Wow! A victory over terror and a victory in Iraq during the same week!

How is it possible? We tore down a major Al-Qaida terror network (7 black men) in Miami and Alberto Gonzalez (on the right) announced that we now have them on the run, so to speak. The fact that the group was purported to be plotting to blow up the Sears Tower in Chicago and then didn't even have pictures of it after one of the men (who had previously lived in Chicago) visited there sometime over the past eight months. When asked if the "Al Qaida cell" had ever had contact with actual Al-Qaida operatives, Mr. Gonzales reluctantly said "no" -- but only after consulting with his advisors who were with him at the news conference. (How is it that he wasn't prepared for that question beforehand?)

The other questions were equally interesting: Did they have guns or explosives? "No!" What did they have? "well, they had boots and uniforms" -- paid for with money that the intelligence agent posing as an Al-Qaida member gave them.

As it turns out, they weren't even Muslims in the fullest sense of the word, being that they belonged to a Muslim-Christian offshoot of something like the "Black Jews for Christ," whatever in heck that is, called the "Seas of David."

I have no doubt that these seven men should be locked up in a loony bin somewhere, but fail to see where the Government broke up a dangerous terror network -- as it was originally portrayed to us.

The other victory -- this one in Iraq, was announced by Rick Santorum who is, of course, running for reelection to the Senate in Pennsylvania. He announced that recent investigations showed that Saddam Hussein was indeed armed with WMDs when we attacked him in 2003. Trouble is though, the WMDs turned out to be old canisters (many empty) and degraded artillery rounds containing degraded mustard agent and saran gas. Further, they were found early on during our occupation and were already reported more than two years ago. Even before the war, they were known to exist -- since they were (1) known to have been lost or abandoned by the Iraqis at the conclusion of the war with Iran in 1988 and (2) were in the area covered by our "no fly" zone in the southern part of Iraq close to the Iranian border. They were clearly not what President Bush was referring to as the "WMD program" which Saddam was alleged to have activated just prior to our invasion in 2003. The Pentagon has since verified that these are "not the WMDs we were looking for when we went in this time," Of course, such degraded weapons are dangerous -- as are the land mines we (the US) has left here and there in places like Vietnam. The same could be said for depleted uranium rounds or (maybe even) Agent Orange and some of the more exotic defolients we used in recent conflicts.

Bottom line: much ado about nothing and a big embarrassment for the likes of Santorum and Gonzalez. What next?