malicious compliance. Surely, they scratched their heads saying, ‘I can’t believe he really wants to say that.’ Wiles tells us that he didn’t feel safe with the hundreds of highly trained officers armed with high powered rifles encircling the building and protecting him. He even implies that he needed his sidearm to protect himself.”

The nerve!

Hincker continued: “The writer would have us believe that a university campus, with tens of thousands of young people, is safer with everyone packing heat. Imagine the continual fear of students in that scenario. We’ve seen that fear here, and we don’t want to see it again…Guns don’t belong in classrooms. They never will. Virginia Tech has a very sound policy preventing same.”

Who’s scratching his head now, Mr. Hincker?

Some high-handed commentators insist it’s premature or unseemly to examine the impact of school rules discouraging students from carrying arms on campus. Pundit Andrew Sullivan complained that it was “creepy” to highlight reader e-mails calling attention to the Virginia Tech’s restrictions on student self-defense—even as the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence rushed to capitalize on the massacre to sign up new members and gather e-mail addresses for Million Mom March chapters. “We are outraged by the increase in gun violence in America, especially the recent shooting at Virginia Tech,” reads the online petition. “Add your name to the growing list of people who are saying ‘Enough Is Enough!’”

Enough is enough, indeed. Enough of intellectual disarmament. Enough of physical disarmament. You want a safer campus? It begins with renewing a culture of self-defense—mind, spirit, and body. It begins with two words: Fight back.

***

Update:

The fantasy of gun-free zones
Plus: A lesson in “sensitivity”

Dean Barnett compares the United 93 revolt and the British Royal Navy rollover:

What a strange and dismal trip it has been for the Western world, going from “Let’s Roll” to “Fighting Back Was Not An Option” in scarcely more than five years. One can only hope that when the history of our era is written, the former will turn out to be the immortal quote, not the latter.

Related: The stoicism of Adm. Stockdale.

The time of notification of the crash of United 93 into a field at Shanksville, Pa., was 10:15 am Eastern. Who can forget: “Let’s roll!” United 93 passenger and crew list in extended entry:

UNITED AIRLINES FLIGHT 93

United Airlines Flight 93, from Newark, New Jersey, to San Francisco, California, crashed in rural southwest Pennsylvania, with 45 people on board.

CREW

Jason Dahl, 43, from Denver, Colorado, was the plane’s captain. He had a wife and son. Dahl had a lifelong interest in flying, said his aunt, Maxine Atkinson, of Waterloo, Iowa.

Leroy Homer, 36, from Marlton, New Jersey, was the first officer on board. He was married and had a daughter.

Lorraine Bay was a flight attendant.

Sandra Bradshaw, 38, of Greensboro, North Carolina, was a flight attendant.

Wanda Green was a flight attendant.

CeeCee Lyles of Fort Myers, Florida, was a flight attendant. She reached her husband, Lorne, by cell phone to tell him that she loved him and their children before the plane went down. The couple between them had four children.

Deborah Welsh was a flight attendant.
PASSENGERS

Christian Adams

Todd Beamer, 32, was from Cranbury, New Jersey.

Alan Beaven, 48, of Oakland, California, was an environmental lawyer.

Mark Bingham, 31, of San Francisco owned a public relations firm, the Bingham Group. He called his mother, Alice Hoglan, 15 minutes before the plane crashed and told her that the plane had been taken over by three men who claimed to have a bomb. Hoglan said her son told her that some passengers planned to try to regain control of the plane. “He said, ‘I love you very, very much, ‘ ” Hoglan said.

Deora Bodley, 20, of Santa Clara, California, was a university student.

Marion Britton

Thomas E. Burnett Jr., 38, of San Ramon, California, was a senior vice president and chief operating officer of Thoratec Corp., a medical research and development company, and the father of three. He made four calls to his wife, Deena, from the plane. Deena Burnett said that her husband told her that one passenger had been stabbed and that “a group of us are going to do something.” He also told her that the people on board knew about the attack on the World Trade Center, apparently through other phone calls.

William Cashman

Georgine Corrigan

Joseph Deluca

Patrick Driscoll

Edward Felt, 41, was from Matawan, New Jersey.

