WMD Found In Iraq

The Washington Post reported while I was in flight to Nashville this afternoon that American troops discoverd over 1500 gallons of chemicals believed to be intended to attack US and Iraqi forces by Islamist terrorists. The warehouse in Mosul had eleven different kinds of precursor agents and appears to have only recently been stocked:

Combined, the chemicals would yield an agent capable of "lingering hazards" for those exposed to it, Boylan said. The likely targets would have been "coalition and Iraqi security forces, and Iraqi civilians," in part owing to the difficulty anyone deploying the chemicals would have had in keeping the agents from spreading out over a wide area, he said.

Military officials did not immediately identify either the precursors or the agent they could have produced. "We don't want to speculate on any possibilities until our analysis is complete," Col. Henry Franke, a nuclear, biological and chemical defense officer, was quoted as saying in a military statement.

Investigators still were trying to determine which group was responsible for the alleged lab and whether the expertise came from foreign fighters or members of Saddam Hussein's former security apparatus, the military said.

No one believes at this point that the chemicals predate the fall of Saddam. That would mean that the chemicals made it into Mosul either by bringing them out of Syria or from a safe storage area in Northern Iraq. Either of those two scenarios could point back to pre-invasion Iraq as the source of the chemicals themselves, however; the former scenario only adds the possibility that Bashar Assad has lost his mind.

The size of this find makes it a significant development, both for the insurgency as it stands now and the sourcing of these chemical components. We may have some radical rethinking to do about the nature of not just the terrorists in Iraq, but also the war narrative that said Saddam had no WMD available for his use.

UPDATE: Welcome, Eschaton readers ... who apparently can't read when I wrote that no one believes this weapons cache predates the fall of Saddam. Apparently the same people who keep posting comments think that 1500 gallons of chemical-weapons precursors can simply pop up out of nowhere, however. Is it so hard to figure out that either they likely came from Syria or from a hidden cache somewhere in Northern Iraq -- and to understand the implications of either scenario? They can't exactly fly them in from the Home Depot in Ankara, folks. Neither the Zarqawi terrorists nor the Ba'athist remnant insurgents have that kind of protection for the extended lines of communications necessary to get them into Mosul from Saudi Arabia or Jordan or Iran.

UPDATE II: The Counterterrorism Blog has more, including a recap of some applicable testimony from Charles Duelfer.

Justice Sunday II: My Priorities

Trip preparations have kept me busy this morning and mostly away from doing the reading necessary for substantial blogging -- and most of that went into analyzing the 9/11 Commission response from last night. As most of you know, I will live-blog from Justice Sunday II in Nashville, where a number of speakers will rally conservatives to support federal-court nominations of the Bush administration and fight against any filibusters that threaten up-or-down votes in the Senate. JSII is sponsored by the Family Research Council, which has its faith-based interests in mind for this campaign against the filibuster.

I am happy to have been invited to this event -- and in the interest of full disclosure, CQ readers should know that JSII has paid for my travel arrangements to and from Nashville, including my air fare and my hotel. As I discussed earlier, without that I would have turned the invitation down due to another project which is still developing, and my car, which unfortunately had about $900 of developments this past week anyway. JSII made it possible for me to attend, but they put no strings on my analysis and in fact went out of their way to invite bloggers who would have provided plenty of criticism, even asking for my recommendation of good liberal bloggers. (Unfortunately, all of my recommendations had scheduling conflicts -- it came close to the last minute.)

In order to set this event properly for CQ readers, I want to explain my outlook on the conjunction of religion and judicial philosophy. I think that religious tests in either direction for judicial nominees is not only unconstitutional but simply a bad idea. It creates an impression that certain faiths and/or philosophies create different classes of Americans and citizenry, which eats away at the body politic. We have seen ample evidence of that over the past twenty to thirty years with the increasingly aggressive treatment of Catholics and evangelicals by the Senate, especially among the Democrats -- but we must not allow the lack of faith to create the same hostility among conservatives, either.

What the Constitution proposed and our founding fathers wanted were judges that did not make value judgments or create policy at all: on the bench, their only Bible was the Constitution and their only philosophy was the Law. That distinction is crucial to the operation of a truly independent judiciary. Judges who base decisions on other outside influences -- whether that be Leviticus or a Luxembourg judicial opinion -- fail the test of independence and the safeguarding of the American Constitution.

The judiciary exists to ensure that the will of the people, as expressed through the Legislature, meets the safeguards built into the Constitution, and that the will of the States, as expressed in the Executive (originally), enforces it within the same parameters. Under those conditions, the religion of the judge has no bearing on the judgemnt rendered. The judiciary still fulfills its role as a co-equal branch under the Constitution, but the power to set policy remains with the people, as the founders intended.

Instead, what we have is an appointed shadow legislature, fed by both sides over the past several decades, setting policy in order to give Congress an easy and somewhat cowardly way of avoiding difficult policy debates. That creates the affliction of conflicting interests that has stripped the judiciary of its true independence and created the Inquisitorial atmosphere now familiar but once unthinkable in the Senate. The Judiciary Committee members now demand not independence but a declaration of intent to follow their preferred orthodoxies, when the only loyalty that a nominee should proclaim is to the Constitution. Senators now demand an oath to "privacy rights", stare decisis, God, and who knows what else.

What I want to hear from Justice Sunday II is a demand from these speakers that religion and the lack of it disappear from these proceedings in the future, replaced by a demand to avoid any influence except the Constitution and respect for the will of the people. I don't want to hear about promoting religious judges as a counterbalance to whatever we have now; I want to hear people speak about meaningful and lasting reform that will restore the system so that the will of the people sets the policy. If we return to that system, no one need fear the personal predilections of the men and women we appoint to the bench -- we only need to ensure that they remain loyal to the Constitution in the matters that come before them, and that they have the competence to understand that.

When you read my live blog, that will be the message I wait to hear.

You Know A Leftist Group Has Jumped The Shark ...

... when the New York Times editorial board takes it to the woodshed. This morning, the Times follows the lead of E.J. Dionne and the Washington Post in condemning NARAL and their attempt to smear Supreme Court nominee John Roberts. They reject NARAL's cancellation of the advertisement as insufficient:

Under pressure, Naral Pro-Choice America has withdrawn a cheesy 30-second TV spot unfairly linking Judge John Roberts Jr. with abortion clinic violence. But the episode's sour taste lingers, and it can only make it harder to get senators to pay proper attention during the Supreme Court confirmation process to legitimate concerns about Judge Roberts's approach to issues of personal privacy and reproductive freedom. ...

In withdrawing the ad, Naral's president, Nancy Keenan, said that the controversy sparked by the ad had "become a distraction" from the group's effort to educate the public. Lamentably, her statement stopped short of apologizing to Judge Roberts, and to Americans of all ideological stripes who are hoping for a confirmation process at once vigorous and informed. If Naral wants to regain credibility, it should start there.

As a scolding goes, this one talks too much about how NARAL hurt its allies rather than the injustice of the smear itself. Still, for the Times, it represents a rather significant wake-up call to the lunatic fringe which NARAL increasingly serves -- that even the most normally strident voices of the Left have their limits, and not to expect cheerful unanimity when straying so far away from the truth.

Air America: The Exempt Media Coverage

Remember that "phony", "undersourced" story that came from the overactive imaginations of the right wing blogosphere? Michelle Malkin and Brian Maloney note today that dozens of newspapers across the country have finally started informing their readers of it -- more than two weeks after it got discovered by the blogs:

Despite liberals' insistence that the Air America / Gloria Wise story is "undersourced" and "appears to be phony," the AP article by David Caruso is being carried by dozens of MSM papers, including the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, Baton Rouge Times Picayune, Fort Worth Star Telegram, Myrtle Beach Sun News, Kansas City Star, Tallahassee Democrat, Grand Forks Herald, Bradenton Herald, Columbus Ledger-Enquirer, Duluth News Tribune, Columbus Ledger-Enquirer, philly.com, Biloxi Sun Herald, Monterey County Herald, Fort Wayne News, San Luis Obispo Tribune, Kansas.com, Centre Daily Times, Pioneer Press, Macon Telegraph, Charlotte Observer, Seattle Post Intelligencer, MLive.com, The UK Guardian, Worcester Telegram, Wilmington Morning Star, Times Daily, Tuscaloosa News, The Ledger, and Charleston Sunday Gazette Mail.

Bear in mind, however, that the AP article does not do anything to advance the story. It does ensure that enough people see it to create an expectation for follow-up and resolution. Eliot Spitzer's office will not get as much room to bury this as it might otherwise be tempted. After all, some of the people involved, including David Goodfriend who once worked for the Clinton White House, have friends in the high places Spitzer must access in order to successfully run for Governor next year.

The money may tell other stories before all of this is out. Keep an eye on Brian Maloney. The AP broadcast could bring further revelations.

Able Danger 'Not Historically Significant': Commission

The Washington Post and the New York Times report extensively on the pushback from the 9/11 Commission's two co-chairs after a week of denials, evasions, and the resulting devaluation of their project. The joint statement from Lee Hamilton and Thomas Kean minimizes the Able Danger program as not "historically relevant" and that the single source who came to the Commission -- an Navy officer in military intelligence -- did not appear credible. From the Post:

The second person, described by the commission as a U.S. Navy officer employed at the Defense Department, was interviewed by senior panel investigator Dieter Snell and another staff member on July 12, 2004, 10 days before the release of the commission's best-selling report.

According to the commission, the officer said he briefly saw the name and photo of Atta on an "analyst notebook chart." The material identified Atta as part of a Brooklyn al Qaeda cell and was dated from February through April 2000, the officer said.

"The officer complained that this information and information about other alleged members of a Brooklyn cell had been soon afterward deleted from the document," the statement says, because Pentagon lawyers were worried about violating restrictions on military intelligence gathering in the United States.

But the commission statement said that because no documents or other evidence had emerged to support the claim, "the commission staff concluded that the officer's account was not sufficiently reliable to warrant revision of the report or further investigation."

This would have been reasonable, under the circumstances, if this happened as Hamilton and Kean say. One person comes to the Commission a week prior to the release of the report and says, "Wait. The Pentagon had a secret program that ID'd Mohammed Atta and three of the other hijackers sometime in early 2000." The investigator says, "Wow! The Pentagon never mentioned that to us! Let's see the documents." The source says, "They don't exist. The Pentagon destroyed them."

That I would be inclined towards skepticism at this point would be an understatement. However, I would still follow up with the Pentagon to find out whether it was true. Such a development hardly qualifies as "historically insignificant" if it gets corroborated. The identification of the core group of terrorist pilots more than a year before the attacks would have tremendous significance -- to the historical record, as well as to the conclusions drawn.

And yet, from the Kean/Hamilton statement, no one on the Commission or its staff even bothered to pick up a phone to check with the Pentagon on Able Danger -- not even when their source turns out to be an officer in the regular Navy attached to the DoD. They dismissed him because of two reasons: he didn't bring documentary evidence, and his recollection of when Atta became known didn't fit the timeline on which they had already agreed -- which put Atta in the US no earlier than June 2000.

On the first point, it seems to me that such an approach to witnesses demonstrates a certain laziness on the part of the Commission. Witnesses who bring their own documentation obviously make it easier on investigators, but to dismiss those who have none in a case involving the highest type of classified data is ludicrous. Investigators have the responsibility to locate documentation, or at least follow up to find it if they can. People working in the intelligence field do not get handed fliers and bulletins containing top-secret information so they can maintain personal files of it at home and on the road. The notion that an officer in military intelligence bringing an insider tip has to bring his own evidence as a cover charge severely limits the effectiveness of any inquiry.

On the second point, it's also worth noting that the Commission had an unusual standard for determining Atta's timeline -- they relied on him to travel under his own name at all times. I discussed this in earlier posts, but it bears repeating: terrorists can change tactics situationally. All the report can possibly state was the first time Atta traveled under his own name or any known aliases, and then only if immigration records picked it up. It doesn't take much imagination, however, to think that he may have traveled here under a separate cover once or twice first to test the system and to do preliminary research for his mission.

Finally, as I posted last night, Hamilton himself has some pretty severe credibility problems himself. After the Commission spokesman denied that Able Danger ever came to their attention, Hamilton himself said, "The Sept. 11 commission did not learn of any U.S. government knowledge prior to 9/11 of surveillance of Mohammed Atta or of his cell. Had we learned of it obviously it would've been a major focus of our investigation."

Three days later, we find out that not only did staffers hear about it, they dismissed it without investigating it at all. Hamilton also wants us to believe him when he says that another witness who claims to have briefed them on Able Danger in October 2003 is also unreliable. Somehow Hamilton does not fill me with confidence in his own credibility, nor should he do so with anyone else after this week of lies and evasions.

Curt Weldon, who started this ball rolling, has stated that his sources have offered to testify publicly, under oath, to Congress about Able Danger and what they told the 9/11 Commission. That sounds like a good idea, and Congress needs to make that happen immediately.

UPDATE: Jim Geraghty at TKS reminds us of some other statements from the Commission earlier this week, including Kean:

"I think this is a big deal," said John F. Lehman, a Republican member of the commission who was Navy secretary in the Reagan administration. "The issue is whether there was in fact surveillance before 9/11 of Atta and, if so, why weren't we told about it? Who made the decision not to brief the commission's staff or the commissioners?" ...

"If this is true, somebody should be looking into it," said Thomas H. Kean, the commission chairman ...

Again, those statements came on August 9th. Three days later, the two co-chairs suddenly remember not only the mention of Able Danger but that they gave it due consideration and serious thought before rejecting it as unreliable and historically insignificant. It certainly is possible, but it sounds pretty strange -- and it sounds a lot more like a self-serving reversal.

Commission: Able Danger Only Told Us About Atta

The AP reports tonight that 9/11 Commission co-chairs Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton have changed their story yet again. Now the two say in a joint statement to the press that they do recall hearing that Able Danger had identified Atta, two days after Hamilton categorically denied it -- and for a man who had supposedly never heard of Able Danger, Hamilton's recall of detail of the briefing appears impressive (via Tom Maguire):

In a joint statement, former commission chairman Thomas Kean and vice chairman Lee Hamilton said a military official who made the claim had no documentation to back it up. And they said only 9/11 ringleader Mohamed Atta was identified to them and not three additional hijackers as claimed by Rep. Curt Weldon, vice chairman of the House Armed Services and Homeland Security committees.

"He could not describe what information had led to this supposed Atta identification," the statement said of the military official.

They also said no else could place the other three hijackers with Atta in a purported terror cell code-named "Brooklyn" during the time period cited by Weldon.

Compare this to what Hamilton said on August 9th:

"The Sept. 11 commission did not learn of any U.S. government knowledge prior to 9/11 of surveillance of Mohammed Atta or of his cell," said Hamilton, a former Democratic congressman from Indiana. "Had we learned of it obviously it would've been a major focus of our investigation."

Now we hear Hamilton say the exact opposite. The Commission heard about Atta -- they just ignored it, claiming now that the evidence shown at the briefing did not match up with their timeline for Atta's first entry to the US. That would have been an interesting claim had Hamilton made it when first asked. Now, with his categorical denial still ringing in our ears, it sounds more like another excuse to wriggle out of a debacle they themselves made.

The only development this gives us is an admission that the Commissioners themselves had awareness of Able Danger's assessment of Atta as a terrorist a year before the 9/11 attacks -- and they didn't bother to mention it at all in their report, not even to refute it as contrary information that they could refute. For a group which wound up berating two administrations for only listening to that evidence and intelligence which fit their policies, it at least smacks of the pot calling the kettle black. At worst, it smells much worse than that.

One More Look At Prague (Updates With Corroboration)

Read the updates for corroborating links.

My last post reviews a rather obscure report on the discovery of an Iraqi spy ring in Germany in February or March of 2001, resulting in the capture of two Iraqi Intelligence Services agents. The Arabic newspaper that reported it in March 2001 also reported that the CIA tipped the Germans to the Iraqi operation and that the FBI and CIA interrogated the two captured spies. I looked around for any reporting on this story in the American or British mainstream media (anything in English), even in Nexis, and came up empty.

This story may not pan out. However, it apparently has never been denied, and if it is true, one would have expected the CIA and FBI to bring this to the attention of the 9/11 Commission -- or at least the existence of the report itself. The 9/11 report makes no mention of this development at all.

I explained in the last post how this could change the notion that Iraq had no operational involvement in 9/11, as the main effort of the Hamburg cell at that time was supporting Atta for the upcoming attacks. Instead, let's take a look at the effect this would have had on Atta and his ability to get the logistical support he needed from his cell in Germany, now apparently compromised. After all, Mohammed Atta still had to get sixteen terrorists safely into the US using the Hamburg cell as his line of communication to the AQ network at the time of the purported trip to Prague.

Until Atta could make a new connection to AQ in Europe, he could not travel or communicate back to Germany. To do so would be an unpalatable risk to his cover. Instead, Atta would need to go somewhere that could give him new logistical support and rebuild his lines of communication. When the time came to go to the well again, Atta had to carefully relink to the network.

How does Atta reconnect to his support? With the operation compromised, he won't feel safe with either going back to Germany or traveling under his own name until he knows how badly the operations have been disrupted. Instead, he uses a safe cover -- one he likely would use only once -- to make his way to another station to re-establish his logistical support. Prague would be close enough to the situation for others in the network to have assessed the damage done by the Germans and to decide whether to abort the mission altogether.

Again, if the Al-Watan Al-Arabi reports turn out to be correct, this would explain why Atta felt the need to travel under an assumed identity, and why he went to Prague rather than Hamburg to meet with Iraqi agents. That meeting would be necessary for Atta to determine if he and his team should continue to make plans and whether to bring in the "muscle" hijackers, which happened a short while afterwards. If the Germans had found out about their operation and discovered his identity, then sending the other hijackers to the US could have meant walking into a trap.

This would explain why Atta changed his usual routine and traveled under an assumed identity. After reconnecting to the network and getting assurances that the network was secure, he could use his real identity on his next trip.

Does any of this constitute proof? No. But the evidence we see this far fits this theory, and if the Al-Watan Al-Arabi report is true, the 9/11 report doesn't. We need to start rethinking this from the beginning, dump the preconceived notions, and gather all of the evidence together to understand what really happened to us on 9/11.

UPDATE: Thanks to CQ reader Elly, we have multiple media sources for confirmation. The Germans arrested the Iraqi intelligence agents on February 25th and 27th. First the BBC:

Two Iraqis have been arrested in Germany on urgent suspicion of spying.

The German federal prosecutor's office said that the two were suspected of working for an Iraqi intelligence agency.

"The two accused are suspected of having carried out missions on behalf of an Iraqi intelligence agency in various cities in Germany since the beginning of the year 2001," a brief statement said.

Next, Reuters reported it a few hours later (Newsmax had essentially the same report the next day):

German state prosecutors said on Thursday federal police had arrested two Iraqis on suspicion of spying.

The two men were detained in Heidelberg, according to a German television report. German officials declined to comment on the report. ... "They are suspected of carrying out missions for an Iraqi intelligence service in a number of German towns since the beginning of 2001,'' said a spokeswoman for state prosecutor Kay Nehm in Karlsruhe.

Now we have some corroboration for the existence of an Iraqi espionage operation in Germany. Reuters speculated that the spies may have wanted to conduct sabotage operations against American forces in Germany in retaliation for joint Anglo-American attacks that week on Iraqi radar sites. However, all reports mention that the spies had conducted operations in several German cities -- which makes it sound like they had a network-support mission going at least in parallel to whatever else they might have done on their own.

Two weeks later, the Arabic newspaper in Paris might have had better information on the activity of the Iraqi spies, as well as the involvement of the CIA and the FBI. Now that we have some confirmation of the arrests, we need to find out whether any American security services did in fact question these Iraqi agents in Germany, what they found, and whether that information came to the 9/11 Commission. It sure didn't make it into their report.

Another Detail The 9/11 Commission Seems To Have Missed (Updated!)

Arrests corroborated by BBC and Reuters. See Update V.

Germany has long been known as one of the primary logistical areas for the 9/11 attacks. Mohammed Atta and several of the 9/11 hijackers spent considerable time in Hamburg especially during the recruitment and research effort in 1999 and 2000 before coming to the United States to begin the actual work of preparing the attacks. The 9/11 report contains 75 references to Germany, most of them involving Atta and his team; a search on Hamburg generates 90 hits. Three of the four pilots came from the Hamburg cell (page 242).

With all of these references to Germany and Hamburg, the 9/11 Commission oddly failed to include a published report from March 2001 in a Parisian Arabic newspaper, Al-Watan Al-Arabi, about the arrest of two suspected Iraqi spies -- based on a tip from the CIA (boldface mine):

Iraqi Spies Reportedly Arrested in Germany 16 March 2001

Al-Watan al-Arabi (Paris) reports that two Iraqis were arrested in Germany, charged with spying for Baghdad. The arrests came in the wake of reports that Iraq was reorganizing the external branches of its intelligence service and that it had drawn up a plan to strike at US interests around the world through a network of alliances with extremist fundamentalist parties.