Colleen Fraser

Andrew Garcia

Jeremy Glick, 31, from West Milford, New Jersey, called his wife, Liz, and in-laws in New York on a cell phone to tell them the plane had been hijacked, Joanne Makely, Glick’s mother-in-law, told CNN. Glick said that one of the hijackers “had a red box he said was a bomb, and one had a knife of some nature,” Makely said. Glick asked Makely if the reports about the attacks on the World Trade Center were true, and she told him they were. He left the phone for a while, returning to say, “The men voted to attack the terrorists,” Makely said.

Lauren Grandcolas of San Rafael, California, was a sales worker at Good Housekeeping magazine.

Donald F. Green, 52, was from Greenwich, Connecticut.

Linda Gronlund

Richard Guadagno, 38, of Eureka, California, was the manager of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Humboldt Bay National Wildlife Refuge.

Toshiya Kuge

Waleska Martinez

Nicole Miller

Mark Rothenberg

Christine Snyder, 32, was from Kailua, Hawaii. She was an arborist for the Outdoor Circle and was returning from a conference in Washington. She had been married less than a year.

John Talignani

Honor Wainio

War memorials should memorialize war. If you want peace and understanding and healing and good will toward all, go build Kabbalah centers…

…A proper war memorial stirs to anger and action. We all remember passenger Todd Beamer’s last heard words as he and his fellow Americans prepared to take back the plane from al Qaeda’s killers, don’t we?

No, the phrase wasn’t “Let’s meditate.” It was “Let’s roll.”

I focus not only on the use of the red crescent, but also the overall tone and intent of architect Paul Murdoch’s design:

Funded with a mix of public money and private cash (including a $500,000 grant from Teresa Heinz’s far left Heinz Endowments), the winning design, titled the “Crescent of Embrace,” features a grove of maple trees ringing the crash site in the shape of an unmistakable red crescent. The crescent, New York University Middle East Studies professor Bernard Haykel told the Johnstown, Pa., Tribune-Democrat, “is the symbol of ritual and religious life for Muslims.”

Some design contest jury members reportedly raised concerns about the jarring symbol of the hijackers’ faith implanted on the hallowed ground where the passengers of Flight 93 were murdered. But their recommendations to change the name of the memorial (to “Arc of Embrace,” or some such whitewashing) were ignored. Memorial architect Paul Murdoch, whose firm emphasizes “environmental responsibility and sustainability,” did not return calls and e-mails seeking comment, but he did emphasize to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that his creation was about “healing” and “contemplation.” He is also proud of his idea to hang a bunch of wind chimes in a tall tower at the site as a “gesture of healing and bonding.”

Wind chimes? Hey, why not add pinwheels and smiley face stickers and Care Bears while we’re at it, too?

Let’s set aside the utter boneheaded-ness of using a symbol that, inadvertently or not, commemorates the killers’ faith instead of the victims’ revolt. The soft-and-fuzzy memorial design of “Crescent of Embrace” still does injustice to the steely courage of the Flight 93′s passengers and crew. It evokes the defeatism embodied by those behind a similar move to turn the 9/11 memorial at Ground Zero in New York City into a pacifist guilt complex.

This is no way to fight a war. Or to remember those who have died fighting it.

Mark Steyn weighs in on Flight 93, re-hijacked:

If [architect Paul] Murdoch sincerely believes in a “crescent of embrace”, let him build one – at the headquarters of a “moderate” Islamic lobby group, or in the parking lot of your wackier colleges. To impose it on Flight 93 – to, in effect, hijack those passengers a second time – is an abomination. Flight 93 is about what happens when you understand that some things can’t be embraced.

The New York Sun editorializes:

We went to the architect’s Web site, where some images of the design are posted. We kept looking for an American flag or some patriotic symbol and just couldn’t find any. Perhaps we missed it. We hope so. The revolt on Flight 93 is going to go down in American history as one of the great moments, and “Let’s roll” is going to rank with the retort that General McAuliffe, surrounded by the enemy en route to Bastogne, delivered to the Nazi demand for surrender, “Nuts.”

There is, incidentally, a museum in Bastogne known as the “Nuts Museum,” a modest place commemorating the spirit of General McAuliffe’s soldiers. Imagine if it had been built in, say, the shape of the German eagle…

…The right thing for the Park Service to do would be to take its time and think this through. If the memorial is purely a private matter, it can do whatever it wants. But if it is a public site and involves public money and an agency like the Park Service is involved, then the American people deserve to have a say in the decision of how the heroes of Flight 93 are memorialized.