The most serious report contained information that Iraq and Osama bin Ladin were working together. German authorities were surprised by the arrest of the two Iraqi agents and the discovery of Iraqi intelligence activities in several German cities. German authorities, acting on CIA recommendations, had been focused on monitoring the activities of Islamic groups linked to bin Ladin. They discovered the two Iraqi agents by chance and uncovered what they considered to be serious indications of cooperation between Iraq and bin Ladin. The matter was considered so important that a special team of CIA and FBI agents was sent to Germany to interrogate the two Iraqi spies.

Not one word of this gets addressed in the final Commission report, as far as I can tell. The report contains thirty-one references to arrests, most of them for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Zacarias Moussaoui, but none of them mention any German arrests of Iraqi spies in Germany for March 2001. It isn't as if the 9/11 Commission considered Al-Watan al-Arabi an unreliable source, either; they used it as a reference for an editorial by Saudi Prince Bandar.

The CIA apparently knew something about this; why didn't it come out during the hearings? This looks like a very strange coincidence, that the Germans found such an extensive Iraqi espionage ring within their borders at the same time that al-Qaeda planned its largest and most complicated attack on Western interests ever. That attack required extraordinary coordination and planning, with a large amount of resourcing. The attacks before and since have all been suicide or hit-and-run affairs, on a much smaller scale and with much more modest ambitions.

This information was published contemporaneously in March 2001 and was in the public domain. If anyone brought it to the Commission's attention, no evidence of it exists in the report. Presumably, such public information would have been addressed in the report even if it turned out to be mistaken had anyone bothered to look at it -- or if the Commission could explain it away in favor of their "no operational connection" analysis between Iraq and 9/11.

In March 2001, the CIA suspected that the Iraqis had allied themselves with Islamist extremists to carry out attacks on American interests, and as a result the Germans discovered exactly that -- right where the planning for 9/11 took place. Did this information get the Able Danger treatment as well? (h/t: CQ reader Tom M.)

Addendum: It's worth noting that syndicated columnist Amir Taheri considered Al-Watan Al-Arabi to be a pro-Saddam weekly.

UPDATE: These arrests don't appear to have made it into Stephen Hayes' book The Connection, either.

UPDATE II: A commenter asks me if I believe that Saddam had an active role in 9/11. Up to this week, I've been fairly satisfied with the "no proven operational connection" determination made by the 9/11 Commission regarding the attacks -- though reading Hayes' book shows us plenty of other efforts by Saddam to reach out to radical Islamists. With an apparent attempt to suppress certain kinds of evidence now coming to light with the Able Danger revelations, though, the entire report and its conclusions no longer hold much credibility. It appears that the Commission's efforts aimed at supporting a preconceived narrative, and that may be the best that can be said of it.

Remembering what analysts said about the attack in the days following 9/11, all of them seem surprised at the sophistication and coordination of the operation. Al-Qaeda had never attempted a mission on that scale before, and it hasn't since then, either. I recall plenty of experts talking for weeks afterward how that kind of well-timed and effective attack required strong logistical support, training, and funding. Perhaps AQ managed to pull that all together once; maybe not. I think we need to take another look at 9/11, starting completely fresh. What we have has massive holes in it, as we have all discovered in the last 72 hours or so.

UPDATE III: Pierre at Pink Flamingo has had this information on his site for almost three years. (Sorry, Pierre, it didn't pop up on Google.)

UPDATE IV: I thought most people knew about Ramzi Yousef and the Iraqi passport. Here's one narrative from Rotten.com:

The first major explosion Ramzi Yousef added to his resume was significant in a number of ways -- the World Trade Center.

In late 1992, Yousef entered the country with a fake Iraqi passport and asked for asylum. His traveling companion was arrested immediately when a search of his luggage revealed bomb-making manuals. Because the INS holding cells were overcrowded, Yousef was released with instructions to come back a month later for a hearing.

More from Laurie Mylroie:

Several Iraqis hovered around the fringe of the plot. One, Abdul Rahman Yasin, is the sole remaining indicted fugitive. Born in the United States while his father was a graduate student here, Yasin was able to obtain a U.S. passport in June 1992. Yasin arrived in New York from Baghdad in September 1992. He returned there shortly after the Trade Center bombing, transiting through Jordan, where he stopped at the Iraqi embassy and quickly (within 24 hours) received a visa for his U.S. passport. Much later, U.S. authorities found documents in Iraq that showed Yasin was rewarded with a house and monthly stipend. Ramzi Yousef was a second key figure in that attack. Like Yasin, Yousef arrived in New York in early September 1992. At Kennedy Airport, Yousef presented an Iraqi passport, with stamps showing that his trip began in Baghdad. The immigration inspector who processed him testified that Yousef's passport "appeared to be valid and unaltered."

And so on; here's the Google search that brings up plenty of references.

UPDATE V: These arrests have been corroborated by contemporaneous reports from the BBC and Reuters, quoted by Newsmax here.

E.J. Dionne: Stop The Insanity

E.J. Dionne tries to restore sanity to the Left after watching NARAL squander their public credibility on a smear campaign -- and seeing few of his own side object to it. He gives what looks to be the first severe scolding by an unimpeachable voice on the Left to the pro-abortion contingent for the silence that discredited not just NARAL, but also the main force of the opposition to the nomination of John Roberts for the Supreme Court:

Fellow liberals, face it: The advertisement created by NARAL, the abortion rights group that opposes John Roberts's nomination to the Supreme Court, is outrageous. It ties Roberts to people who bombed abortion clinics. If this isn't guilt by association, I don't know what is. ...

You can consult FactCheck.org, a Web site run by the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania -- not a haven for the right-wing conspiracy -- to find out all that is wrong with the ad. Just consider: Roberts filed the brief in question on behalf of the United States government (i.e., the administration of President Bush's father) in the spring of 1991, seven years before the Alabama clinic was bombed . The brief did not support clinic bombings. There is a difference between "bombers" and "protesters," as any civil libertarian knows. The Supreme Court, by a vote of 6 to 3, sided with Roberts's interpretation, and Congress then, rightly, passed a federal law aimed at preventing violence against abortion clinics.

Give Dionne credit. Most people who argued against these ads either did so because of the injustice of the smear campaign against Roberts, which includes all of the Right and darned few voices on the Left. Those on the Left who argued against the advertisement did so on the basis of expediency -- how it adversely affected the anti-Roberts strategy. Dionne so far stands alone on the Left (thus far) to argue both injustice and stupidity, and he does a marvelous job of it.

People have demanded more civility and less partisanship from Washington in handling policy and nominations. When Bush chose a conservative with enough flexibility and support to allow the Democrats to approve, or at least not blockade, what happened? One of their main special-interest groups launched a highly uncivil hatchet job on him, ratcheting up the temperature of the debate by injecting outrageous claims of bloodthirstiness on his behalf. Dionne points out the folly of then expecting a civil response from the White House on negotiations for disclosure and the proper bounds for questioning during the hearing.

Dionne doesn't mention this potential outcome, but it should also be obvious: the NARAL smear and its tacit acceptance on the Left will convince the White House that offering face-saving candidates to the Democrats wastes political capital. Expect the next nominee to explicitly come from the Scalia/Thomas mold as a result of this scurrilous attack and lack of specific disavowals.

I disagree with Dionne on his conclusion, where he argues for a Civility Compact. It consists of Roberts and the administration basically giving in to extortion to avoid smear jobs against him. It weakens his strong stance earlier in the piece on the injustice of NARAL's lies and innuendos. Those have no place in any fair political process, and potential victims shouldn't have to bargain to avoid them. Roberts and the White House should cooperate with the Senate on the same basis as the Clinton administration did for Stephen Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. That seems like a fair and honest standard for both the Senate and White House to follow, and should result in a spirited but civil and rational discourse -- followed by an up-or-down vote on the Senate floor.

A Guide To Able Danger Posts At CQ

In order for CQ readers to access the new posts covering the emerging scandal surrounding the revelations about the Able Danger data-mining project that accurately identified Mohammed Atta and three other 9/11 hijackers, I have created a new category for these posts called 9/11 Commission. Here are the posts so far that have gone into this category:

9/11 Cell Identified In 2000
Dafydd: Tangled Webs, Contrasting Countdowns
Confirmation Of Able Danger Raises Even More Questions
9/11 Commission Acknowledges Briefing On Able Danger
The Second Half Of 9/11
9/11 Commission Changes Its Story -- Again
Rethinking Prague After Able Danger
The Wall, The White Memo, And The DoD

NEW: Another Detail The 9/11 Commission Seems To Have Missed

Later on, I will try to update older posts relating to the 9/11 Commission to put them in this same category. This will be a subcategory of the War on Terror category, so all of these posts will remain within that group as well. Hopefully this post will provide a quick guide to the coverage of Able Danger here at CQ in the meantime.

UPDATE: WorldNet Daily notes some of my analysis in their overview on Able Danger and the collapse of the 9/11 Commission's credibility. Darn, no hyperlinks, but a very nice summary of a few of the above posts.

We 'Won' ... Nothing

The Times of London makes a big deal about a favorable ruling yesterday from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which publicly supported the EU-3 in calling for Iran to stop its uranium processing in order to remain in compliance with the non-proliferation pact. Based on the lead, Times readers might believe this to be a significant victory, but the Iranians quickly demonstrated its hollow nature:

BRITAIN and its European allies won a diplomatic victory over Iran yesterday when the international community unanimously backed their resolution demanding that Tehran halt work at all its nuclear sites.

After three days of intense negotiations, the thirty-five member states of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) supported a text proposed by Britain, France and Germany that expressed “serious concern” over Iran’s attempts to restart uranium processing.

The resolution called on Iran to halt uranium conversion work at its site near Isfahan, which was resumed this week. It also urged Tehran to maintain its freeze at other sites involved in the nuclear fuel cycle and asked Mohamad ElBaradei, the IAEA director, to report back on Iran’s compliance on September 3.

So the Iranians got a three-week window in which to process their uranium, and the EU-3 got the firm backing of the Non-Aligned Movement -- in keeping the matter from moving to the UN Security Council. The ever-helpful NAM failed in its attempt to water down even this tepid scolding from the IAEA, another "victory" the Times celebrates in its coverage.

So what does victory look like? Strangely enough, it looks almost exactly like a humiliating defeat:

The decision appeared to wrong-foot Iranian officials, who pledged to continue co- operating with the agency but also vowed to defy the demands made in the new resolution. “It is evident that the motive is to apply pressure,” said Cyrus Nasseri, Iran’s delegate to the IAEA. “Fortunately, Iran will not bend. Iran will be a nuclear fuel producer and supplier within a decade.” ... Dr ElBaradei said that “the jury is still out” on whether the Iranian authorities would comply.

The Times assures us that Iran will face "strong international pressure" to shut down its facility at Isfahan and reseal the site once again. Well, that would constitute a change ... how? All that the Iranians have faced is "strong international pressure", and look where it has led. Victory after victory at the bargaining table while the Iranians do as they please in real life. Obviously, some people have focused on the wrong contests, and it doesn't appear to be the Iranians.

Please note that this "victory" has the Iranians so rattled that they now brag openly about not just producing their own nuclear fuel, but transforming the program into exportation as well. Wasn't the entire idea of opposing the Iranian nuclear program to keep them from supplying nuclear material anywhere? Perhaps this is yet another for of "victory" of which I remain ignorant, although references to Munich and 1938 vaguely come to mind.

Air America: Gloria Wise Not An 'Appropriate Source'?

David Lombino at the New York Sun continues to out-hustle the Paper of Record on the ever-widening scandal at Air America involving the transmission of government grant money from Gloria Wise Boys & Girls Club. In his report today, Lombino discovers that Air America lacks confidence in its creditor's legitimacy:

A spokesman for Gloria Wise, Jim Grossman of Rubenstein Public Relations, said yesterday Piquant has "agreed in principle to return the money, but there is no schedule and no money back - no timetable."

"All they have done is put something in an escrow fund," he said. "Lawyers for Gloria Wise are trying to get this into some formal agreement."

Air America contends that Mr. Grossman's characterization is misleading, and that an agreement has been reached between Piquant and the club that includes a timetable for a "voluntary repayment of loans made to Evan Cohen and Progress Media," according to a statement released by the radio network last night.

"Until the claims of financial impropriety are resolved, we're not going to give the club the money directly until we know it is going to an appropriate source," a spokesman for the network, Jaime Horn, said.

Another day provides yet another poor excuse from Piquant about not paying the money back they took from the poor kids and Alzheimer's patients for whom the grant money was earmarked. Try to follow the tortured logic at play here from Ms. Horn. Air America executive Evan Cohen transfers large amounts of cash from the charity (which pays him $75 grand a year) in order to keep the network afloat, and by some accounts, uses forged documents to commit fraud in doing so. Air America benefits from this wrongdoing. Now the fact that Cohen engaged in wrongdoing to benefit Air America lets them off the hook for reimbursing Gloria Wise because, and I quote, of the "claims of financial impropriety"? Instead, they will continue to just keep depositing their payments into their own escrow account, essentially just transferring money to itself while pretending it reflects repayment of its debt.

It's almost exactly like a murderer demanding mercy for killing his parents on the basis of his status as an orphan. The logic is completely circular. Air America corrupted Gloria Wise by engaging in "financial impropriety", and now that impropriety lets Air America off the hook from paying it back. Using RBMN's comment on my earlier post, that lets every bank robber off the hook for restitution as well.

Michelle Malkin and Brian Maloney have much, much more on the latest developments of this story.

Separatists Demand Independence For Southern Iraq

The political situation in Iraq took a difficult turn while the country awaits the draft constitution from its first popularly-elected Assembly in decades. Shi'ites invoking the Iranian Ayatollah Khomeini demanded a secession of southern Iraq in order to form an Iranian-influenced puppet state and used Najaf as the protest staging point:

Waving posters of Iran's late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, thousands of chanting Shiite Muslims signaled approval for a call Thursday by their leaders for a separate Shiite federal state in central and southern Iraq.

The demand by one of the government's dominant Shiite religious parties, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, came five days before a draft of Iraq's new constitution is due. The call, which triggered immediate protests by Sunni Muslim leaders and some Shiite officials, capped increasingly assertive moves by the party to influence the new Iraq as it takes shape. ...

"This was a shock," Salih Mutlak, the most vocal Sunni on the committee drafting Iraq's constitution, said Thursday after the Najaf rally. "You are giving Iraq to the Iranians."

"We hoped this day would never come," Mutlak separately told the Reuters news agency. "We believe that the Arabs, whether Sunni or Shiite, are one. We totally reject any attempt to stir up sectarian issues to divide Iraq."

The spokesman for Jafari, whose Shiite Dawa party is both government partner and political rival with the Supreme Council, also rejected Thursday's call. "The idea of a Shiite region is unacceptable to us," Laith Kubba told Reuters.

Obviously the idea has appeal to the demonstrators in Najaf, but in a country where well over half of the 26 million people follow the Shi'a, a rally with a few thousand people does not necessarily hold significant meaning. Not even acknowledged Iranian puppet Moqtada al-Sadr has openly called for such a move, although he has supported the idea of federalism mixed with autonomy for a Shi'ite sector in the region. The most influential Iraqi ayatollah and the one who commands by far the most loyalty, Ali al-Sistani, has categorically ruled out secession, demanding a unified Iraq, although perhaps somewhat federalist.

That demand appears unlikely to change, and ironically, Najaf provides the reason for his tenacity. Sistani practices "quiet" Shi'ism, a philosophical version that has its teachings based in Najaf. During the long period of Sunni minority rule, this philosophy was deliberatly oppressed along with all other expressions of Shi'ism in Iraq. The "quiet" school demands a more spiritual and less temporal faith of its adherents, and its practitioners tend to divorce themselves from political power as corrupting. On the other hand, the more activist Qumian Shi'ism from Iran (based in the city of Qum) demands that religion become highly temporal and integrated into the politics of Islam as well as the spiritual lives of its adherents.

Sistani has waited decades for Najaf to free itself of Sunni domination so that he can revive the Shi'ite philosophy to which he adheres. The last thing he wants is to watch Najaf move from Sunni domination to Qumian domination with an Iranian annexation, in practice if not in fact. The demonstration for secession will not progress much farther than this.

The Wall, The White Memo, And The DoD

With the 9/11 Commission reeling from the revelation that it deliberately ignored the information regarding the Army's secret Able Danger program and its identification of Mohammed Atta and three other 9/11 hijackers as an al-Qaeda cell, the speculation on their motive for omitting that vital data while blaming the intelligence communities for failing to stop 9/11 has centered on Commissioner Jamie S. Gorelick and her role in building and overstating "the wall", the policy that forbade any hint of cooperation between law enforcement and intelligence operations far beyond the requirements of the FISA statute.

The conflict of interest surrounding Gorelick's appointment as Commissioner rather than witness or target in the 9/11 investigation came up during the public hearings in 2004. Senators Jon Cornyn and Kit Bond openly called for her testimony at the time, as did CQ and a number of other bloggers and pundits who also demanded her resignation. Deborah Orin reminds us of the problem in today's New York Post in her analysis of the deliberate omission of Able Danger:

IT'S starting to look as if the 9/11 Commission turned a blind eye to key questions that could embarrass one of its own members — Clinton-era Justice Department honcho Jamie Gorelick. ...

Gorelick's defenders might argue that hindsight is 20-20. But that excuse doesn't work in this case, because she was warned way back then — when the see-no-evil wall was created.

That warning came right from the front line in the War on Terror — from Manhattan U.S. Attorney Mary Jo White, who headed up key terror probes like the prosecutions for the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993.

White — herself a Clinton appointee — wrote directly to Reno that the wall was a big mistake.

White had firsthand knowledge about the critical value of open sharing between law enforcement and intelligence. After all, she provided the first American counterattack against al-Qaeda -- in the law-enforcement model espoused by Democrats to this day. She successfully prosecuted Ramzi Yousef and several others involved in the first WTC bombing in 1993, a prosecution available only through the bumbling of the AQ cell survivors who stupidly tried to recover their security deposit on the rental truck used as the car bomb.

White knew that prevention should take place over prosecution if the US intended on keeping its citizens safe. She wrote her first memo objecting to the political decision to create an almost-insurmountable barrier that far exceeded the requirements of FISA as interpreted by earlier administrations. When that got her nowhere, she wrote a second memo, giving specific and prescient warnings about what would happen as a result:

That memo surfaced during the 9/11 hearings. But The Post has learned that White was so upset that she bitterly protested with another memo — a scathing one — after Reno and Gorelick refused to tear down the wall.

With eerie foresight, White warned that the Reno-Gorelick wall hindered law enforcement and could cost lives, according to sources familiar with the memo — which is still secret.

The 9/11 Commission got that White memo, The Post was told — but omitted any mention of it from its much-publicized report. Nor does the report include the transcript of its staff interview with White.

And here the Commission engages in its second covert act of omission in order to protect those who made it impossible for the intelligence community to act on its findings. What happened to the second White memo? Mary Jo White gets three mentions in their final report, all of them in the footnotes, and none of them refers to her warnings to Gorelick or Janet Reno. Nowhere does the Commission reveal her objections to the wall or her efforts to reverse the Gorelick decision.

The DoJ decision undoubtedly influenced the political appointees serving as the Pentagon's legal counsel. When the Able Danger team asked for permission to approach the FBI with this information, the Defense attorneys reviewed the material and refused them permission -- three times, as the New York Times first reported. Their concern reflected military restrictions known as "intelligence oversight", as CQ reader Debbie K. pointed out in an e-mail. Intelligence Oversight is the military counterpart to FISA that keeps the military from engaging in domestic spying except in specific circumstances. However, in this case the activity had already been performed and a danger appeared to have been identified -- and the political and legal appointees at the DoD refused to pass it along.

Without a doubt, the policy instituted by the holier-than-thou attitude of the Clinton administration contributed mightily to the inability of the security services to protect the US from the 9/11 attack. The developments now before us showing that the Commission deliberately omitted evidence of this from their report strongly suggests that one or more of its members (and their staff) had a vested interest in keeping that as quiet as possible.

UPDATE: Jim Geraghty at TKS has a good analysis of the knowns and the known unknowns, as Donald Rumsfeld undoubtedly would say. He also links to some good work going on in the blogosphere analyzing the knowns and known unknowns. Check them all out.

UPDATE II: Captain V has more background on Intelligence Oversight, in a way. (via Tom Maguire)

Air America: Garbo Gray Lady Speaks!

The New York Times has ended its hermitage in tomorrow's edition by finally reporting on the financial scandal in its own back yard. Alan Feuer reports on the ongoing Air America funding scandal, and manages to make it more boring than a blotter report for a weekly suburban freebie:

The state attorney general's office and the city's Department of Investigation are looking into whether a boys and girls club serving poor children and ailing elderly people in the Bronx had improper financial dealings, including loans to the Air America radio network, state and city officials said yesterday.

The separate investigations are trying to determine whether the Gloria Wise Boys and Girls Club, run from an office in Co-op City in the Bronx, made improper loans of up to $875,000 to the radio network, known for its liberal programming and hosts like the comedian Al Franken, the officials said.

Investigators from the charities bureau of the attorney general's office, which oversees about 60,000 nonprofit agencies in the state, requested documents from the club last week but have yet to receive them, state officials said. Historically, the charities bureau has required nonprofit agencies caught up in financial improprieties to make compensation for any misspent money and to institute tighter fiscal controls.

My, but Feuer sets us alight with his prose. He does rewrite history through selective recounting of the facts rather well, however:

The allegations of financial mismanagement at Gloria Wise came to light in June, when the Department of Investigation announced in a letter to the club that all city agencies were canceling their contracts with Gloria Wise and an affiliate, the Pathways for Youth Boys and Girls Club, because officials at the clubs had "approved significant inappropriate transactions and falsified documents that were submitted to various city agencies."

Well, that's true as far as it goes. Perhaps the initial DOI announcement occurred in June. However, no one linked it to Air America and the shady loans made through the ethically challenged connection of Evan Cohen until it surfaced in a local Bronx newspaper and recounted by the Daily News in late July. If Brian Maloney hadn't pushed it in the blogosphere, it wouldn't have been noticed at all.

Besides, that just makes it even worse for the Times -- now they've ignored the story for two months instead of two weeks.

At least they covered it to some extent. Michelle Malkin notes that Feuer and the Paper of Record manage to screw up a transcript, though, and in a way that makes a significant change in a quote. The worst part of the report is the lack of investigative vigor displayed. There isn't a fact written that hasn't been on the blogs for at least 48 hours.

Well, it's a start. Knowing the Times, it's probably a finish, too.

NARAL Retreats, Blames ... Pretty Much Everyone

After getting criticism for its smear job on Supreme Court nominee John Roberts from even pro-choice politicians, NARAL withdrew its advertisement from circulation this evening. Instead of acknowledging their incredible failure in judgment, NARAL preferred to blame everyone else for failing to recognize their genius:

After a week of protests by conservatives, an abortion rights group said Thursday night it is withdrawing a television advertisement linking Supreme Court nominee John Roberts to violent anti-abortion activists.

"We regret that many people have misconstrued our recent advertisement about Mr. Roberts' record," said Nancy Keenan, president of NARAL Pro-Choice America.

"Unfortunately, the debate over that advertisement has become a distraction from the serious discussion we hoped to have with the American public," she said in a letter Thursday to Sen. Arlen Specter (news, bio, voting record), R-Pa., who had urged the group to withdraw the ad.

Specter, himself an abortion-rights supporter as well as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee that will question Roberts next month, earlier Thursday had called the ad "blatantly untrue and unfair."

The NARAL ad criticizes Roberts and links him with violent anti-abortion protesters because of the anti-abortion briefs he worked on as a government lawyer.

They wanted to have a "serious discussion" by setting up a false premise in its advertising? That would have been one neat trick. Of course they're lying again, just as their ad lied about Roberts and they lied to the Washington Post about buying ad time on Fox News Channel for the spot. What's one more lie once the die has been cast?

NARAL says they'll have more advertisements to replace the one they pulled. Why? No one will believe what they have to say now. NARAL blew their credibility with this foolish and fraudulent campaign.

The biggest winner in this move is CNN. They no longer have to defend themselves for running the ad. The collective sigh in Atlanta may have been audible in Washington DC.

UPDATE: Timothy Goddard argues that the big losers are Democrats who want to cast themselves as moderates, noting that not a single major Democratic figure openly opposed the content of the ad. Slightly behind them: pro-life Republicans who missed an opportunity to flash some love to the base. A well-argued post and a good point, especially about underestimating the timing of the political cycle.

UPDATE II: The Washington Post editorial board underestimated the political cycle, too, but stakes out its normal moderate position by labeling the NARAL ad a smear:

In releasing the ad, Nancy Keenan, NARAL's president, said in a statement that she wanted "to be very clear that we are not suggesting Mr. Roberts condones or supports clinic violence." That's funny, because the ad does precisely that. It opens with the scene of a bombed clinic -- a clinic attacked years after the case in question -- and then shows a victim of the bombing. An announcer intones that "Supreme Court nominee John Roberts filed court briefs supporting violent fringe groups and a convicted clinic bomber." It closes with the announcer telling viewers that "America can't afford a justice whose ideology leads him to excuse violence against other Americans." A reasonable viewer can only conclude that Judge Roberts -- who served as deputy solicitor general in the administration of George H.W. Bush -- had somehow justified or defended a clinic bombing. ...

The administration's stance in the case and others like it was, while aggressive and controversial, not extreme or legally untenable. Indeed, it prevailed at the Supreme Court on a 6-to-3 vote. In no sense did the brief defend clinic violence, much less bombings. Indeed, Judge Roberts began his oral argument by describing the conduct of the protesters as "tortious" and emphasizing that it was illegal under state law. The question in the case was whether federal law at that time provided additional grounds for legal action. Arguing that it did not is not the same as excusing clinic bombings.

NARAL is certainly within its rights to disagree with the position the government took in the case. But the impression it creates with this ad is not an argument but a smear-- a smear that will do less to discredit Judge Roberts than it will the organization that created it.

CQ reader Cayute Kitt notes that NARAL still has the ad on its site, even though it retracted it from airing on television. The smear continues ...

Rethinking Prague After Able Danger

The official line espoused (at least for the moment) by the 9/11 Commission for their omission of the Able Danger data-mining project that correctly identified Mohammed Atta and three other 9/11 hijackers more than a year prior to 9/11 is that the data supplied by the Army AD intelligence information clashed with what the Commission "knew" about Atta's whereabouts. Spokesman Al Felzenberg told the media that although the Commission lied earlier about not being briefed on Able Danger, they disregarded it for this reason:

Al Felzenberg, spokesman for the commission's follow-up project called the 9/11 Public Discourse Project, had said earlier this week that the panel was unaware of intelligence specifically naming Atta. But he said subsequent information provided Wednesday confirmed that the commission had been aware of the intelligence.

The information did not make it into the final report because it was not consistent with what the commission knew about Atta's whereabouts before the attacks, Felzenberg said.

Felzenberg did not go into specifics. However, the only dispute about Atta's whereabouts in the days before 9/11 is whether Atta traveled to Prague in April 2001. Czech intelligence insisted -- in fact, still insists -- that Atta came to Prague on April 9th and met with Iraqi diplomat Ahmad Khalil Ibrahim Samir al Ani and a member of the Iraqi intelligence service. A meeting with the Iraqis so close to the mission would strongly indicate a connection between 9/11 and Saddam Hussein, at least in terms of logistical support.

The Commission report insists that the meeting never occurred, and explained its reasoning on pages 228-9:

The FBI has gathered evidence indicating that Atta was in Virginia Beach on April 4 (as evidenced by a bank surveillance camera photo), and in Coral Springs, Florida on April 11, where he and Shehhi leased an apartment.On April 6, 9, 10, and 11,Atta’s cellular telephone was used numerous times to call various lodging establishments in Florida from cell sites within Florida.We cannot confirm that he placed those calls. But there are no U.S. records indicating that Atta departed the country during this period. Czech officials have reviewed their flight and border records as well for any indication that Atta was in the Czech Republic in April 2001, including records of anyone crossing the border who even looked Arab.They have also reviewed pictures from the area near the Iraqi embassy and have not discovered photos of anyone who looked like Atta. No evidence has been found that Atta was in the Czech Republic in April 2001.

All this does, of course, is tell us that Atta's phone got used during the time frame he supposedly traveled. As they say, anyone could have used that phone during his absence. They then run down their reasoning against that timing:

These findings cannot absolutely rule out the possibility that Atta was in Prague on April 9, 2001. He could have used an alias to travel and a passport under that alias, but this would be an exception to his practice of using his true name while traveling (as he did in January and would in July when he took his next overseas trip). The FBI and CIA have uncovered no evidence that Atta held any fraudulent passports.

KSM and Binalshibh both deny that an Atta-Ani meeting occurred. There was no reason for such a meeting, especially considering the risk it would pose to the operation. By April 2001, all four pilots had completed most of their training,and the muscle hijackers were about to begin entering the United States.

The available evidence does not support the original Czech report of an Atta-Ani meeting.

The Commission never took into account the following:

* Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM) and Binalshibh had given American intelligence disinformation; at the beginning of Chapter 7, the Commission dismisses KSM's assertions about a lack of AQ contacts in Southern California. Why rely on them here?

* If Iraq had a hand in 9/11, the Iraqis would have required Atta to travel using special cover when they met. The Iraqis would not have wanted the Americans to link Atta with Saddam. They certainly would have provided him a special passport and false identity for such a meeting; they had done the same with Ramzi Yousef, the 1993 WTC bomber, using Kuwaiti paperwork stolen during their 1991 invasion. In fact, no one is sure that Ramzi Yousef is his actual name.

* The purpose of the trip may have been to ensure that the "muscle hijackers" did get into the US safely, and to arrange for logistical and financial support to make that happen. It would have also given Atta an opportunity to finalize all plans before proceeding with the final phases of his mission.

* The reason that "[t]he available evidence does not support the original Czech report of an Atta-Ani meeting" could be that they left out the Able Danger evidence that might support it.

The insistence that Atta could never have been in Prague on April 9, 2001 despite the insistence of Czech intelligence to the contrary never stood on firm ground. With this new revelation about Able Danger and the immediate invocation of the Commission-approved Atta timeline, it becomes even less sure and more suspicious than ever.

If Able Danger supports Czech intelligence, which at the moment remains just speculation, it will prove tremendously explosive. The ramifications will affect not just the careers of the Commissioners and their staff, but a deliberate attempt to suppress Able Danger might well result in criminal prosecution. It will also force a recalculation of the war in Iraq and its place in the war on terror. The involvement of Jamie Gorelick on the Commission will once again cause people to ask why such a conflict of interest was allowed to occur -- only this time, Congress won't be able to avoid the answers.

Congress needs to hold public hearings to get to the bottom of these questions. The deliberate deceptions of the 9/11 Commission this week has set off alarms about their motives and preconceptions which may have seriously perverted our knowledge of 9/11 and the forces which stood behind the attacks -- by far the most complicated and well-coordinated al-Qaeda operation, before or since.

UPDATE: This picture, from a friend of mine who served in Iraq in 2003-4, shows that Saddam had no problem celebrating his delight in the mission's success, and The Anchoress reminds us that the Iraqi consulate in New York was the only one that didn't lower its flag after 9/11:

9/11 Commission Changes Its Story -- Again (Updates And Bump To Top)

Another day, another story seems to be the containment strategy for the defunct and now discredited 9/11 Commission. The AP reports that the Commission's spokesperson, Al Felzenberg, now admits that the Commission knew full well that the secret Army program Able Danger had identified Mohammed Atta as an al-Qaeda operative along with three other men in Brooklyn, but left it out of their final report:

The Sept. 11 commission knew military intelligence officials had identified lead hijacker Mohamed Atta as a member of al-Qaida who might be part of U.S.-based terror cell more than a year before the terror attacks but decided not to include that in its final report, a spokesman acknowledged Thursday.

Al Felzenberg, who had been the commission's chief spokesman, said Tuesday the panel was unaware of intelligence specifically naming Atta. But he said subsequent information provided Wednesday confirmed that the commission had been aware of the intelligence. ...

Felzenberg said an unidentified person working with Weldon came forward Wednesday and described a meeting 10 days before the panel's report was issued last July. During it, a military official urged commission staffers to include a reference to the intelligence on Atta in the final report.

Felzenberg said checks were made and the details of the July 12, 2004, meeting were confirmed. Previous to that, Felzenberg said it was believed commission staffers knew about Able Danger from a meeting with military officials in
Afghanistan during which no mention was made of Atta or the other three hijackers.

Staff members now are searching documents in the National Archives to look for notes from the meeting in Afghanistan and any other possible references to Atta and Able Danger, Felzenberg said.

And so now we come back to the National Archives -- and October 2003. One of Sandy Berger's last visits to the Archives where he took highly classified material out the door with him was in October 2003, around the time that the Commission first heard about Able Danger. Does this start to sound just a little too convenient and coincidental?

Even without the possible Berger theft as part of the story, this constant shifting of the story underscores the massive credibility deficit that the Commission has now earned. First they never heard of Able Danger. Then, maybe a low-level staffer told them about the program but not the Atta identification. Next, the military met with the Commissioners but didn't specify the Atta identification. Now, we finally have confirmation that the Commission itself -- not just its low-level staff -- knew that military intelligence had identified Mohammed Atta as an al-Qaeda operative a year before 9/11. Instead of reporting it, the Commission buried it.

This points to some disturbing questions. It looks like the Commission decided early to pin blame on the intelligence community rather than the bureaucracy which stripped it of its ability to act in the interests of our security. Who benefited from that? Commissioner Jamie S. Gorelick. Who else stood to lose if the real story came out? The answer to that may well be the National Security Advisor who conducted a clumsy raid on the National Archives in the middle of the investigation.

Congress needs to take this up immediately.

Addendum: And Congress needs to get the Commission staffers the hell out of the National Archives until after Congress investigates this themselves. See The Anchoress for more thoughts and links surrounding Sandy Berger.

And please, let's remember what Commission co-chair Lee Hamilton had to say about this less than 48 hours ago:

"The Sept. 11 commission did not learn of any U.S. government knowledge prior to 9/11 of surveillance of Mohammed Atta or of his cell," said Hamilton, a former Democratic congressman from Indiana. "Had we learned of it obviously it would've been a major focus of our investigation."

This man and his fellow Commissioners have completely destroyed their credibility and that of their investigation.

UPDATE: Had some problems with "Able Danger", which came out Able Baker and Able Data. Must have been the lunchtime burger. Thanks to CQ reader New England Devil for the heads-up.

UPDATE II: Weldon sent a letter expressing his unhappiness with the earlier denials coming from the Commission, and he released it to the media:

Weldon said he was upset by suggestions earlier Wednesday by 9/11 panel members that it had been not been given critical information on Able Danger's capabilities and findings.

"The impetus for this letter is my extreme disappointment in the recent, and false, claim of the 9/11 commission staff that the commission was never given access to any information on Able Danger," Weldon wrote to former Chairman Gov. Thomas Kean and Vice-Chairman Rep. Lee Hamilton. "The 9/11 commission staff received not one but two briefings on Able Danger from former team members, yet did not pursue the matter.

"The commission's refusal to investigate Able Danger after being notified of its existence, and its recent efforts to feign ignorance of the project while blaming others for supposedly withholding information on it, brings shame on the commissioners, and is evocative of the worst tendencies in the federal government that the commission worked to expose," Weldon added.

Fox News Channel reported earlier that Weldon says the intelligence officers who conducted these briefings have expressed willingness and enthusiasm for testifying under oath and on the record about the information given to Commission staffers on both occasions. Also, they spoke to the officer involved in the October 2003 briefing who insists that Atta's name was brought to the Commission on that occasion.

This looks more and more like a political disaster for the Commission and those who sought to blame the intelligence community to save the bureaucracy, especially the administration that bottled up the Able Danger project in 2000.

UPDATE III AND BUMP: Tom Maguire sent me a note referencing a Redstate post that should get everyone's attention:

The Commission’s objection to Able Danger’s Mohammed Atta datapoint was:

"There was no way that Atta could have been in the United States at that time, which is why the staff didn't give this tremendous weight when they were writing the report," Mr. Felzenberg said. "This information was not meshing with the other information that we had."

There is always the distinct possibility that the other information is wrong and it certainly begs the question of how Able Danger was able to identify Mohammed Atta and ask to turn their evidence over to the FBI if he was not in the country.

But this is the second occasion in which the 9-11 Commission has pooh-poohed other evidence concerning Atta that didn’t “mesh” with their desired storyline.

The elephant in the corner of the 9-11 Commission’s report has always been the perfunctory way in which they dismiss the allegation that Atta met with the intelligence chief at Iraq’s Prague embassy, Ahmed Khalil Ibrahim Samir al-Ani, on April 8-9, 2001. This meeting was discounted on the strength of Atta’s cell phone being used on April 6, 9, 10, and 11 and an ATM photo on April 11… and the fact that they can’t find a record that Atta bought plane tickets with presumably any of the 63 drivers licenses the hijackers possessed.

The Prague story would not fit the preconception that the operation was carried out strictly by al-Qaeda without assistance of any other government. The dismissal of the Able Danger information is inexplicable without assuming that the Commission had decided in advance who was to blame.

The consistent denial of Atta meeting in Prague with Iraqi intelligence always stuck in the craw of those who followed the case closely. Czech intelligence insists to this day that Atta met with the IIS in Prague on those dates. However, the Commission finally decided not to endorse it (Chapter 7 of their report). Why? Because it would have implicated Saddam Hussein in the 9/11 attacks -- and provided another, more immediate reason to invade Iraq, just when half of the committee wanted to avoid any such conclusions.

With that in mind, the correlation between the deliberate dumping of the Able Danger data from the report makes more sense. If Able Danger identified Atta correctly, it could have corroborated the timeline that fits with Czech intelligence on Atta's visit. That meant that the Iraqis at least had contact with the local 9/11 mastermind, if not actively supported it.

Now, speculating a bit, who was it that cleaned out the National Archive along the same time frame as the first briefing of the Commission about Able Danger? Which campaign did he advise at the time of his mission to inspect the records? And on whose behalf did he ostensibly perform that mission?

This may cause a political meltdown the likes of which have never been seen before. If intelligence officers appear before Congress and name names, the domino effect could change Washington DC forever. Congress needs to act fast to ensure that no further damage occurs to the records.

UPDATE IV: John Podhoretz reaches the same conclusions at The Corner.

Dafydd: Why Markets Sometimes Fail

As many of you know, Hugh Hewitt has been on holiday for the past several days. His guest host today (or at least for this first segment) is someone named Jerry-something; I didn't catch the name, and I'm not familiar with him. But he raised an interesting question... one that he seemed incapable of answering, alas, for the answer seems pretty clear to me.

He asks the standard question about Iraq: "are we winning?" But he is drawn to the negative response, no we're not, by an interesting line of reasoning: he notes that oil hit a high today, and he deduces (rather, he surmises) that international investors are beginning to be convinced that we're losing and are going to lose. And as he points out, "markets are usually right."

But that facile pronouncement at the end is insufficient; it requires deeper thought: why are markets usually right? And under what conditions can they be egregiously wrong? Alas, many capitalists (such as myself) have such a kneejerk love of markets that we are occasionally led to attribute godlike powers of perception to them.

Markets normally work because of thousands, hundreds of thousands, or tens of millions of consumers who all have their own information sources; and because with that many different people arriving at different conclusions, each correcting as he sees his competitor doing better at this or that, you end up with a massive biological parallel processor with a positive-feedback loop: such a processor is far superior to any sort of top-down heuristic, or set of rules, where a single bad rule can ruin the entire chain of reasoning.

In a market, individuals make dreadful mistakes all the time; but rather than deflect the entire market down the wrong path -- as might happen if, say, the commanding officer in a battle made a dreadful mistake guessing where the enemy was -- the market usually absorbs the mistake: for every person who makes a mistake, there is another who exploits his superior perception, and the loss of the first is balanced by the gain of the second. In aggregate, those prone to mistakes are weeded out (they go bust), while the unusually perceptive become richer and more powerful. Eventually, the market itself, as a mass, moves... slowly, but usually in the correct direction to increase net wealth.

Yet not always. And the way I phrased it above, you can probably see the weak point. It's right here: "consumers who all have their own information sources."

The stock-market crash of 1929 is a good example of how the system fails. I am not an economist, and I hope I'm not completely misunderstanding this; but my impression is that a flood of people had gotten into stock speculation who had never invested money in the market before. They were buying on margin; this isn't necessarily bad, if you know what you're doing; but it's risky, and they had no idea how to calculate the risk. They put too much on the margin, and they invested in stock based not upon real financial information but upon emotional reactions -- because they had no access to accurate financial information, mostly because they had no idea where to look for it and couldn't understand it anyway.

I suspect much of the same was behind the "dot-com" boom and crash during the Clinton administration: lots of people getting into the market, being unaware of even the most basic financial information (such as the ratio of stock price to corporate earnings).

Anybody of at least average intelligence can evaluate a laundry soap or a breakfast cereal and come away with a pretty good understanding of how well it "works" -- cleans or tastes -- and how much it costs compared to competing products. This is near perfect consumer information. But some products (computer hardware and software, for example) require a much great degree of sophistication to evaluate and cannot be so easily priced by the consumer. In an atmosphere of imperfect information, consumers grab for any datum they can get... usually asking their equally unknowing friends (which measures ubiquity) or reading reviews -- which measures the amount of money companies are willing to pay for fake "reviews" in trade magazines, since the average consumer wouldn't know a real trade magazine and a reliable reviewer from a paid hack in a magazine that makes much of its money from advertisements.

Markets fail to reflect or predict reality when the consumers have little access to accurate information, or worse, great access to authoritative-sounding fraudulent information.

And that is precisely what is happening with the market's perception of the progress of the Iraq war. Combat is not a financial measure; the only hint that oil traders have about the war is through the news, which in this case means the MSM. To be perhaps excessively blunt, all they know is what they read in the papers.

Individual investors cannot go to Iraq and "see for themselves," as an ordinary consumer can taste a breakfast cereal or try out a computer application: the war zone is too dangerous, they're denied entry to the most interesting areas (where the fighting is fiercest, for example), and much of what is happening would be invisible anyway on a brief trip. One would need to be stationed in Iraq for months or even a year or two to have a good idea what is happening. It's likely that the average Marine Corps staff sergeant on his second or third tour knows a hell of a lot more about the war progress than the most astute oil investor based in Paris or even Abu Dhabi; but the Marine doesn't bid on sweet light crude.