Rep. Tom Tancredo has sent a letter to the National Park Service. The AP reports that the memorial must be approved by not only the NPS director, but also the Secretary of the Interior Department.

Via LGF, CAIR has already mobilized in defense of the memorial:

WASHINGTON, Sept. 13 /PRNewswire/ — The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) today dismissed Rep. Tom Tancredo’s (R-CO) comments on the design of a memorial to those aboard a plane that crashed in Pennsylvania on 9/11 as a cynical political ploy designed to gain national attention…

A “plane that crashed?!” That’s a rather telling description of the flight that fought back against Islamist terrorists. A “plane that crashed?” No, CAIR, this is “a plane that crashed.” Flight 93 didn’t just “crash.” It was hijacked by al Qaeda followers under the banner of the red crescent, the very same symbol that may soon be implanted at the Islamists’ crime scene outside Shanksville, Pa. It crashed there because brave men and women forced the hijackers’ hands and refused to allow the terrorists to complete their deadly mission in Washington, D.C.

Never, never forget.

***
The next step for those wishing to object to the memorial design–partially funded with your tax dollars, and wholly belonging to all of us–is to contact Interior Department Secretary Gale Norton, who along with Congress, has final approval authority over the design.

Her e-mail address is gale_norton@ios.doi.gov.

Her phone: 202 208-7351.

Her mailing address: Department of Interior 1849 C St, NW, Washington DC 20240.

1035am EDT Update: A reader says Interior doesn’t want to take calls about the design and is directing citizens to an out-of-order NPS number. Nice. Meantime, here are Gale Norton’s own words about what the memorial should do:

“As I look around this field, there is little that we can do or say or build that can be equal to the courage and sacrifice of the heroes who died on Flight 93, two years ago today,” Norton said. “Our hearts tell of a need to honor and memorialize their heroism and to distinguish and identify the importance of this site and what happened here for future generations.”

1100am EDT update Several readers also inform me that the fax number for the NPS Superintendent of the Flight 93 Memorial is not working. Here’s other contact info:

National Park Service
109 West Main Street, Suite 104
Somerset, PA 15501-2035

Superintendent – Flight 93 NMEM
(814) 443-4557

And fyi, Public Law No: 107-226 is the law that established the Flight 93 Memorial. Its main sponsor was Rep. John Murtha, R D-Pa. Contact info for Rep. Murtha here.

***

Captain Ed sums it all up:

This memorial offends on multiple levels, again whether the offense was intentional or not. It simply does not meet the occasion. While the verdict of the families should have some weight in the approval process, the entire point of this memorial is the national implications of the event, which is why the government will run the memorial and is in charge of its construction and maintenance. A great many of us do not want the Islamic symbolism as a centerpiece for the Flight 93 memorial, but more importantly, we want a memorial that evokes the courageous and inspiring example that they provided with their last breath of life. They didn’t teach us to sit around and do nothing, and a memorial that encourages that simply gets it wrong.

If you haven’t yet seen the other finalists’ designs, you should. My favorite is “Disturbed Harmony,” which pays stark and moving homage to the bravery and heroism of the passengers and crew of Flight 93. It’s a memorial with strength and spine.

***
Previous:

(Dis)honoring the flight that fought back
Flight 93 memorial: Seeing is believing
Flight 93 memorial: controversy

Technorati: Flight 93 memorial

9/14 840pm EDT update: The design will be altered.

Mom-to-be kills alleged knife attacker

FT. MITCHELL, Ky. — A nine-months’ pregnant woman fought off and killed a knife-wielding woman who may have been trying to steal the baby, police said Friday.

Police said Sarah Brady, 26, acted in self-defense in killing Katherine Smith on Thursday. No charges were filed.

Smith, 22, had been falsely telling neighbors for weeks that she was pregnant, and a search of her apartment after her death revealed a full baby nursery, investigators said.

“She had everything in place that you’d expect to have in place with a newborn coming,” said Steve Hensley, police chief in this Cincinnati suburb.

Brady suffered only minor cuts and is still due to give birth soon. The coroner’s office confirmed Friday that Smith was not pregnant, and that she died of stab wounds.

Hat tip: Spoons

Update: The story is holding up, and new police details are chilling. The attacker was obsessed and “had been carrying an ultrasound picture of someone else’s twins and was wearing maternity clothing filled with padding.”