The bias of the American MSM against the Iraq war is, believe it or not, almost nil compared to the bias of the news services in most other countries; so too the willingness to print nightmarish fantasy instead of observed fact. To read the news in France, Japan, or even England is to get the impression not that we're losing, but that we've already lost, that we're staggering and ready to drop, and that we've nearly been driven entirely out of the Middle East.

Here's a depressing little experiment you can try; if you do, please comment with the results. Seek out friends of yours who don't follow the news closely -- not bloggers or blog readers, obviously, unless they confine their reading to dKos or Juan Cole (sorry, I couldn't resist!) -- and ask them the following question. Ask with a neutral voice and no facial expression, as if you were a professional pollster (say, maybe someone should commission an actual professional poll using this question):

Comparing the war in Iraq to the war in Vietnam, would you say that American deaths in Iraq have been:

a) Significantly more than in Vietnam
b) Somewhat more than in Vietnam
c) About the same as in Vietnam
d) Somewhat less than in Vietnam
e) Significantly less than in Vietnam

The correct answer, any way you choose to measure it (per month, as a percent of the force, &c), is (e), of course. But I suspect that most people who get all of their news from the MSM would answer (b) or (c), because that's the way the networks and most of the major dailies portray it. And of course, it's even worse in foreign countries; I wonder how many consumers of Agence France-Presse or al-Jazeera (which likely includes many oil investors in Europe and the Middle East) would answer (a), the reality-free choice?

This sets up exactly the kind of market failure seen in stock-market crashes: little access to accurate information, great access to fraudulent information. And for that very reason, the spot oil market is completely incapable of properly analyzing progress in the Iraq war.

Hate E-Mail Results In Termination

As a result of the commentary that Michelle Malkin has provided on the Cindy Sheehan protests, she has once again received the kind of sexist and racist e-mail that bloggers usually see only from those nutcases who hijack both of those victim classes in order to spew their venom. Sadly and predictably, the lunatics (who do not represent the mainstream Left) focus on Michelle's gender, genitalia, and ethnicity to convince her of the wrongness of her position, which would be laughable if it wasn't so damned predictable and more than a little pathetic.

One unpredictable result came from Michelle's decision to publish some examples, complete with headers. Patrick Mitchell, who until today worked at the Los Angeles law firm of Olgletree Deakins, found out that using company e-mail to send hate-filled messages such as "YOU STINK you nasty C*NT! Eat S**t and DIE bitch!!" (asterisks mine) tends to limit one's career at most law firms. Managing stockholder Gray L. Geddie called Michelle and sent an e-mail expressing his shock and outrage:

I was very disturbed to learn today that a legal secretary in our Los Angeles office sent you the vile e-mail referenced on your home page. ... As Managing Shareholder, I wanted to extend to you our apologies and let you know that this serious violation of our firm's work rules has resulted in the discharge of this employee.

Bravo, Mr. Geddie and Ogletree Deakins. Bravo. As for young Mr. Mitchell, he can explore the various philosophies of karma while looking for gainful employment in LA.

UPDATE: If you're looking for my thoughts on Cindy Sheehan, you won't find them expressed any better than by Mitch Berg at Shot In The Dark. She's entitled to her opinion, and she's entitled to change her mind. She's not entitled to dictate policy to the United States, but she can protest all she wants ... and the usual suspects can exploit that to their hearts' content. It's worth noting that the rest of the family feels quite a bit differently about policy and her protests.

WaPo Correction Names NARAL For False Info On Fox

As promised, the Washington Post has updated its story by Dan Balz published yesterday that claimed both CNN and Fox had sold national advertising to NARAL for its fraudulent commercial insinuating that Supreme Court nominee John Roberts supported violence against women. It ran the correction at the top of the original story on its website:

Correction to This Article

Because of incorrect information from NARAL Pro-Choice America, an Aug. 9 article incorrectly said that a new television ad attacking Judge John G. Roberts Jr. would air on the Fox News Channel.

The Post acknowledges that NARAL lied about its ad placement, and one can see the transparent motivation behind the fib. They wanted to show that their ad passed muster across the political spectrum by saying that FNC had also approved the ad for airtime. Their willingness to use lies to combat the Roberts nomination should prove instructive for not just reporters who rely on their information, but for those who need to measure NARAL's credibility while pondering NARAL's arguments.

Some criticize Dan Balz for not confirming the ad buy with Fox (and CNN) independent of NARAL's assertions. However, that may be just a bit harsh. Their claims of ad buys doesn't strike me as something that would cause immediate skepticism; the ad itself drew so much of it that the details of the purchases probably seemed secondary. Balz did the right thing in the end. He burned the source that lied to him and corrected the record for all to see.

The Second Half Of 9/11

Now that the New York Times has printed its confirmation of the Able Danger story and shown that the 9/11 Commission ignored its existence and later lied about being briefed about it, we can turn our attention to another piece of the 9/11 puzzle that the Commission also conveniently overlooked. Over two weeks ago, I posted about the curious case of Mohammed Afroze, the al-Qaeda conspirator who confessed to masterminding a series of attacks on international targets for September 11, 2001, which intended to turn the AQ attack into global warfare. In my Daily Standard column today, I go into more depth about Afroze and his plans:

On the day after the failed July 21 bombings in London, an Indian court in Delhi sentenced Mohammed Afroze to seven years in prison for his participation in a wider plot which had been planned for September 11, 2001. Afroze led another al Qaeda cell which planned to use commercial airlines as missiles to destroy several international targets. The Islamist terrorists intended to send a global message through coordination with the attacks on America. Their plan failed when the terrorists lost their nerve and fled Heathrow.

Afroze and his compatriots from Bangladesh, Afghanistan, and Pakistan had planned on flying their Manchester-bound flights into the House of Commons and the Tower Bridge in London. Attacking Parliament would have sent a message to the British government about the continued sanctions on Iraq. Blowing up the Tower Bridge would kill a slew of British civilians, with the intent of terrorizing them into demanding a withdrawal of British troops from the Middle East and a halt to support of American actions in the region.

But Afroze had other targets as part of his plan--and these reveal something much deeper and broader than Galloway and the media wish to contemplate.

The other targets? Australia and India. The latter especially destroys the oft-repeated meme that al-Qaeda's primary motivation comes from Anglo-American occupation in Iraq, or their actions in the first Gulf War. Instead, the aborted attack plans of Afroze show that Osama bin Laden and his gang of terrorists intend on establishing a new Caliphate in Southwest Asia and North Africa, regaining the lands that once fell under Muslim control, and using control of oil to push for global domination.

Interestingly, especially in light of the Able Danger revelations this week, the 9/11 Commission never mentions Mohammed Afroze even a single time, despite his key role in attempting to provide the international half of the attacks on 9/11. The nature of these targets shows that AQ didn't target America exclusively and should have provided at least some context for their consideration. Like Able Danger, however, they either ignored it or deliberately omitted it as not fitting within the predetermined conclusions they desperately wanted to reach.

Nor has the media provided any coverage of Afroze. The paltry mention his case received came almost exclusively from the international press corps, notably the Times of India and the Times of London. Americans once again find themselves underinformed of the facts of 9/11 despite the vast amount of money, time, and attention spent on supposedly "connecting the dots" after the fact. This willful ignorance on the part of those commissioned to keep us informed should once again demonstrate that the media has aligned itself to certain narratives and have proven unreliable in the main to report facts that do not fit them.

This continues to make life dangerous for Americans and free people around the world. If the media cannot truly depict the issues surrounding global Islamofascist terror, the ignorance they promote about its goals will result in a collapse of will to keep those goals from becoming reality.

Jimmy Carter And The Cherry Briefing Book

Ask people about Jimmy Carter and the likely response will sound something like, "A good an honest man, a mediocre [or worse] President, and the best former President we've had." The latter part of that statement had been considered the common wisdom almost ever since Carter left office after having lost his bid for a second term to the Reagan Revolution, especially given his high-profile work with charities like Habitat for Humanity.

Over the past decade, that carefully-built reputation for charity and honesty has slowly declined as Carter injected himself into foreign policy across three administrations, Democrats and Republicans alike, where he most definitely did not wait for an invitation before commencing to unconstructively meddle where voters clearly told him in 1980 they did not want him. The nadir came last month, when he openly campaigned against the Iraq War overseas in Britain, attempting to undermine US policy and support from its closest ally during wartime.

Now George Will tells us that the first assessment -- Carter's honesty -- also fails the test. Carter has often expressed bitterness at losing his re-election bid and claimed over the years that the theft of his pre-debate briefing book lost him the election ... instead of the double-digit lending rates, skyrocketing unemployment, and the humiliation of his weak response to Iran's hostaging of our embassy in Teheran. Will responds to Carter's assertion that Will stole the briefing book himself in a must-read column appearing in today's Washington Post:

A quarter of a century has passed since 44 states said "No, thanks" to Jimmy Carter's offer to serve a second term, yet he still evidently thinks his loss is explained not by foreign policy debacles, such as invading Iran with eight helicopters, and a misery index -- inflation plus unemployment -- of 22, almost triple today's index. Rather, he seems to think approximately this:

Ronald Reagan won because he won the only debate. He won it not because of Carter's debate performance ("I had a discussion with my daughter, Amy, the other day, before I came here, to ask her what the most important issue was. She said she thought nuclear weaponry . . .") but only because Reagan had Carter's briefing book. And Reagan had it because this columnist gave it to him.

That last accusation, for which there is no evidence, is, as he has been told, false. ... Recently in a Plains, Ga., church, he illustrated his aptitude for the virtue of forgiveness by saying that once, after columnist Will read a report of his telling his briefing book tale, Will wrote to him "asking for forgiveness."

Will then refutes Carter and his paranoid fantasies expeditiously by revealing that the only letter he wrote Carter specifically told him that he had no idea how David Stockman got the briefing book, although he saw it with the future Reagan budget director during the debate prep. The only point on which Will expressed regret was that Carter's staff could come up with such poor preparation for the crucial moment of his campaign, and that its usefulness approached zero for Reagan and for Carter.

Will doesn't reveal if Amy prepared it for her dad, discussing the importance of nuclear weaponry. He does, however, take the occasion to review Carter's increasingly bitter performance as ex-president and suggests that he needs to be re-evaluated for that pedestal which at one time appeared his destiny after office. It seems that the good and honest man has transformed into an incompetent, miserable old liar -- or more to the point, may always have been, behind that cheery smile and folksy PR.

Air America: Heads Roll At Gloria Wise, Not Piquant?

The New York Post reports this morning that high-level executive departures have rocked Gloria Wise Boys & Girls Club in the wake of the disclosure of almost a million dollars in loans and transfers of government grants to Evan Cohen and Air America. GW also refuted a key claim of Air America in its attempt to distance itself from the shady dealings that kept it on the air:

Just days after the executive director abruptly resigned following Post reports that the club had provided $875,000 in bizarre loans to Air America, two other top officials at the Gloria Wise Boys & Girls Club have quit.

Acting executive director Lorraine Corva — who took over after Charles Rosen suddenly resigned last week — will be leaving her job on Aug. 26, sources said.

Assistant executive director Jeff Aulenback also resigned, effective immediately, sources said.

Their departures from the embattled social-services agency are tied to the ongoing fallout from the highly unusual and possibly improper loan to Air America, as well as other dubious fiscal practices, sources said.

Piquant hasn't made any management changes in the past week, despite the three abrupt departures from its creditor's executive group. That seems rather fortunate as they continue to get publicly challenged on their assertions regarding the repayment of the money that wound up at Air America instead of serving the needs of the poor children and Alzheimer's patients in the Bronx for which it was earmarked. GW spokesman Jim Grossman told the Post that AA/Piquant still hasn't told the truth about their plans to give the money back:

The left-wing radio network, which showcases Al Franken, last Friday made a $50,000 repayment on the loan to an escrow account controlled by the station's lawyer.

"The [city] Department of Investigation advised Air America to repay $875,000 into an escrow account from which no money can be disbursed without our approval," said DOI spokeswoman Emily Gest.

"Air America has not followed that recommendation."

But an Air America official told The Post yesterday that both sides had agreed to a payment plan months ago and that they were on schedule with their payments.

That was news to the Boys & Girls Club. "Air America has agreed in principle to give the money, but nothing has been finalized yet," Grossman said yesterday.

"They haven't agreed how and when to do it."

Michelle Malkin has this and a number of other links on her post this morning, including original story-breaker Brian Maloney's transcript of a very interesting Al Franken broadcast. North Carolinians Confederate Yankee and John have updates as well. Michelle also reports that one of her readers has found Evan Cohen in Hawaii,and CQ readers will never guess what kind of work that he wants to pursue.

A Disgusting Smear On A Brave Man

The death of Steven Vincent by terrorists in the town of Basra has caused a number of people to turn their attention from the difficulties surrounding Baghdad and the Zarqawi-led foreign band of lunatics operating in that area to the British zone in the south. Before his murder, Vincent wrote about the Shi'ite radicals slowly infiltrating the power structure and their ability to conduct vigilante missions against their former Ba'ath masters, with the British either unable or unwilling to confront them.

Now The Scotsman reports that British authorities have started spreading a story that the already-married Vincent got killed for offering a dowry for his Iraqi interpreter, offending the local Muslims, instead of his writing about the ongoing corruption and violence in Basra:

AN American journalist who was shot dead in Basra last week was executed by Shiite extremists who knew he was intending to marry his Muslim interpreter, it has emerged.

Steven Vincent was shot a week before the planned wedding to Nouriya Itais and had already delivered a $2,500 dowry to her family.

The disclosure casts new light on the grip of Islamic religious sects in the British-run south- east of Iraq - raising concern that they will take control once troops start to withdraw. Mr Vincent was abducted from his hotel three days after writing a piece in the New York Times accusing British officials of allowing religious parties to infiltrate the Basra police.

In America, his death was taken as retribution for his article. But in London yesterday, British officials pointed out that the police in Basra believed it was retribution for his affair.

"We warned him to look after his security in a more professional manner than he was doing," said the official.

What does Fraser Nelson, the Scotsman's political editor, use to report this rather sensational development? A single anonymous source within the British government. Nelson never mentions the fact that Vincent already has a wife and family. Vincent wrote most of his blog posts as open letters to Lisa Vincent, including his last original post on the blog days before his murder. It seems unlikely in the extreme, given Vincent's writings, that this dowry story holds water. Beyond the gossipy official, however, the Scotsman offers no evidence and no corroboration for this nasty rumor -- making the newspaper no different than the sexist Islamists who cannot conceive of men and women having working relationships.

This looks like an attempt by British officials in the Basra region to deflect attention from their administration of the area and Vincent's critical reporting of these shortcomings. Instead of actually addressing that, they found a dupe in the Scotsman to print unsubstantiated and scurrilous gossip about a victim of the violence of which he warned. Shame on everyone involved in this smear job. (link via USS Neverdock)

9/11 Commission Acknowledges Briefing On Able Danger

Tomorrow's New York Times reports that members of the 9/11 Commission reversed themselves and now acknowledge being briefed on the Army's data mining project, Able Danger, prior to the publication of their report to the American people. After over 24 hours of denying that anyone had told the Commission about the secret project, their spokesman now says that commission officials met with a uniformed officer who told them about the identification of Mohammed Atta and three other 9/11 hijackers in 2000, over a year prior to the attacks:

The Sept. 11 commission was warned by a uniformed military officer 10 days before issuing its final report that the account would be incomplete without reference to what he described as a secret military operation that by the summer of 2000 had identified as a potential threat the member of Al Qaeda who would lead the attacks more than a year later, commission officials said on Wednesday.

The officials said that the information had not been included in the report because aspects of the officer's account had sounded inconsistent with what the commission knew about that Qaeda member, Mohammed Atta, the plot's leader. ...

The briefing by the military officer is the second known instance in which people on the commission's staff were told by members of the military team about the secret program, called Able Danger.

The meeting, on July 12, 2004, has not been previously disclosed. That it occurred, and that the officer identified Mr. Atta there, were acknowledged by officials of the commission after the congressman, Curt Weldon of Pennsylvania, provided information about it. ...

Al Felzenberg, who served as the commission's chief spokesman, said earlier this week that staff members who were briefed about Able Danger at a first meeting, in October 2003, did not remember hearing anything about Mr. Atta or an American terrorist cell. On Wednesday, however, Mr. Felzenberg said the uniformed officer who briefed two staff members in July 2004 had indeed mentioned Mr. Atta.

First we hear that no such meeting occurred. After that, the Commission says one might have occurred in October 2003 but that no one remembered it. Now we find out that the Commission had two meetings where the heard about Able Danger and its identification of Mohammed Atta, including one just before they completed their report. Instead of saying to themselves, "Hey, wait a minute -- this changes the picture substantially," and postponing the report until they could look further into Able Danger, they simply shrugged their shoulders and published what they had.

Why? Able Danger proved that at least some of the intelligence work done by the US provided the information that could have helped prevent or at least reduce the attacks on 9/11. They had identified the ringleader of the conspiracy as a terrorist agent, even if they didn't know what mission he had at the time.

What does that mean for the Commission's findings? It meant that the cornerstone of their conclusions no longer fit the facts. Able Danger showed that the US had enough intelligence to take action -- if the government had allowed law enforcement and intelligence operations to cooperate with each other. It also showed that data mining could effectively identify terrorist agents.

So what did the Commission do? It ignored those facts which did not fit within its predetermined conclusions. It never bothered to mention Able Danger even one time in its final report, even though that absolutely refuted the notion that the government had no awareness that Atta constituted a terrorist threat. It endorsed the idea of data mining (which would die in Congress as the Total Information Awareness program) without ever explaining why. And while the Clinton policy of enforcing a quarantine between law enforcement and intelligence operations came under general criticism, their report never included the fact that the "wall" for which Commission member Jamie S. Gorelick had so much responsibility specifically contributed to Atta's ability to come and go as he pleased, building the teams that would kill almost 3,000 Americans.

And when confronted with this revelation this week, the Commission lied about their knowledge of the program and attempted to impugn Rep. Curt Weldon's integrity instead. Here's what Lee Hamilton, one of the Commission's co-chairs, had to say just yesterday on the topic:

"The Sept. 11 commission did not learn of any U.S. government knowledge prior to 9/11 of surveillance of Mohammed Atta or of his cell," said Hamilton, a former Democratic congressman from Indiana. "Had we learned of it obviously it would've been a major focus of our investigation."

The Able Danger project team tried three times, Fox reports, to give the information on Atta to the FBI in 2000. Each time, administration attorneys blocked their efforts:

Weldon said that in September 2000, the unit recommended on three separate occasions that its information on the hijackers be given to the FBI "so they could bring that cell in and take out the terrorists." However, Weldon said Pentagon lawyers rejected the recommendation, arguing that Atta and the others were in the country legally so information on them could not be shared with law enforcement.

"Lawyers within the administration — and we're talking about the Clinton administration, not the Bush administration — said 'you can't do it,'" and put post-its over Atta's face, Weldon said. "They said they were concerned about the political fallout that occurred after Waco ... and the Branch Davidians."

The Commission spent yesterday claiming that the Pentagon never briefed them again on anything about Able Danger after the October 2003 meeting, saying in the Fox report that they pursued the documents from the Pentagon on the program -- and that they received them, which the Pentagon confirms. Oddly, the words "Able Danger" appears nowhere in their final report despite the documents being in their hands. And now we have the Pentagon practically begging them on July 12, 2004, to put the Able Danger and the Atta information into the report, and the Commission refusing to do so.

Someone needs to answer questions, in front of Congress this time and not some pass-the-buck commission that tried to bury Able Danger the first time. Who made the decision to bury Able Danger? Why?

One fact we know for sure now: the Commission report has no credibility whatsoever. What else got left out because of inconvenience? Until we have officials with some accountability look into the evidence instead of a panel comprised of people like Gorelick who have axes to grind and actions to minimize, we will never get a clear, factual look at the performance of our intelligence services and the constraints put on them by bureaucrats more interested in political correctness than in national security. (Fox link via The Anchoress and Dr. Sanity)

UPDATE, 5:43 AM: Interestingly, the New York Times changed its headline overnight from "9/11 Commission's Staff Ignored Military's Early Identification of Chief Hijacker" to "9/11 Commission's Staff Rejected Report on Early Identification of Chief Hijacker". Nothing else changed in the story except the headline. Did the Times feel uncomfortable with the clearly accurate first headline and want to attract less attention in the blogosphere?

Chinese Espionage Vaults To Top Of FBI Priorities

After the catastrophic attacks on 9/11, American priorities for intelligence operations understandably shifted overwhelmingly to identifying potential new threats for attacks and other violence on American assets at home and abroad. The London Telegraph now reports that those priorities may have changed again, as the Chinese have taken advantage of the distraction by expanding their military and industrial espionage efforts in the United States:

The FBI is deploying hundreds of new agents across America to crack down on spying by a small army of Chinese agents who are stealing information designed to kick-start high-tech military and business programmes.

The new counter-intelligence strategy reflects growing alarm at the damage being done by spies hidden among the 700,000 Chinese visitors entering the US each year.

"China is the biggest [espionage] threat to the US today," David Szady, the assistant director of the FBI's counter-intelligence division, told the Wall Street Journal.

Officers said the campaign to close down China's wide-ranging espionage effort was now one of the major intelligence priorities after the struggle against terrorism.

The FBI finds the new Chinese espionage threat troublesome, and not just because of its scale. The Chinese have so many people working legitimately within the United States that it allows agents to hide well within those communities -- groups that tend naturally to act in a closed manner. The FBI also faces significant linguistic challenges with the Chinese, a problem it didn't necessarily have with the Russians. The Chinese use several different dialects, and some so different they almost qualify as separate languages.

One bright spot for the FBI, according to the Telegraph, is that the spies sent by Beijing are mostly amateurs, not professionals. That counts as a blessing and a curse. Their lack of training makes it easier for the agency to spot them, but the sheer number sent makes it more difficult for the US to track them all. Most of them have orders to send any information they get back to China with no particular strategy in mind. This also complicates matters for counter-espionage, because capturing a foreign agent generally leads nowhere else -- few traditional "rings" exist.

The rise of Chinese espionage comes at a difficult time for the United States. We need the Chinese as a lever against the North Koreans, but we also see the tremendous build-up of military resources that Beijing has already put into the Pacific Theater. Soon they will challenge us for naval supremacy, putting Taiwan at risk. That may satisfy Beijing in the short run, but tyrannies that acquire power rarely stop themselves from acquiring more. Their espionage efforts help them do so with our own technology, probably the only way it could happen at all.

All of this has occurred in the background as the war on Islamofascist terrorism necessarily occupies our attention. Beijing sees this and knows to take advantage of it, diplomatically by stalling us on Iraq and Iran, and militarily and strategically by espionage and ramped-up production schedules. They have done everything but sent telegrams introducing themselves as our next challenge on the global stage. It's the unpaid bill that no one wants to open because everyone knows what the cost will be.

That bill has apparently come due now. Despite the enormous amount of trade that benefits both nations, the Chinese have decided to square off against us to challenge us for primacy in the Pacific and possibly the world, at a time when they know us to be distracted. We need to start taking our security posture in the Pacific more seriously. We need a serious evaluation of our capabilities in that theater and an assessment of whether we will continue to present a strong enough posture over the next two or three decades to deter Beijing from becoming adventurous, in Taiwan and elsewhere. We also need to unshackle Japan and convince Tokyo to either create a strong defensive force for itself and the nearby areas or to assist us in expanding our own forces to provide that security umbrella.

The Chinese have made their play. They will need to see that we will not simply accept a subservient role quietly on the basis of distraction.

Power Line Goes MSM

Well, maybe that's overstating it a bit -- but my friends at Power Line announced today that they have rolled out a news aggregation site called Power Line News. They have links to content sources all over the globe, and RSS feeds from the blogs you read, including CQ. It's a slick presentation and a fun site, and as John says, news junkies can get their fill and more through their Java-enabled interface.

Drop by and take a look -- you'll want to bookmark it!

Note: Saint Paul at Fraters Libertas congratulates John and I for our nascent speaking careers at Premiere Speakers Bureau. He writes one of his funniest posts ever -- and if you read FL, you'll know that's pretty darned hilarious -- comparing us to some of the more, uh, intriguing options available at Premiere. Check out his calculation of our relative value ...

CNN, Keeping Their Viewers (Mis)Informed (Updated & Bumped)

The controversy over NARAL's advertisement opposing the nomination of John Roberts to the Supreme Court may not do the damage that the pro-abortion lobbying group desired, but it may well bury what's left of CNN's credibility. After taking a beating today when the nonpartisan site Factcheck.org called its claims that Roberts supported violence against women "false" and "especially misleading", NARAL still managed to sell the advertisement to a television channel -- and not just any TV station, but supposedly truth-based CNN, according to the Drudge Report:

CNN has reviewed and agreed to run a controversial ad produced by a pro-abortion group’s that falsely accuses Supreme Court nominee John Roberts of filing legal papers supporting a convicted abortion clinic bomber, the DRUDGE REPORT has learned.

The news network has agreed to a $125,000 ad buy from NARAL for a commercial which depicts a bombed out 1998 Birmingham, AL abortion clinic. The Birmingham clinic was bombed seven years after Roberts signed the legal briefing the ad question!

That just starts the smear, according to the Annenberg group Factcheck, which denounces the ad in no uncertain terms:

An abortion-rights group is running an attack ad accusing Supreme Court nominee John Roberts of filing legal papers “supporting . . . a convicted clinic bomber” and of having an ideology that “leads him to excuse violence against other Americans” It shows images of a bombed clinic in Birmingham , Alabama .

The ad is false.

And the ad misleads when it says Roberts supported a clinic bomber. It is true that Roberts sided with the bomber and many other defendants in a civil case, but the case didn't deal with bombing at all. Roberts argued that abortion clinics who brought the suit had no right use an 1871 federal anti-discrimination statute against anti-abortion protesters who tried to blockade clinics. Eventually a 6-3 majority of the Supreme Court agreed, too. Roberts argued that blockades were already illegal under state law.

The images used in the ad are especially misleading. The pictures are of a clinic bombing that happened nearly seven years after Roberts signed the legal brief in question.

NARAL still insists that its advertisement is accurate. However, Factcheck provides a transcript right on its page which it refutes in almost every sentence contained in the ad. Read all of the Factcheck post in order to see just how dishonest NARAL got in its smear campaign.

And CNN now wants to run the ad for NARAL. That tells you how much CNN values their own credibility.

More in a moment. I'm going on the Hugh Hewitt show to discuss this.

UPDATE: Carol Platt Liebau and Peter Robinson filled in for Hugh this week, and we discussed what CNN could do to avoid the inevitable backlash it will suffer from running an ad so filled with falsehoods and smears. My prediction will be that CNN sees the outrage this ad has generated and reconsiders. However, it will issue a press release saying that Drudge's report was premature and that CNN did not agree to the ad sale at all.

If CNN runs this ad after the easy refutation on display at Factcheck, the remaining shreds of credibility they retain will dissipate, revealing themselves to be nothing but shills for the Left.

UPDATE II: I missed this in the Post article:

The NARAL ad, set to begin airing tomorrow on local channels in Maine and Rhode Island and nationally on the CNN and Fox News cable networks, features Emily Lyons, a clinic director who was badly injured when a bomb exploded at her clinic in Birmingham in 1998.

Shame, shame, shame on Fox News as well. What are they trying to prove -- that they can get as corrupt as CNN?

UPDATE III and BUMP: Radioblogger has the transcript of my appearance on Hugh Hewitt's show last night. Also, regarding Fox News, I'm hearing that Fox has NOT sold national advertising time to NARAL for this ad, but that individual Fox Broadcasting outlets have done so in a few markets. These broadcast outlets have agreed to air the smear spot, but not their networks:

Bangor
WABI CBS
WLBZ NBC
WVII ABC

Portland
WCSH NBC
WGME CBS
WPFO FOX

Presque Isle
WAGM CBS

Providence
WPRI CBS
WNAC FOX

Notice that NARAL appears to target Maine and Rhode Island. It looks like an attempt to persuade Lincoln Chaffee, Susan Collins, and Olympia Snowe to abandon Roberts.

UPDATE IV: Radioblogger has the official CNN response:

Ms. Goldberg sent me an e-mail with CNN's statement regarding the decision to air the NARAL spot. Here it is:

CNN accepts advocacy advertising from responsible groups from across the political spectrum who wish to express their views and their opinions about issues of public importance. So that viewers can further research the claims being made within the ads, the messages must identify the name of the sponsoring organizations, usually by displaying a website address.

Within CNN news programs, the more prominent and newsworthy advocacy advertisements will be reported on, fact checked and debated.

They aren't as smart as I thought they were. Perhaps they figure to pick up some respect for not backing away from NARAL, but as Duane asks, just how can one square the qualifier "responsible" with the people who produced this smear of an ad?

UPDATE V and BUMP TO TOP AGAIN: The Media Blog at NRO confirms what I heard this morning -- that Fox did not sell any airtime to NARAL:

A Fox News spokesman just told me, "[NARAL] actually never approached us for a buy. You’ll see a correction in the Washington Post tomorrow." So Fox News will not be running the false ad. However, CNN seems to be supplementing its "this ad is not totally outrageous" defense with a soupçon of "everyone is doing it." Neither defense holds up.

Ken Mehlman appeared on the new Situation Room to blast the advertisement, Media Blog reports. I'll have to double-check the transcripts later, even if Abbi Tatton and Jackie Schechner didn't mention this post (read MB's entire post to see why I say that!).

UPDATE VI: MB@NRO followed up with Dan Balz, who wrote the Washington Post piece. He told MB that his source on the Fox buy was ... NARAL. So much for being a "responsible" group, although the Washington Post certainly is -- Balz promises a correction in tomorrow's edition.

What'd I Say? Don't Ask The New York Times

That Ray Charles song may come to mind for the participants in the meeting yesterday between Senator Ron Wyden and Supreme Court nominee John Roberts. According to Wyden and reported by the New York Times directly from his notes, Roberts responded to a question regarding the Schiavo case by chastising Congress for stipulating rememdies to the federal judiciary through legislation:

Terri Schiavo, the brain-damaged Florida woman whose case provoked Congressional action and a national debate over end-of-life care, became an issue on Tuesday in the Supreme Court confirmation of Judge John G. Roberts Jr. when a Democratic senator pressed him about whether lawmakers should have intervened.

The senator, Ron Wyden of Oregon, said that Judge Roberts, while not addressing the Schiavo case specifically, made clear he was displeased with Congress's effort to force the federal judiciary to overturn a court order withdrawing her feeding tube.

"I asked whether it was constitutional for Congress to intervene in an end-of-life case with a specific remedy," Mr. Wyden said in a telephone interview after the hourlong meeting. "His answer was, 'I am concerned with judicial independence. Congress can prescribe standards, but when Congress starts to act like a court and prescribe particular remedies in particular cases, Congress has overstepped its bounds.' "

The answer, which Mr. Wyden said his aides wrote down word-for-word, would seem to put Judge Roberts at odds with leading Republicans in Congress, including the Senate majority leader, Bill Frist, and the House majority leader, Representative Tom DeLay, who both led the charge for Congressional intervention in the Schiavo case this spring. Mr. DeLay said at the time that the federal judiciary had "run amok."

At the time, it certainly played out to the opposite. The federal judge who heard the case gave the opinion that the text of the law did not stipulate to a specific remedy, which is why he declined to give the Schiavos a de novo hearing. One would tend to believe that jurists will sympathize more with the judge on this point, while Congressmen and Senators would oppose that. However, Wyden supports physician-assisted suicide as implemented on a state level in Oregon and doesn't want Congress dictating to the federal bench to overturn it.

Curiously, the Republicans who took part in this conversation remember it differently. Ed Gillespie sent a letter to the Times' DC Bureau asking them to rewrite this article to include a rebuttal from the White House staff assisting Roberts in his pre-confirmation rounds at the Senate. This letter will get posted later today on the web, but a source within the GOP has disseminated it to bloggers:

Dear Mr. Taubman,

In covering a meeting yesterday between Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Supreme Court nominee Judge John Roberts, the New York Times provided the Senator’s characterization of Judge Roberts’ views in relation to the Schiavo case, which were based on notes from the meeting taken by the Senator’s staff. In reporting on the meeting, the New York Times chose not to contact the White House for comment.

Had it done so, the White House would have been happy to have provided the recollections of others present in the meeting. Former Senator Fred Thompson, who is helping Judge Roberts in his meetings with senators, does not believe that Judge Roberts made comments as described in the article. For example, the Times writes that Roberts “made clear he was displeased with Congress’s effort to force the federal judiciary to overturn a court order withdrawing her feeding tube.” He said no such thing, according to others in the meeting.

In fact, notes taken by a White House aide at the meeting reflect that Judge Roberts said he had not studied the Schiavo case and could not comment on either the case itself or Congress’s actions related to it.

Judge Roberts’ courtesy visits with senators are closed to the press and are treated as private by Judge Roberts and the White House, but if a senator chooses to publicly characterize the nature of those conversations, the White House would appreciate the opportunity to provide a fuller accounting of a two-way discussion. The New York Times is welcome to contact our press office for such perspective 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

In the meantime, we would appreciate the Times correcting today’s article in writing, noting that notes taken by a White House aide present in the meeting show that when Senator Wyden asked Judge Roberts what he thought about the Schiavo case, Judge Roberts replied, “I haven’t studied the case. I wouldn’t want to opine on it.” And in addressing “the idea generally of specific remedies,” Judge Roberts noted that “I am aware of Court precedents which say congress can overstep when it prescribes particular outcomes in particular cases.”

As the person charged with coordinating the White House’s efforts to confirm Judge Roberts, I would appreciate your consideration of this time-sensitive request.

Sincerely,

Edward W. Gillespie

I see two problems with this article. First, Sheryl Gay Stolberg works for the New York Times, which tends to get noticed when placing calls to press offices. Nowhere in her report does she indicate that she attempted to contact Roberts or the White House staff on this issue, even though she writes about how Roberts' response as given by Wyden will generate controversy among his supporters. Such a controversial response should have prompted her to at least attempt to confirm Roberts' response instead of just accepting what Wyden said over the phone to her.

Second, read the article carefully. Stolberg gets quotes from Wyden, Senator Pat Leahy (D-VT), and reports extensively about the NARAL ad that Factcheck.org now calls false and "especially misleading." She includes no quotes from Republicans, and only notes in a single sentence that the NARAL ad prompted a response advertisement from Progress for America (which she labeled a "conservative advocacy group" despite not giving a partisan characterization to NARAL) without describing their objections to the NARAL ad.

Stolberg either does a poor job presenting a balanced look at the issues or a terrific job of writing a biased hack piece on Roberts, albeit a rather minor one. If I were Ed Gillespie, I'd ask the Gray Lady what happened to its journalistic standards in a more general sense.

UPDATE: Bench Memos at NRO had this earlier, and gives a bit more context to the dispute:

According to a White House source familiar with the meeting, the story is completely off base and represents a "gross lack of journalistic ethics." The reporter, Sheryl Gay Stolberg, "never called the White House and didn't call the judge to check the quotes." She was essentially "anointing a Democratic Senator to be spokesperson" for Judge Roberts.

The substance of Wyden's account is grossly misleading, according to this White House source. "Judge Roberts said more than once in the meeting that he's not going to talk about the Schiavo case." Moreover, there was "nothing said in the meeting to give support to the notion that he was displeased with Congress's action" in the Schiavo case.

As for Roberts's purported statement that "Congress can prescribe standards," but may overstep its bounds when it seeks to prescribe particular remedies, Wyden's characterization of that statement is materially misleading because it was not the full quote. Apparently, Roberts was only characterizing Supreme Court precedent that discussed that line of thought. It would have been more accurate for Wyden to explain that Roberts said something like "I am aware of Supreme Court decisions that say that . . . ." But Roberts did not in any way give his own view of Congress's power, and Wyden's comments are simply not supported by the actual substance of the meeting.

I'd say that the White House is pretty steamed. It sounds like they have a right to be. The lack of context probably amounts to little more than a misunderstanding, but the failure of Stolberg to simply pick up the phone and ask seems very troubling, as does the rest of her reporting in this article.

UPDATE II: NRO has the PDF of Gillespie's letter here.

Al-Qaeda Tries To Split The West

After seeing the effect that the Madrid bombings had on the Spanish electorate, it appears that Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda have gone on a public-relations campaign to undermine Western resolve in the war on terror. In today's Daily Standard, Daveed Gartenstein-Ross points out the changing rhetoric of AQ leadership that now seems tailored to the tastes of the war's critics, promising a truce (hudna) for the simple act of abandoning Southwest Asia and North Africa for good:

AFTER AYMAN AL-ZAWAHIRI released a new videotape on August 4, the media focused on how he placed the blame for the last month's terrorist attacks in London on Tony Blair's shoulders and threatened even greater carnage in the future. Less noticed but no less important is al Qaeda's changed tactical approach to the West: They are now attempting to convince Westerners that they are worth negotiating with and can be appeased.

Zawahiri put forth this idea in a section of the tape where he speaks directly to Americans. In it, he mentions the hudna, or truce, that Osama bin Laden offered last year in exchange for the withdrawal of foreign troops from the Muslim world. Zawahiri asks, "Didn't Osama bin Laden tell you that you would never dream of peace until we actually live it in Palestine and before all foreign forces withdraw from the Land of Muhammad?"

In arguing that Westerners can buy peace through accession to al Qaeda's demands, the group's leaders emphasize three issues that they believe will have traction in the West: withdrawal from Iraq, ending support for Israel, and military disengagement from the Middle East.

Obviously bin Laden and Zawahiri have studied the reactions of the West through our media, and likely their own as well. Like most of our enemies over the past century, they have analyzed dissent as weakness and intend to exploit it. The only difference in this war is that their analysis may not be in error.

The war on Islamofascist terror has as much of a propaganda component to it as any we have fought in the past, and arguably more critical. Our intention to convince the Muslims of the region that democracy will allow them their best opportunity for hope and prosperity has to compete with the entrenched tyrannies and kleptocracies that would much prefer to continue oppressing and exploiting them. George Bush and Tony Blair have repeatedly and passionately made that case to Muslim moderates -- but whether the message reaches beyond the filters of state-run media in those areas cannot be known.

On the other hand, the media in the West appears all too eager to pass the propaganda of AQ to its consumers, usually without any accompanying context. As Gartenstein-Ross points out, the many messages of AQ do not at all point consistently to terms for peaceful co-existence with the West, regardless of retreat. More than a year after 9/11, bin Laden issued a set of demands for peace: "disallow interest-bearing loans, ban the production and consumption of alcohol, punish sex out of wedlock, ban gambling, and sign the anti-global warming Kyoto Accords."

That message will hardly garner sympathy on either side of the political divide in America or anywhere else. By April 2004, he dropped all of those demands and substituted withdrawal from Iraq. In the video he released just before the presidential election, bin Laden insisted that support for Israel and the American military presence in the Gulf states caused al-Qaeda to attack America and the West. Further communiqués from Zawahiri have continued their attempts to woo Bush critics with promises of truce and peace as long as we abandon our interests on their turf.

All this proves is that AQ understands the value of public relations. None of this makes any sense, especially when one considers the wide-ranging targets selected by AQ operations over the years. Who could claim that Saudi Arabia, for instance, supports Israel over the Palestinians? Did the Moroccans come out in favor of Ariel Sharon, or even of our invasion of Iraq? Hardly. However, bin Laden and Zawahiri hope that they can take advantage of short Western attention spans and a media that has repeatedly demonstrated its sympathy with just such an approach as demanded in AQ's most recent propaganda.

Tomorrow, my Daily Standard column will review a case that the media has ignored and that the 9/11 Commission never bothered to include in its "comprehensive" analysis of the attacks. (DS postponed it from its normal Wednesday slot so it could follow this excellent column.) The case of Mohammed Afroze demonstrates the lies of AQ propagandists and calls into question how the media and our elected representatives have made us more vulnerable to their suggestions.

Air America: CQ Consults Costello Again

Once again, CQ's resident legal analyst Eric Costello, Esq reviews the latest developments on the Air America story -- this time, the question of the ownership change. In an e-mail to CQ, Eric points out a number of legal issues raised in the transfer of assets from Progress to Piquant:

As usual, the latest installment of the l'affaire Air America has been read with great interest. Here's my reactions (for public use as you see fit):

(1) The term of art that is implicated here, I believe, is what is known as a "fraudulent conveyance," a legal term that goes back a long way. A legal dictionary definition (rather simplifying the concept, of course) of this term is "a conveyance of property without any consideration of value, for the purpose of delaying or bindering creditors. Such a transfer will, when proven to the satisfaction of judge or jury, be declared void. Although such conveyance is void as regards the purchaser and creditors [read: Gloria Wise], it is valid as between the parties and usually valid as to subsequent innocent purchasers. For example, one company may transfer a house to a related company to avoid giving the house to a 3rd party. However, subsequent innocent purchases/transfers of the house will often be valid."

What does this mean? Assuming that either Gloria Wise, or the NYS Attorney General's Office (pursuant to its role as the guardian of charities) brought action, a judge or jury would have to look at the asset purchase transaction between Progress Media/Radio Free America on the one hand and Piquant on the other. They would look at the reasons for the transaction. Hence, my interest in the comment noted in the Tribune that you cited, which was that the purpose was to "restructur[e] the company [i.e., Air America] to free it of any obligations incurred by ousted chairman and founding investor Evan Cohen." This implies that a major purpose of the transaction was to have an effect on creditors. (I use understatement here -- fill in your own non-legal term, if you so desire!) A judge or jury would then have to focus on the consideration given by Piquant to Progress/RFA to see if there was any value or not. If the judge or jury finds that there was no value, then they could void the transaction "as regards the purchaser and creditors." Put another way, the debt owed by Progress/RFA to Gloria Wise would be applied to Piquant, the asset purchase agreement notwithstanding. I expect that this will be one avenue that will be explored with great interest by the NYAG. Note that the sale itself of Air America's assets would not be questioned, just the "freeing of the obligations incurred by ousted chairman and founding investor Evan Cohen."

I speculate: Piquant's sudden turnaround *might* be the result of someone on their legal team pointing out the vulnerability of Piquant to a fraudulent conveyance action. By reimbursing Gloria Wise, Piquant would hope, perhaps, to deflect such an action. (The question of the original terms of the loan from Wise, including interest and personal/corporate guarantees, and their applicability to Piquant's repayment, would still be open.)

(2) More than ever, this means that a key document (for our review, and for the NYAG) is going to be this asset purchase agreement, including all schedules attached to the agreement, which would spell out the assets that Piquant acquired, or did not acquire, and the liabilities that Piquant assumed, or did not assume. More to the point, the asset purchase agreement would spell out precisely (we hope) the consideration paid by Piquant for the assets, an essential element in any fraudulent conveyance analysis (including any defences Piquant might have). Absent some involvement by Gloria Wise (possible, but unlikely), which would have NYAG compliance issues, this document is private as far as I know. At least until the NYAG gets a hold of it, which I bet they will.

(3) Query: was Gloria Wise apprised of this *2004* transaction in any way, and did they discuss at a board meeting the impact of this transfer, which would, in all likelihood, have rendered the note from the Cohen-Progress group worthless, or at least of greatly diminished value? This would have had a major impact on Gloria Wise's financials, as a key asset would have been grossly impaired. It also implicates the guarantee issue, as discussed above and previously, as to whether Wise pursued any extant guarantees.

(4) I find it curious that a pre-packaged bankruptcy was not used for this transaction, which would have allowed the debts to be shed perfectly legally. One suspects the burden of the PR angle that would be required in the disclosure (i.e., Wise as a creditor), plus the PR angle of Progress/RFA going bust within weeks, was not palatable. Bankruptcy proceedings and filings (including the plan of reorganization, which would include the asset purchase agreement) are public; the asset purchase agreement here was a totally private transaction. It certainly raises anew points discussed via Michelle Malkin as to whether or not Progress/RFA is still an extant entity, or has filed for bankruptcy (or should).

(5) There needs to be a firmer grasp of the exact timeline regarding Piquant's roster of shareholders. I am assuming, based on what I see, that Piquant forced out Cohen/Sorenson and *then* had the asset purchase agreement transaction, between two sets of parties that had substantially common rosters of owners. This would have an impact on the fraudulent conveyance argument, in that one could argue this was, so to speak, merely shifting one's wallet of assets from one trouser pocket to another.

As always, I await further revelations via CQ.

One would assume that attorneys would have rechecked this transfer a number of times to ensure technical compliance with applicable laws. However, that may not have been the case, and I think Eric makes some excellent points in his presentation. Even if legal, it shoots Mack Truck-sized holes in the argument that Piquant's ownership has no responsibility for Progress Media's obligations.

Stay tuned -- more will come ...

UPDATE: Professor Bainbridge detailed some of the legal issues at the time of the transfer. Ironman at Political Calculations supplied that link and has more here.

Air America: Piquant Media Buyout A Shell Game?

Piquant Media owns Air America Radio and has repeatedly said during the financial scandal, still unreported by the Exempt Media, that it has no legal obligations for the debts incurred by former ownership, Progress Media and specifically Evan Cohen. Al Franken repeated this during his radio show two days ago, claiming that Piquant only agreed to reimburse Gloria Wise Boys & Girls Clubs out of a sense of moral obligation.

However, that fails to tell the entire truth about the ownership of Piquant, its predecessor Progress Media, or the slim differences between previous and current management at Air America Radio.

Air America Radio did not start out with Evan Cohen, as Piquant and Franken convenienly suggest. It started out with a man named Sheldon Drobny, a wealthy Chicago investor who wanted to build a leftist media empire and settled on radio to start it. Front Page Magazine told the story at the netlet's inception:

The idea to create a “liberal” radio network – as if National Public Radio, ABC, NBC, CBS and the other left-leaning networks were insufficient – came from Chicago businessman Sheldon Drobny, who said he was willing to invest $10 million in the venture. In 2003 he created AnShell Media as home for this enterprise and hired Atlanta broadcast veteran Jon Sinton as its chief executive officer.

Drobny and his wife Anita started a holding company called AnShell to manage the effort. However, Sheldon Drobny ran into a buzzsaw when National Review's Byron York reported on Drobny's rehashing of Lyndon LaRouche conspiracies on his own website, MakeThemAccountable.com. Drobny compared George Bush to Adolf Hitler on a number of occasions and regurgitated LaRouche's hallucinations of ties between the Bush family and German Nazis.

As a result of the fallout from York's article, Drobny sold most of his interest in AnShell later that same year to a new consortium comprised of himself and his wife, Evan Cohen, Rex Sorenson, and Cohen's college classmate David Goodfriend, who brokered the initial meetings between the Drobnys and Cohen. If David Goodfriend sounds familiar, it may be because Goodfriend served in the Clinton White House as an assistant press secretary. The new holding company was christened Progress Media, and its president remained Jon Sinton.

In 2004, the landscape changed again. By June, Progress had run out of cash after less than two months on the air and had lost airplay in Los Angeles and Chicago due to its inability to pay its bills. In a series of tense meetings, the other principles in Progress decided to force out Evan Cohen and Rex Sorenson, who had allegedly misled the others on the financial state of the enterprise.

Now here's where the Piquant derives the idea of "previous ownership".

The Drobnys and other investors forced Cohen and Sorenson to give up their voting stock and depart. They then formed Piquant Media, which the Chicago Tribune reported in detail on June 19, 2004 (via Wizbang):

The investors in Air America Radio, the liberal talk radio network that launched in March, are restructuring the company to free it of any obligations incurred by ousted chairman and founding investor Evan Cohen. The investors, including Highland Park couple Sheldon and Anita Drobny and Air America Chief Executive Doug Kreeger, formed a new corporation, Piquant LLC. They plan to use the new entity to purchase the assets of Air America from Progress Media and RadioFree America, two related companies that own and operate the network.

"We have an asset purchase agreement we've entered into," said Norman Wain, another investor. "Progress Media and RadioFree America are selling all of their assets to Piquant."

Anita Drobny will be chairwoman of the board of the new company, according to people familiar with the deal. The purpose of the transaction is twofold: to eliminate Cohen and his partner Rex Sorensen's shares in the company, and to insulate the cash-strapped network from any debt or other obligation that Cohen may have incurred.

Note that the ownership of Piquant LLC remains essentially the same as Progress, just without Cohen or Sorenson. The Drobnys still remain the big backers and now control the board; Jon Sinton remains with the company as president of programming; Doug Kreeger remains with the company as an investor. The notion that the asset sale changed management and ownership significantly is a mirage, a smokescreen to avoid Progress' debt and obligations and to allow Air America to free itself of the taint of Cohen's alleged deeds.

UPDATE: Macho Nachos, who frequently links here, has already posted on this topic a number of times. He provides his links here, along with a healthy venting of steam that I hadn't noticed it yet. I don't catch them all, but I try to set the record straight when I miss.

Confirmation Of Able Danger Raises Even More Questions

The AP reported yesterday that they independently verified the claims published in the New York Times that a secret Army data-mining operation identified a handful of Brooklyn residents as members of al-Qaeda in 2000, but did nothing to notify the FBI because of Justice Department policies forbidding cooperation between intelligence and law-enforcement operations. This confirmation comes from DoD documents, not unnamed sources or grandstanding politicians:

Defense Department documents shown to an Associated Press reporter Tuesday said the Able Danger team was set up in 1999 to identify potential al-Qaida operatives for U.S. Special Operations Command. At some point, information provided to the team by the Army's Information Dominance Center pointed to a possible al-Qaida cell in Brooklyn, the documents said.

However, because of concerns about pursuing information on "U.S. persons" — a legal term that includes U.S. citizens as well as foreigners admitted to the country for permanent residence — Special Operations Command did not provide the Army information to the FBI. It is unclear whether the Army provided the information to anyone else.

The command instead turned its focus to overseas threats.

The documents shown to the AP do not specify the identities of the individuals named, but they do corroborate Rep. Curt Weldon and the Times' source to the extent that identification was made and that no action was taken by the DoD. Tom Maguire noted this development as an update to his post on the Times article (and posted a comment here), pointing out that finding Islamist sympathizers in Brooklyn should not have been a big surprise to the US after the first WTC bombing in 1993. Law-enforcement authorities knew of the Brookly mosque where the terrorist cell responsible for the earlier attack had gathered and plotted.

Now the 9/11 Commission wants some answers for these new documents:

Members of the independent commission that investigated the Sept. 11 terror attacks called on Congress to determine whether the Pentagon withheld intelligence information showing that a secret American military unit had identified Mohammed Atta and three other hijackers as potential threats more than a year before the attacks.

The former commission members said the information, if true, could rewrite an important chapter of the history of the intelligence failures before Sept. 11, 2001.

"I think this is a big deal," said John F. Lehman, a Republican member of the commission who was Navy secretary in the Reagan administration. "The issue is whether there was in fact surveillance before 9/11 of Atta and, if so, why weren't we told about it? Who made the decision not to brief the commission's staff or the commissioners?"

According to the Times' source, however, he did explicitly brief the Commission on the existence of the Able Danger program and its identification of Atta and three other 9/11 hijackers as al-Qaeda operatives, as mentioned yesterday:

The former intelligence official said he was among a group that briefed the former staff director of the Sept. 11 panel, Philip D. Zelikow, and at least three other staff members about Able Danger when the staff members visited the Afghanistan-Pakistan region in October 2003. The official said that he had explicitly mentioned Mr. Atta in the briefing as a member of the American terrorist cell.

This hearkens back to the 9/11 Commission report. As I noted yesterday, the volumnous report comprises almost 600 pages. Yet the report remains incredibly bereft of insight on military intelligence. It only contains 13 references to military intelligence at all, over half of which specifically refer to Pakistani military intelligence. American MI only gets mentioned in their recommendations and not in the analysis of how the US failed to detect the 9/11 plot before its successful conclusion. In retrospect, that gaping hole in analysis seems highly odd, almost as if the 9/11 Commission never bothered to ask the Pentagon about its intelligence missions -- or simply disregarded evidence relating to it.

Could the latter be possible? Consider the single mention of "data mining" in the report on page 388-9. The Commission notes that "scattered units at Homeland Security and the State Department" perform data mining and screening without explaining which units do what. MI falls within the DHS. However, not a word gets mentioned as to what results data mining produced. Nevertheless, in the same breath, the Commission endorses data mining on a wider and more coordinated scope than ever before.

Why didn't the Commission press harder for military intelligence, and if the Times' source has told the truth, why did they ignore the Able Danger operation in their deliberations? It would emphasize that the problem was not primarily operational, as the Commission made it seem, but primarily political -- and that the biggest problem was the enforced separation between law enforcement and intelligence operations upon which the Clinton Department of Justice insisted. The hatchet person for that policy sat on the Commission itself: Jamie S. Gorelick.

Again, this begs the question of what else the Commission ignored, especially in terms of military and civilian intelligence, in order to reach its conclusions. It also undermines their recommendations to create two new levels of bureaucracy for the intelligence services. Instead, if the Able Danger development pans out, it means that the best fix is the Patriot Act and a reduction in bureaucratic drag on intelligence, not an increase in it. Congress needs to start from scratch and completely reinvestigate 9/11, this time outside the heat of a partisan presidential election cycle.

Yakovlev Plea Stuns UN

The Times of London reports this morning that the quick guilty plea by Alexander Yakovlev has unnerved United Nations officers and personnel, who fear that Yakovlev has cut a deal with the US that will result in more prosecution. Even his lawyer dropped a strong hint that Yakovlev had bargained for soft treatment:

Alexander Yakovlev admitted three charges carrying 20 years each in New York on Monday, as a UN inquiry reported that he had taken almost a million dollars in bribes from companies that won more than $79 million (£44 million) in UN business.

That he surrendered to the authorities in New York and immediately entered guilty pleas suggests that he may have struck a plea bargain to co-operate with prosecutors in return for a lighter sentence.

His lawyer, Arkady Bukh, told The Times that he could not comment because of a confidentiality agreement. “Normally, if you enter a guilty plea in an expedient manner, we expect from a judge quite a lenient sentence,” he said.

UN officials said that they believed Mr Yakovlev would become a co-operating government witness. “It’s obvious. He struck a deal. He’s going to testify,” one UN official said.

As I suggested when he pled out within minutes of his arrest, this seemed so obvious that it almost appeared to have the intent of frightening the rest of Yakovlev's associates at Turtle Bay. Federal prosecutors in New York vowed to chase UN corruption down to the last conspirator and corrupt official, and without a doubt Yakovlev had enough contacts to know where most of the evidence can be found. The moderate delay in sentencing -- five months while Yakovlev remains free on $400,000 bail -- gives prosecutors enough time to determine whether he makes good on his deal.

No one can possibly believe that Yakovlev will go down alone for the racketeering at Turtle Bay. If he intended on doing so, he would never have pled guilty so quickly. His lawyer confirmed it, but that just serves to remove the last vestiges of hope for any UN official connected to Yakovlev that has something dirty to hide.

Expect to see a number of UN officials suddenly either returning home or resigning to cooperate with US officials on this investigation. Either way, Yakovlev's guilty plea has finally started the long-overdue process of cleaning out the Augean stables that the UN has become.

For Cathy

Chris Muir has a message for all CQ readers tonight:

Please click on the strip itself. It will open a new window for your browser. Keep clicking, and while you're at it, say a prayer for Cathy, Chris, and the whole family.

Dafydd: Tangled Webs, Contrasting Countdowns

NOTE: Text in [square brackets] constitute a correction from earlier, erroneous data.

Below, Captain Ed discusses [the manifest failures of the intelligence and police communities pre-9/11, including the possibility that, due to the "wall of separation" between intel and law enforcement, a military data-mining group called Able Danger was prevented in fall 2000 from briefing the FBI on an al-Qaeda cell in Brooklyn that included some of the 9/11 hijackers -- including the leader, Mohammed Atta. Much of the evidence for this comes from Rep. Curt Weldon... whose credibility had been previously maligned by CIA officials, who attacked Weldon personally as a credulous and foolish man.]

Indeed, the Captain quotes from a Slate article by Eric Umansky that uses this [earlier CIA attack] to dismiss the entire claim. But is this really legitimate evidence that [debunks the claim], as Umansky believes? Or is this just another example of [] "log rolling," where a series of supposed facts and assessments each rely upon the others in a vast circularity of citation?

Just to flesh out this whole business about Congressman Weldon, [the CIA dismissed previous claims made by Weldon regarding Iranian complicity in terrorist plots against the United States; the Agency characterized Weldon as having been duped by the dupe of an "intelligence fabricator." Based on that characterization, Weldon was] attacked by various liberal sources (e.g., The American Prospect magazine) for getting his information from an Iranian informant code-named (by Weldon) "Ali," [a source whom the Prospect likewise dismisses]. The incident is also discussed in Kennth R. Timmerman's excellent book Countdown to Crisis: the Coming Nuclear Showdown With Iran, pp. 276-8 -- released the very next day after Weldon's similarly titled but distinct, Countdown to Terror: The Top-Secret Information that Could Prevent the Next Terrorist Attack on America... and How the CIA has Ignored it.

"Ali" is described by Timmerman as Ali M., "a former Iranian government minister" at that time in exile in Paris; Ali M. is very likely actually Fereidoun Mahdavi, whom Laura Rozen and Jeet Heer, writing in the American Prospect, describe as "formerly the shah’s minister of commerce and, more importantly, the close friend and business partner of (Manucher) Ghorbanifar." At the time of Mahdavi's contacts with Weldon, the CIA had already issued a "burn" notice pegging Ghorbanifar as an "intelligence fabricator."

Starting a tab, we have Rep. Curt Weldon saying that the group Able Danger tried to warn the [FBI] about Mohammed Atta and other members of that al-Qaeda cell back in 2000; the 9/11 Commission blew off the claim because it came from Weldon, whom the CIA considers a dupe of intelligence fabricators.

Separately, we have exiled Iranian Minister Mahdavi, a close friend of Ghorbanifar, meeting with Weldon to tell the congressman of various plots by the Iranians against the United States; the CIA blew off the warnings because they came from Mahdavi, whom they consider a dupe of intelligence fabricators. Although they are starting to get tangled, it's important to note that these are two separate strands of this intelligence web: Mahdavi has no connection with Able Danger.

In the Prospect article, Rozen and Heer claim that Mahdavi said that his information came from Ghorbanifar; but the supposed confession is a bit shaky, sounding more like what one would say to avoid suffering the grim and grisly fate of other Iranian defectors:

“I will deny any quote,” he says. “I gave information to Weldon from Ghorbanifar.” He insists that, because he cannot contact anyone in his homeland, he could not have been the original source for the information that the arms merchant asked him to pass to the congressman. “I am very well-known in Iran,” he says. “Everyone knows me. I cannot call there.”

It's also important to remember that the American Prospect is a deeply liberal magazine that has been opposed to the Iraq war from the beginning. What does this have to do with Iran? The authors of the article above see the quality of intelligence on Iran through the filter of the supposedly "faulty" intelligence on Iraq, for which they blame the "neoconservatives":

Indeed, to CIA analysts still smarting from the humiliations of the Iraqi intelligence fiasco, the reappearance of Ghorbanifar behind “Ali” must have set off loud alarms. The Iranian arms dealer not only symbolizes one of the most disgraceful episodes in the history of American covert operations, which involved selling sophisticated weapons to a terrorist regime in exchange for hostages; with his neoconservative sponsors and opportunistic methods, Ghorbanifar very much resembles Ahmad Chalabi, another slick operator who eventually came to be viewed with the deepest suspicion -- but not before his faulty “intelligence” about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction helped to draw America into war.

Adding a bit more to the tab: the CIA is skeptical about the [Iranian] intel from Mahdavi because they are upset about Ghorbanifar, who "symbolizes" the Iran-Contra scandal.

Timmerman's description of Weldon's attempts to alert the CIA to the intelligence Mahdavi ("Ali M.") was faxing him matches that of the congressman. But Timmerman also discusses many other Iranian terrorist plots... and Timmerman, unlike Weldon, uses a great many sources. One of Timmerman's major sources is a former Iranian intelligence and security officer named Hamid Reza Zakeri, who says he was present at a number of meetings between the top Iranian mullahs (including Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamanei) and top members of al-Qaeda (including Ayman al-Zawahiri and bin Laden's eldest son Saad). At these meetings, starting in January 2001, the Iranians were informed of the upcoming attacks on the World Trade Centers, the Pentagon, and other targets, says Zakeri. I discussed this in an earlier post here, It Ain't Even the Quarter.

I noted in that post that the CIA had similarly dismissed the intel from Zakeri, calling him a "serial fabricator" and "a fabricator of monumental proportions." Is this starting to sound familiar?

The tab mounts: Weldon's claims about Iranian involvement in anti-American terrorism are buttressed and echoed by Kenneth Timmerman, who is a much more careful researcher. One of Timmerman's prime sources, however, who has no connection to Mahdazi or Ghorbanifar, is also dismissed by the CIA as a "fabricator."

So let's tote up the damages:

1) The information about Able Danger's warnings about Atta and other members of the Qaeda cell come from Rep. Curt Weldon.

2) Weldon also believes in earlier information from Fereidoun Mahdavi about many plots by Iran against the United States, none of which is related to the Able Danger claim.

3) Mahdavi is a close friend of Manucher Ghorbanifar.

4) The CIA has labeled Ghorbanifar an "intelligence fabricator" who evidently "symbolizes" the Iran-Contra scandal -- which did not particularly involve the CIA, by the way, but rather the National Security Council. [After Reagan's CIA Director, William Casey, died of a brain tumor in January 1987, several actors in the Iran-Contra scandal rushed to blame him for the whole program. I have always found this very suspicious; I strongly suspect everyone decided to make the dead man into the fall guy. However, LC Oliver North, who actually ran the program, acted out of the NSC, not the CIA.]

5) Therefore, the CIA dismisses all claims from Mahdavi (this is the same CIA that completely missed predicting the revolution in Iran carried out by Ayatollah Khomeini from his exile in Paris).

6) Mahdavi's claims of Iranian terrorist plots against the U.S. are supported by Kenneth Timmerman, who relies upon a number of other sources (not Mahdavi).

7) The CIA dismisses one of Timmerman's sources, Hamid Reza Zakeri, as "a serial fabricator" and "a fabricator of monumental proportions."

8) Thus the CIA dismisses all of the other charges brought by Timmerman, as well.

9) Therefore, taking everything into consideration, Slate dismisses all of the claims made by Weldon about Able Danger.

Ah. Perhaps this is some new form of rhetoric of which I was previously unaware.

Maybe it's just me, but the syllogism (1-9) doesn't quite seem to match up with the rigorous logic I was taught in the graduate math department of UC Santa Cruz. But then again, I'm not a member of an intelligence organization that is desperately trying to convince the world that it's not utterly incompetent.

UPDATE 8/10/05 07:52: Rarely has my skepticism about the ability of government bureaucracies to sort truth from fiction been so thoroughly vindicated in such a short period of time. Just a few hours after I published this post, the demigod of this website put his own post up noting that AP had independently confirmed the central claim of Rep. Weldon: that Able Danger had, in fact, reported in 2000, a year before the 9/11 attacks, on the Brooklyn al-Qaeda cell that included Mohammed Atta. This despite the denials by the [9/11 Commission -- since retracted -- that there was any evidence] that any such report was made... and despite the snide character assassination of Weldon that accompanied the denials.

Well-a-day. I think we now know just how seriously to take it when the CIA denounces a source as a "fabricator," or in Weldon's case, the dupe of fabricators. We should trust the Agency only as far as... well, I suppose you couldn't throw the entire Langley facility very far.

UPDATE II -- AND CORRECTION

A tangled web indeed! So tangled that I got tangled up in it myself.

While it's true that the CIA has been dismissing Rep. Curt Weldon as a dupe of a dupe of a fabricator, in fact the agency that Able Danger tried to contact about the al-Qaeda cell with Mohammed Atta was the FBI, not the CIA.

Since this is a major correction, I will go back through this post and make the changes, putting corrections into [square brackets] to make clear what is different. (Hat tip to Scott in the comments for catching my mistake!)

UPDATE III: The 9/11 Commission has finally admitted that Rep. Weldon was right all along... that Able Danger did inform them that they tried to contact the FBI about the Atta cell but were prevented by the Clinton Administration Justice Department, whose Deputy Attorney General at the time, the author of the policy of a "wall of separation" between intelligence and law enforcement, was none other than Jamie Gorelick -- who subsequently served on the very same 9/11 Commission that heard but ignored the testimony about the failure of that very policy (and then lied about having heard it)!

So let's recap what has happened:

1) I mistook an attempt to alert the FBI for an attempt to alert the CIA;

2) The CIA did, however, call into question the credibility of Rep. Weldon, as I noted, by denouncing Weldon's source and a second, unrelated corroborating source as "fabricators;"

3) Slate went to town on Weldon on the basis of the CIA denunciation and used that to dismiss Weldon's claim that Able Danger had tried to warn the FBI about Mohammed Atta in 2000 but were prevented by the Gorelick policy -- which claim by Weldon is now known to be true.

4) The 9/11 Commission emphatically stated, more than once, that nobody from Able Danger had ever briefed them about the attempts to warn the FBI; the Commission has now admitted that they were indeed briefed -- not once but twice.

5) Despite being briefed, however, the Commission failed to include even a single, stray mention of Able Danger, its attempted warning, Gorelick's Wall that prevented the warning that conceivably could have prevented the 9/11 attacks... or even of the stunning success of the strategy of "data mining" that led to the identification of Atta.

So of all this succession of dumb mistakes, I have the strong feeling that mine was the "least dumb," for whatever that is worth...!

Justice Sunday II ... With Disclosure!

I am pleased to announce that arrangements have firmed up for CQ to live-blog Justice Sunday II in Nashville, TN this Sunday evening. I received an invitation to join several other bloggers in providing live commentary for the event, which will feature such well-known and controversial speakers as Tom DeLay, Zell Miller, William Donahue, Dr. James Dobson, and quite a few others. It will be simulcast to a number of churches and other organizations via satellite and also accessible through their website.

Just to make sure everyone understands the arrangements, I want to clearly state that JSII will pay for my travel arrangements to attend this event. In fact, they will pay the costs directly, instead of reimbursing me, so that cash does not change hands. Some CQ readers may wonder why I point this out, but I think Jeff Jarvis makes a good point in his blog yesterday about ensuring the best possible disclosure to avoid misunderstandings later on. This offer came as a late development, meaning that I didn't have time to make less expensive arrangements, and with a car breakdown this week which will wind up costing me close to a thousand dollars, I didn't have the money anyway.

JSII did not ask me to portray them in any particular manner -- in fact, they asked me for a couple of liberal bloggers whom they could also invite for better, more rounded reporting from the event. I suggested Pennywit, Jeralynn Merritt from TalkLeft, and a neo-Libertarian viewpoint from Jon Henke at QandO. (I don't know if they had the chance to issue those invitations.) I wish I'd thought to include Jeff, and I'm sorry he turned it down.

I think that this shows JSII as attempting as much inclusiveness as possible, and should dispel any fears that those of us live-blogging from Nashville have sold out. I know I will enjoy attending the event and supplying the running commentary, but that's all the "enjoyment" they will supply, apart from the food and beverages ... and heck, that's just Southern hospitality.

Other bloggers I know who will be there are (I'll add more as I hear about them):

Bill Hobbs
Lance from Red State Rant
Trey Jackson
Charmaine Yoest

9/11 Cell Identified In 2000 (Updates)

Today's New York Times reveals that military intelligence had identified the core of the 9/11 cell more than a year before the attacks that killed 3,000 people. Mohammed Atta and three of the other hijackers remained unknown to the FBI, however, thanks to the working policy at the time which forbade intelligence services from sharing information with the FBI and other law-enforcement officials:

More than a year before the Sept. 11 attacks, a small, highly classified military intelligence unit identified Mohammed Atta and three other future hijackers as likely members of a cell of Al Qaeda operating in the United States, according to a former defense intelligence official and a Republican member of Congress.

In the summer of 2000, the military team, known as Able Danger, prepared a chart that included visa photographs of the four men and recommended to the military's Special Operations Command that the information be shared with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the congressman, Representative Curt Weldon of Pennsylvania, and the former intelligence official said Monday.

The recommendation was rejected and the information was not shared, they said, apparently at least in part because Mr. Atta, and the others were in the United States on valid entry visas. Under American law, United States citizens and green-card holders may not be singled out in intelligence-collection operations by the military or intelligence agencies. That protection does not extend to visa holders, but Mr. Weldon and the former intelligence official said it might have reinforced a sense of discomfort common before Sept. 11 about sharing intelligence information with a law enforcement agency.

A former spokesman for the Sept. 11 commission, Al Felzenberg, confirmed that members of its staff, including Philip Zelikow, the executive director, were told about the program on an overseas trip in October 2003 that included stops in Afghanistan and Pakistan. But Mr. Felzenberg said the briefers did not mention Mr. Atta's name.

The report produced by the commission last year does not mention the episode.

The reason for the inability to share information with the FBI, information that might have led them to "connect the dots", in the parlance of the 9/11 Commission, was the wall between intelligence and law-enforcement operations constructed in large part by the Clinton Administration. While FISA, the legislation governing the use of law-enforcement resources for intelligence work, has existed since the 1970s, the 1990s saw a major reinterpretation of that law within the executive branch, prompted by Deputy Attorney General Jamie S. Gorelick. As Andrew McCarthy noted last year, that reinterpretation had the practical effect of cutting off all communication between the two groups responsible for American security:

Commissioner Gorelick, as deputy attorney general — the number two official in the Department of Justice — for three years beginning in 1994, was an architect of the government's self-imposed procedural wall, intentionally erected to prevent intelligence agents from pooling information with their law-enforcement counterparts. That is not partisan carping. That is a matter of objective fact. That wall was not only a deliberate and unnecessary impediment to information sharing; it bred a culture of intelligence dysfunction. It told national-security agents in the field that there were other values, higher interests, that transcended connecting the dots and getting it right. It set them up to fail.

Now we have more proof of that in this report. One might wonder what the 9/11 Commission made of this information. Not much; in fact, the Commission never even heard about it. Farther down in the Times report, we find out that the intelligence official corroborating Curt Weldon tried to tell the 9/11 Commission about the Able Danger operation and its findings:

The former intelligence official said the first Able Danger report identified all four men as members of a "Brooklyn" cell, and was produced within two months after Mr. Atta arrived in the United States. The former intelligence official said he was among a group that briefed Mr. Zelikow and at least three other members of the Sept. 11 commission staff about Able Danger when they visited the Afghanistan-Pakistan region in October 2003.

The official said he had explicitly mentioned Mr. Atta as a member of a Qaeda cell in the United States. He said the staff encouraged him to call the commission when he returned to Washington at the end of the year. When he did so, the ex-official said, the calls were not returned.

Mr. Felzenberg, the former Sept. 11 commission spokesman, said on Monday that he had talked with some of the former staff members who participated in the briefing.

"They all say that they were not told anything about a Brooklyn cell," Mr. Felzenberg said. "They were told about the Pentagon operation. They were not told about the Brooklyn cell. They said that if the briefers had mentioned anything that startling, it would have gotten their attention."

The sensitivity of the data-mining aspects of Able Danger are obvious. The fact that the military had enough information to cull that they could identify potential terrorists, and ultimately so accurately, would have caused an outcry before 9/11 and probably in the bitter partisan atmosphere of the Commission as well. The cautiousness of the agent came from his desire to keep the program from a deluge of criticism and publicity that would have spelled an end to it. However, he and Weldon both assert that the Commission had been told of its existence and its results -- and yet the Commission completely disregarded it.

Why? Could it be that the Commission didn't want to provide any further embarrassment to one of its members -- the same Jamie S. Gorelick whose actions created the obstacles that kept military intelligence from coordinating with the FBI? It would have made crystal clear the damage done to the national-security effort through the hostility of the Clinton Administration towards intelligence efforts. It also would have shown the foolishness of including Gorelick on the 9/11 Commission, an objection made by CQ during the hearings last year, and for the same reasons.

This new information undermines the notion that the 9/11 Commission report provides a comprehensive look at the attacks. It considered the primary reason for the attacks' success as an intelligence failure, while this shows that at least one intelligence agency had it right. It found itself handcuffed by a political policy that forbade them from doing anything constructive with the intelligence they had.

UPDATE: Slate's Eric Umansky offers a healthy dose of skepticism:

As Times mentions in passing, Weldon has a reputation for relying on iffy sources. He recently wrote a much-panned book alleging all sorts of Iranian plots, including that Tehran is hosting Bin Laden. The book relied on one source—a source one CIA official told the Times "was a waste of my time and resources." A "fabricator" recalled another former spook. (The American Prospect has more on Weldon's source troubles.)

As for the former unnamed defense official, he talked to the NYT while "in Mr. Weldon's office." And given the allegations being made, the Times offers a loopy explanation for why the former official isn't named: "He did not want to jeopardize political support and the possible financing for future data-mining operations by speaking publicly." (If his accusations are true, how would his being named undercut future data-mining efforts?)

So, what we have in the NYT are allegations by a congressman known to make wildly dubious claims, and one former defense official who backs up the congressman but for some reason declines to put his good name to the ... facts. On the other side, you have—as the Times mentions up high but only details in, oh, the 29th paragraph—the 9/11 commission insisting that they did look into the program and found nothing.

I suspect that he meant he didn't want data-mining to get too much of a public profile. The program generated a lot of controversy when first proposed in the 90s, and then again after 9/11. Furthermore, if one actually does a search through the entire 9/11 Commission Report, the phrase "Able Danger" appears nowhere. On the subject of data mining, the only reference made to the concept appears on pages 388-9 (emphasis mine):

Inspectors adjudicating entries of the 9/11 hijackers lacked adequate information and knowledge of the rules. All points in the border system—from consular offices to immigration services offices—will need appropriate electronic access to an individual’s file. Scattered units at Homeland Security and the State Department perform screening and data mining: instead, a government-wide team of border and transportation officials should be working together. A modern border and immigration system should combine a biometric entry-exit system with accessible files on visitors and immigrants, along with intelligence on indicators of terrorist travel.

So perhaps the sourcing on Weldon and the Times' corroboration may seem slim to Umansky, but the 9/11 Commission appears to have no credibility at all on Able Danger or data mining. Indeed, they acknowledge that some had been done -- without noting the results -- and recommend that more of it be undertaken. Their claim that they "looked into the program and found nothing" doesn't match at all with their official report. If they found nothing as a result of data mining, why recommend more of it with better coordination? Someone isn't telling the truth -- and so far, I still suspect that the 9/11 Commission has more to lose than Curt Weldon and his corroborating source.

UPDATE II, BUMP to TOP: There's nothing wrong with skepticism, but I would suggest that the Commission has earned just as much of it as Weldon. Just as a further investigation into the credibility into the Commission's response on this point, I searched the 9/11 Commission report again for the phrase "military intelligence". I expected a ream of hits; I got 13. They referenced:

* Pakistani military intelligence (7 refs)
* A demand for coordination between allied & Pakistani MI (p 331)
* A recommendation to keep the DoD's JMIP and TIARA programs as is (p 429, 2 refs)
* A recommendation to disclose overall budgets for MI (p 433)
* A note explaining a recommendation using MI as an analogy (p 566)

Based on this "data mining" of the Commission report, it not only looks like they found nothing, it seems like they didn't ask around about American military intelligence at all. They had more to say about Pakistani military intelligence than our own. Does that sound comprehensive to you?

Air America: It's All About ... Al Franken

Al Franken addressed the funding scandal at Air America for the first time on the air yesterday, the New York Post reports. Fortunately for AA listeners, Franken clearly identified the real victim of the misappropriated government grants and questionable loans from Gloria Wise Boys & Girls Clubs. It wasn't the poor kids or the Alzheimer's patients -- it was ... Al Franken:

"About three weeks into the life of Air America, I became an involuntary investor — I stopped being paid," Franken told listeners yesterday on WLIB (1190 AM).

It was the first time the all-liberal network's biggest star addressed at length a controversial $875,000 loan from the disgraced — and now de-funded — Gloria Wise Boys & Girls Club.

Since The Post first reported the story on July 30, Attorney General Eliot Spitzer announced an investigation into the social services agency whose development director, Evan M. Cohen, was also Air America's founder.

"He let us believe that we had enough funding to go three years before making a profit," Franken said.

"Turned out it was three weeks."

In the early days of Saturday Night Live, Franken used to perform a bit on the Weekend Update segments where he would do an on-air editorial about how an issue affected himself ... Al Franken. The first couple of times he performed it, it was pretty funny. It satirized the public-service aspects of TV and fed into our suspicions that broadcast editorials had a lot more to do with personal scores than with community outreach. It got progressively less funny with each repetition, however, and more than twenty years later, it just sounds pathetic.

We still see a shutout on Exempt Media coverage of this scandal. Now we even have Air America covering it, and still the New York Times refuses to report on it.

(via Michelle Malkin)

4000 Centrifuges Later ...

A leading Iranian dissident with well-established ties within the Iranian nuclear program claims that Teheran has built 4,000 centrifuges, far more than the IAEA suspects, making Iranian claims of peaceful motives behind their nuclear power efforts appear less than honest:

Iran has manufactured about 4,000 centrifuges capable of enriching uranium to weapons grade, an exiled Iranian dissident who helped uncover nearly two decades of covert nuclear activity in 2002 said Tuesday.

Alireza Jafarzadeh told The Associated Press the centrifuges — which he said are unknown to the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency — are ready to be installed at Iran's nuclear facility in Natanz.

Jafarzadeh, who runs Strategic Policy Consulting, a Washington-based think tank focusing on Iran and Iraq, said the information — which he described as "very recent" — came from sources within the Tehran regime who have proven accurate in the past.

The IAEA only knows of 164 centrifuges at Natanz, its spokesman said in response, a paltry fraction of what Jafarzadeh says will shortly begin production. He also says that the IAEA has missed the facilitation of this production through the use of front companies buying disparate parts that have yet raised no concerns, because only one company performs the integration needed to complete their construction.

Despite this information and the recent resumption of uranium processing by the Iranians, the IAEA does not plan on reporting the situation to the UN Security Council for a resolution. It has considered, it says, sending a formal warning to Teheran. That warning will mean little to the mullahcracy except as evidence of the uselessness of the IAEA in enforcing non-proliferation treaties. They have already come to that conclusion about the EU-3, snubbing the latest offer from Britain, France, and Germany ostensibly because it did not meet their requirements. Apparently, however, the Iranians have built their centrifuges and have no more need of stall tactics.

Will either the EU-3 or the IAEA ever refer this situation to the UNSC? No one has any illusions about that body's willingness to do much except bloviate, but at least it will show some progress in the process of enforcement. The fact that neither will even go that far shows how little courage the West has in confronting rogue regimes, especially those with whom they have significant trade interests. At the very least, they could shut up and get out of the way. Hopefully, they will do that before the mullahs decide to turn Tel Aviv into a glass parking lot overlooking the Mediterranean.

A CNN/AQ Connection In Turkey?

MEMRI provides a bit of shocking information from Turkey in its latest dispatch of Arabic translations for the West. A Turkish terrorist group has launched a newspaper in Istanbul, Kaide ('al-Qaeda' in Turkish), which it distributes across the entire country:

The Turkish political weekly Tempo, along with some major Turkish daily newspapers including Milliyet,Aksam and Cumhuriyet, reported that the Islamist Turkish terrorist organization Great East Islamic Raiders Front (IBDA-C) has begun publishing a new weekly, Kaide ("Al-Qaeda" in Turkish) which openly praises its namesake and idolizes Osama bin Laden. Kaide, which looks like an Al-Qaeda bulletin and includes all Al-Qaeda announcements, is published legally in Istanbul and sold at newsstands across Turkey. ...

The Turkish weekly Tempo interviewed Kaide executive Ali Osman Zor in Kaide' s offices in the Kasimpasa neighborhood of Istanbul. Following are excerpts: [3]

"[…] Even the plain fact that Al-Qaeda has an office in Kasimpasa, in the middle of Istanbul, where they publish this [Kaide] magazine, is frightening. Despite the publishers' claim that they only have 'emotional ties' with Al-Qaeda, the entire Kaide magazine is formatted like an Al-Qaeda bulletin. On the London attacks, their headline read 'Al-Qaeda is Liberating the World,' and many pages are dedicated to statements by Al-Qaeda. The Kaide magazine boasts of the beheadings in Afghanistan and Iraq by saying 'the jihad fighters continue to behead!' and all its pages are filled with frightening statements and threats. Kaide also shows the ties between IBDA-C […] and Al-Qaeda.

"IBDA-C leader Salih Mirzabeyoglu [Salih Izzet Erdis] is serving a life sentence which is a commutation of a death sentence. The staff of the Kaide magazine is made up of convicts who served long prison terms for their affiliation with IBDA-C, and were released under the government's 'general pardon.'

"[…] Ali Osman Zor speaks of Osama bin Laden and Zarqawi as 'heroes,' saying that the London attacks that killed over 50 people were 'acts of revenge for Allah,' and claims that former ANAP MP Mehmet Kececiler has met with bin Laden.

Subtlety does not arise in this connection between Kaide and its AQ namesake. Ali Osman Zor goes out of his way to emphasize the spiritual and political connection between his newspaper and AQ, praising Osama bin Laden and "our soul-mate, Carlos the Jackal". Zor delights in the London bombing and notes with pride Kaide's headlines proclaiming that "Al-Qaeda Is Liberating The World."

He also asserts that the leader of the Zapatista movement in Mexico, Marcos, has converted to radical Islam. That should wake a few people about protecting the southern border a bit better than its current status. Zor promises more information along those lines in the coming days.

Distribution, however, requires capital and organization. Writing headlines and paeans to Osama bin Laden might come easily enough to Zor and his ilk, but without cash and a support structure for deliveries, all that makes Kaide little more than a blog. How does Zor get his screed to newsstands across Turkey? MEMRI has that information as well (emphases mine):

It is worth noting that according to Aksam, Kaide is distributed by Yay-Sat, which is Turkey’s largest magazine-newspaper marketing and distribution network. Yay-Sat is owned by the Dogan Media Group, which includes mainstream media outlets in Turkey such as Hurriyet, Milliyet, Radikal, Turkish Daily News, Dunya, and Tempo, as well as TV channels such as CNNTurk and Kanal-D.

DMG owns or distributes a number of publications, but its most interesting partnership for Americans is its connection to CNN. How does the publisher of the "official" Turkish newspaper of the terrorist enemy come to partner up with CNN? DMG tells us that the channel is a "joint venture between [DMG] and AOL Time Warner." In fact, CNNTurk is the only such franchise agreement in the world -- the only CNN affiliate controlled outside of Atlanta, according to the DMG website.

Perhaps AOL Time Warner would like to explain why they have partnered up with Osama's publisher in Turkey. I, for one, would love to hear how Kaide fits in with AOL Time Warner's idea of business partnerships to build a stronger America and a freer world.

King Abdullah Sends A Message

With the death of his brother Fahd, Abdullah can now rule Saudi Arabia in his own name instead of as a steward -- and yesterday he sent a message intended for radicals and democrats alike in the Arabian kingdom, and even his own family:

Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah Monday night ordered the pardon and release of three prominent political dissidents and their attorney who had been imprisoned for holding meetings and signing petitions advocating a new constitution for the kingdom.

The 18-month imprisonment of the four men -- two university scholars, a poet and their attorney -- had galvanized protests from international human rights groups and prompted a rare public rebuke of Saudi Arabia's autocratic political system from Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

Lawyers and associates of the reformers described the pardon as an encouraging signal that Abdullah intends to relax the strictures on public debate about the kingdom's political system and social problems, and that he may also ease the interrogations, threats and forced confessions routinely faced by Saudis who speak out about controversial issues. Abdullah took the throne last week after the death of his half brother, King Fahd.

Does this signify a softening of the rigid Wahhabism of the ibn Abdul-Aziz family? That seems unlikely. Abdullah has remained on friendly terms with the West during Fahd's long twilight decline towards his death last month, but the new king never abandoned the deeply conservative and iconoclastic version of Islam upon which his grandfather built their kingdom. Until two years ago, when the radical Wahhabists they once encouraged decided to openly attack the royal family, Abdullah seemed content to jolly them along while balancing the Western trade that kept the huge royal family in the money.

The May 2003 attacks clearly changed Abdullah's perspective, but before Fahd's death it appears that he did not have the power as steward to do much about it. Abdullah has the opportunity to select his opposition, to some degree. Depending on how he chooses to use his security forces, he can select which form of dissent the royals will tolerate and send a signal to his subjects on how to blow off their political frustration. He may have finally decided that having democrats talking constitutions in public makes for less of a danger than Islamists talking mutiny against the royals.

That certainly wasn't the case before now. The Saudis spent a lot of money setting up madrassas that spewed anti-Western venom and preached the most restrictive of Islamist philosophies. Their success became so complete that finally the royals could no longer meet the standards of purity that their imams demanded, touching off the al-Qaeda impulse for their overthrow, especially after they aligned with their petroleum customers to push Saddam back into Iraq in 1991.

The Washington Post notes that Abdullah may have used this occasion to engage in a little pushback against Prince Nayef, the Saudi security chief that arrested the four in the first place. No fan of democracy, Nayef has made it his business to cut off any talk of constitutions and nationwide elections in order to protect the family privilege. No doubt that formed a part of Abdullah's motivation. Steve Coll also notes that the democrats themselves understood that the royal pardon still communicates their initial guilt despite Abdullah's "forgiveness", which will suit Abdullah just fine.

I'm not sure than anyone sees Abdullah's pragmatic selection of safety valves in this decision. If this continues as a pattern, it will show that Abdullah has learned from his extensive Western contacts that he has much less to fear from constitutionalists than he does from radical Islamists, and he has decided to marginalize the latter in the eyes of his subjects in favor of the former. That will represent a major sea change for Saudi Arabia, Islam, and the war on terror if Abdullah lives long enough to set that in motion.

Trackback Problems At CQ Update

Hopefully, this will be good news. I believe I may have found the strings that caused so many Trackback pings to fail over the last couple of weeks, and I have removed them from my MT-Blacklist system. If you continue to see problems with the Trackbacks and you've confirmed that your ping was sent correctly, send me the excerpt that went with your ping so that I can double-check for more bad strings.

Thank you for your patience!

Yakovlev Under Arrest; Pleads Guilty

CNN has a flash report that a former UN official named in the Oil-For-Food scandal has pled guilty to money-laundering and conspiracy charges in New York. Earlier today, CNN also reported that Alexander Yakovlev had his diplomatic immunity lifted by the UN and had been arrested shortly afterwards:

A former U.N. procurement officer apparently has been arrested in connection with allegations he solicited bribes from companies seeking oil-for-food contracts, an aide to Secretary-General Kofi Annan said Monday.

U.N. officials lifted Alexander Yakovlev's diplomatic immunity at the request of a U.S. prosecutor in New York, and "we believe Mr. Yakovlev is already in custody," Mark Malloch Brown, Annan's chief of staff, told reporters.

Yakovlev, a senior procurement officer for the United Nations, resigned in June amid allegations that he helped get his son a job with a firm doing business with the world body.

Yakovlev came to light six weeks ago, when documents procured by Fox News showed that he had directed business to a firm that employed his son Dmitry. The Yakovlev family connection followed that of the Annans in providing structural support for contract awards to favored firms. Dmitry, like Kojo Annan, prospered under his father's consistent direction of UN contracts to his employer, IHC, and often worked on those contracts directly -- a major violation of UN regulations.

If Yakovlev has pled guilty this quickly to an American indictment, it might mean that he wants to cut a deal. How often does a defendant plead out within hours of his arrest? He may have enough documentation and personal knowledge of the scams to cause many sleepless nights for Benon Sevan and Kofi Annan -- and perhaps a few indictments for them as well.

I thought Sevan protested a bit too loudly. This may well be the other shoe dropping.

UPDATE: It's Yakovlev:

A former U.N. procurement officer pleaded guilty to money laundering, wire fraud and conspiracy charges Monday after the United Nations stripped him of his diplomatic immunity, federal prosecutors said. ...

Earlier, Paul Volcker, the head of the U.N.'s Independent Inquiry Committee, announced that the probe found that Yakovlev solicited a bribe from a French company that bid unsuccessfully on an oil-for-food contract.

The report found no evidence the company paid the desired bribe -- but it found that more than $1.3 million had been wired to a bank account Yakovlev controlled on the Caribbean island of Antigua since 2000.

Volcker apparently nailed a hide to the wall, and one that means something. What surprises me is the speed in which Yakovlev pled out. Something big looks like it will break at Turtle Bay. Annan had better hope that Yakovlev hasn't started talking, because is he has, Annan may well find himself the next UN official to lose his diplomatic immunity. Watch for Annan to move to Brazil or another non-extradition country if that happens.

This Is Not Your Father's Oldsmobile

The American military made some significant progress today when it discovered a facility in western Iraq used for building car bombs. Marines found a total of eleven unexploded devices in a town in the Anbar province where terrorists have planned and executed suicide attacks on Iraqi and American forces:

U.S. Marines discovered a car bomb factory Monday in a western Iraqi town near where 20 members of the American unit were killed last week, the U.S. military said.

Six vehicles rigged with explosives were found in the hideout in the northern part of Haqlaniyah, one of a cluster of towns in western Anbar province long believed to be a stronghold of Iraqi insurgents and foreign fighters.

"All of the rigged vehicles were destroyed and secondary explosions were observed by the Marines," a Marine statement said.

U.S. and Iraqi forces also found five roadside bombs Monday on a road in Haqlaniyah, the statement said. All were detonated in place, it said.

Twenty Marines died in two engagements around Haqlaniyah over the past week, six from small-arms fire and 14 from a car bomb like the ones they discovered today. The Marines have not halted their mission through Haqlaniyah despite the losses suffered last week, and that effort paid off today. The Marines have eliminated eleven attacks on Coalition and/or Iraqi forces in the coming days.

The Anbar province has strategic significance for the terrorists, as it gives them access to the Syrian border and allows for transit in and out of Iraq to evade Iraqi and American patrols. Shutting down their access to Anbar will help isolate the foreign elements inside Iraq and cut off their lines of communication. If the intercept from the Mosul "emir" to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is legitimate, the pinch the terrorists have already felt will eventually strangle their efforts altogether. Without fresh recruits taking the place of the suicide-attack volunteers, the terrorists will have to take much more risk in order to carry out attacks -- and again, if the Sayd note gives any genuine indication, that prospect doesn't appeal to Michael Moore's courageous "Minutemen".

Belafonte's Godwin Boat Song?

CNS News reports that Harry Belafonte once again sang a bit off-key while venturing into politics this past weekend, calling African-American conservatives "tyrants" and comparing the Bush administration to Hitler and the Nazis. Marc Morano interviewed the entertainer who has long championed civil-rights causes, but lately has used less civil language to do so:

Belafonte used a Hitler analogy when asked about what impact prominent blacks such as former Secretary of State Powell and current Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had on the Bush administration's relations with minorities.

"Hitler had a lot of Jews high up in the hierarchy of the Third Reich. Color does not necessarily denote quality, content or value," Belafonte said in an exclusive interview with Cybercast News Service.

"[If] a black is a tyrant, he is first and foremost a tyrant, then he incidentally is black. Bush is a tyrant and if he gathers around him black tyrants, they all have to be treated as they are being treated," he added.

If this accurately represents what Belafonte said, it gives another demonstration of the foolishness of allowing him to speak on behalf of those pressing for the extension of the Voting Rights Act. Historically, he has no idea of what he speaks. Exactly which Nazis in the Third Reich were Jews, let alone the large amounts of them Belafonte has conjured up? It is an idiotic assertion, one that points to an anti-Semitic paranoia that has raised its head often enough on the far fringes of the African-American community, despite the generous support given by the Jewish community overall to civil-rights goals.

The rest of Belafonte's rant goes directly back to his smearing of Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell as "house slaves" last year during the presidential elections. Belafonte and others like him do not allow for dissent within their populations. Anyone who disagrees with the mindset offered by Belafonte, Dick Gregory (who also has a neurotic episode reported by CNS), and the rest of the political leadership of their electorate have to be branded as traitors and sellouts instead of attempting to outreason their objections.

Here's what Gregory said to CNS:

Civil rights activist Dick Gregory mocked the existence of African-American conservatives in America.

"They (black conservatives) have a right to exist, but why would I want to walk around with a swastika on my shirt after the way Hitler done messed it (the swastika symbol) up?" Gregory said in an interview with Cybercast News Service. (The swastika was an ancient symbol generally regarded an emblem of strength and luck before the Nazi Party adopted it in 1920.)

"So why would I want to call myself a conservative after the way them white racists thugs have used that word to hide behind? They call themselves new Republicans," Gregory said.

Belafonte and Gregory amount to nothing more than loathsome windbags who profess a love for democracy as long as it results in a homogenous philosophy. Any dissent from the Accepted Wisdom must be attacked as evil and monstrous, and the dissenters themselves outcast from the hive. Belafonte and his kind descend directly from the most virulent of the Puritans, who traveled to the New World for their religious and political freedom -- and only theirs.

UPDATE: La Shawn Barber channels Douglas Adams and finds Belafonte mostly harmless.

UPDATE II: Joe Gandelman has a nice roundup, but also includes a few choice words of his own for Belafonte:

I had a lot my relatives in the Gandelman family wiped out by Hitler during World War II and I never KNEW there were so many Jews in his government.

Perhaps the Jews I never knew were in Hitler's government helped wipe out the Gandelmans because they went to a rival temple. Or they didn't like Chinese food.

Democrats that aspire to the mainstream, like Jesse Jackson, really should ask Belafonte to avoid talking to the press in the future -- and maybe should rethink inviting him to public events at all.

A Surprise For CQ Readers (Bump To Top)

Mel from Bonafide Style has a surprise for CQ readers today. She has built a new skin for Captain's Quarters, one which I believe will make the blog much easier to read and navigate. Click here to change to the new skin and check it out for yourself. She's still fine-tuning it for some other purposes, but I think you will find it ready to roll right now.

The new skin keeps the default theme for the blog, but makes the following changes:

* A new two-column format for better text presentation
* The placement of the flash ad in the banner
* New java-based operation for blog utilities
* Faster load time for posts

Leave your comments and any problems you have in the comments to this post. Mel and I will review the feedback. Once we have finalized the design, we'll make sure it's accessible through the skins page. (You can switch back to your earlier skin there if you have a problem loading this one.)

Enjoy!

BUMP TO TOP, 8/8: Good comments so far. Keep in mind that you will have to have Java enabled in your browser to see some of these elements. Mel has made a number of adjustments based on your feedback, so it's much appreciated. (And if you're looking for a web designer that is responsive and talented, Mel's putting on quite a show for you ...)

Judicial Absurdities Meet Common Sense

A federal judge in Seattle, Judge John Coughenour, gave a ludicrously light sentence to a would-be terrorist that attempted to sneak into the US to carry out a bombing plot at Los Angeles International. Even worse than the sentence, however, was Coughenour's accompanying lecture to the Bush administration on the proper role for the judiciary in addressing terrorism -- after Coughenour had just demonstrated his essential cluelessness about its nature.

Eric Posner and Adrian Vermeule take apart Coughenour's legal reasoning as well in a Washington Post column this morning:

British and American traditions are two-sided: They acknowledge that governments have an obligation to protect people's lives as well as their liberties. No nation preserves liberty atop a stack of its own citizens' corpses, but if one did, it would not be worth defending.

The spurious assumption behind both cliches is that whatever package of civil liberties happens to exist at the time a terrorist threat arises must be maintained at all costs; adjustments that reduce liberty are bad even if they produce greater gains in security, potentially saving people's lives. This is a virulent form of the fallacy of the status quo -- that whatever exists must be good. In fact, the balance between security and liberty is constantly readjusted as circumstances change. A well-functioning government will contract civil liberties as threats increase. A government that refuses to adjust its policies has simply frozen in the face of the threat. It is pathologically rigid, not enlightened.

The two cliches about terrorism are familiar from debates among commentators and politicians. What is new and surprising is their citation by judges as self-evident truths. Judges do badly when they appeal to speculative causal theories about terrorism or to the romantic ideals of civil libertarianism. Both are incompatible with the kind of balancing that is so much a part of the judicial function. That ideals have a tendency to explode on the rock of fact was spectacularly demonstrated in Britain, where terrorist carnage occurred just a few months after the detainees in Lord Hoffman's case were released under legal compulsion. It is too soon to tell whether there was a causal connection between the two events, but Lord Hoffman's casual dismissal of the threat to citizens' lives now appears grotesque.

In fact, America has often made adjustments during wartime to its civil liberties in order to protect its citizens. Some of these amount to common sense precautions; others, like the Japanese internment camps, cause decades of regret. As Posner and Vermeule note, the elected representatives of the people have to have some leeway in adjusting policy and access to meet security threats, or else any vulnerability once identified will be open to repeated exploitation. Curfews, rationing, limited access all have long histories for Americans during wartime, and all ended after the hostilities themselves ceased. In this case, the end may prove more murky than in World Wars I and II, but no less so than Korea or the Civil War. The notorious suspensions of habeas corpus in the latter example were rescinded shortly after Appomattox.

We have to maintain our flexibility to effectively protect America against attack and catch and/or neutralize terrorists before they can strike. Judge Coughenour's approach asks that we wait until they reach American soil before doing anything about them, and then give them all the rights that they despise in handling their cases. In the meantime, those we don't catch will busy themselves with their mission of killing American citizens. It sounds like a great way to lose the war, and if that's the kind of thinking we can expect from the federal judiciary, then Coughenour provides the best counterargument to his own screed. Posner and Vermeule come in a close second.

Sevan Quits Before He Gets Fired

In anticipation of a highly critical report coming from the Volcker Commission, UN Undersecretary and Oil-For-Food administrator Benon Sevan has called it quits. The BBC reports that Sevan bitterly blames Kofi Annan for sacrficing him to the UN's political enemies in what he says is a futile attempt to appease them:

Benon Sevan's announcement on Sunday came a day before a third report on the scandal-plagued programme is published.

It is expected to accuse Mr Sevan of receiving cash in return for allocating Iraqi oil contracts in the mid-1990s. ...

In his letter Mr Sevan insisted he was innocent of any charges that would be made against him.

"The charges are false and you, who have known me all these years, should know they are false," he wrote.

This sounds rather suspicious to me. If the report hadn't come out yet, Sevan should not have that much information on its content. No doubt Annan shared some of the information with Sevan in the last couple of days before its public release. Even at that, blaming Annan for the findings of Volcker doesn't exactly add up. Volcker's investigation is supposed to be independent of Annan; how exactly can Annan use that to "sacrifice' him? Also, Sevan has well-known close personal links to the UN Secretary-General, and any report slamming Sevan and documenting payoffs will not help Annan in the slightest. In fact, it will make his survival that much more tenuous, as the US and others will make the case that Annan's incompetent management and oversight allowed Annan's inner circle to run the OFF program into a shambles.

The outrage and the resignation appear to be calculated to shift the focus off of the charges and their implications and towards the counterargument that Volcker has conducted a witch hunt on behalf of the US. More importantly, it will apply even more directly to American investigations still under way, notably Norm Coleman's in the Senate. It allows Annan to mourn the loss of a good man's services to the UN and play victim, enduring the wrath of a friend in order to appease those aligned against Turtle Bay. It's all a charade, anyway; given the breadth and depth of the corruption in OFF, its administrators should have been fired at once, not allowed to hang around for a couple of years to interfere with the investigations.

The only positive development in this will be Sevan's absence at the UN from this point forward. Annan should be next, and if either man had any honor at all, they both would have resigned in the face of the OFF debacle that wound up enriching the genocidal lunatic that its design meant to render powerless.

Saudis Warned Brits Of An Impending Attack

Yesterday, the Observer reported that the Saudis officially warned Britain that it had word of an attack on London weeks ahead of the July 7 bombings. Its intelligence services had monitored the cellphone of a terrorist leader in its country and had told Britain of the existence and activation of an Islamist cell within the UK:

Saudi Arabia officially warned Britain of an imminent terrorist attack on London just weeks ahead of the 7 July bombings after calls from one of al-Qaeda's most wanted operatives were traced to an active cell in the United Kingdom.

Senior Saudi security sources have confirmed they are investigating whether calls from Kareem al-Majati, last year named as one of al-Qaeda's chiefs in the Gulf kingdom, were made directly to the British ringleader of the 7 July bomb plotters.

One senior Saudi security official told The Observer that calls to Britain intercepted from a mobile phone belonging to Majati earlier this year revealed that an active terror group was at work in the UK and planning an attack.

He also said that calls from Majati's lieutenant and al-Qaeda's logistics expert, Younes al-Hayari, who was killed in a separate shoot-out just four days before the 7 July bombings, have also been traced to Britain.

The Saudis insist that either this intelligence relates to the July 7 cell or that another completely different cell still remains active in the UK, planning another attack. Unfortunately, neither the Brits nor the Saudis can ask Majati, who allegedly masterminded the Casablanca bombings and possibly the Madrid attack as well. He died in a hail of gunfire in April in a battle against Saudi police.

The British confirm that the Saudis passed along an extensive amount of intelligence on Majati's communications. They received e-mails, transcriptions of phone calls, and text messages, but none of them had enough specifics to stop the July 7 attacks. They do not 'recognise the specifics' of the Saudi claim, however, meaning that the British intelligence services dispute the details of the Saudi claims of cooperation.

If Majati had any involvement in the July 7 attacks, it shows once again that the center of the terrorist movement exists in Saudi Arabia, not Pakistan, at least in terms of finance and direct operation. It also shows that the Saudi government has taken counterterrorism more seriously of late but still lags behind the curve. Majati died in April; the attacks came three months later. Someone took up the slack and helped coordinate the efforts in London. Some of that slack may yet get identified through the collapse of the July 21 follow-up attack. The speed of the arrests in that case provides some glimmer of hope that it may already have done so.

Just as the Bush Administration did, the Blair government may face tough questions about the nature of its intelligence and whether their security services reacted appropriately. The argument casts suspicion in the wrong direction. Before 7/7, the British appeared more worried about protecting their multiculturalism than defending against terrorism, believing that their open-arms approach to Muslims gave them some immunity to AQ targeting. Now the British understand that allowing radicals to emigrate and preach hatred and violence on the streets of their cities does not celebrate multiculturalism but demonstrates a suicidal lack of willpower to draw the line on threats to its existence. As the British electorate finally draws that conclusion, their government will have the mandate it needs to eject the immigrants who use British land and liberty to argue for the destruction of both.

Air America: Missing Payrolls?

Brian Maloney, who broke the Air America scandal in the blogosphere over a week ago while the Exempt Media still mostly ignores it, now hears whispers from inside the netlet that employees worry about the company missing its payroll obligations. A delay in posting direct-deposit pay for their final July paychecks apparently has Air America employees buzzing, although anonymously:

It's bad enough the company is generating fresh bad publicity almost daily, over the diverted $875,000 in taxpayer funds intended for a Bronx-based community service organization.

Now, to make matters worse, an internal memo obtained by the Radio Equalizer indicates Air America Radio employees faced late paychecks just over a week ago.

They were apparently stunned to receive a last-minute notice sent at 5:09pm Thursday, July 28th, indicating direct deposits would not be made Friday, as expected.

Written by company Vice President/Finance Sinohe Terrero (this article confims Terrero's corporate role), it inferred the payroll processing company was to blame:

We have been advised by ADP that Direct Deposit will probably not post until Monday. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cost (sic). If you have any questions please feel free to call me.

Sinohe Terrero

VP Finance

Brian expresses doubts about ADP having an issue in processing direct deposit for a smallish payroll like AAR. I'm not so sure that I share his skepticism; I've worked for big companies and smaller ones that had one or two bouts with this kind of hiccup with its payroll vendors. More key would be to see whether the non-direct-deposit paychecks actually cleared on time when employees went to cash them.

However, the episode clearly unnerved some of the AAR staff. Brian says he has heard from multiple sources within AAR that only a last-minute infusion of cash from an unknown source helped AAR clear their payroll, but it came a bit too late to float the direct deposit on time. As Brian notes, that would mean the $13 million it got from investors earlier this year has already dissipated. If that is the case, it would explain why Piquant Media had agreed "months ago" to repay Gloria Wise for the misappropriated funds it received, but failed to start payments until the scandal went public.

Don't be surprised if the liberal netlet collapses in the weeks ahead, unless it can find another set of white-knight investors willing to keep the enterprise afloat. Perhaps, as Brian suggests, its high-priced talent will start deferring their own salaries to rescue the company -- if they haven't already.

Why Did Daily Kos Poach Graphics From Joe Sherlock? (Update)

The Daily Kos has enjoyed tremendous success, and despite conservative criticism of its content, it appeals to a large number of readers from the port side of the blogosphere. Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, its proprietor and chief original writer, generates envious amounts of ad money and has used that money to support the causes that matter to him. His voice has power, and his ideas get discussed -- truly one of the blogosphere's biggest players in terms of readership, scope, and influence.

So why did one of its writers poach on the bandwidth of a small blog like Joe Sherlock?

Last month, Kos contributor 'theglobalizer' not only lifted a graphic (relating to Keith Olberman) from Joe, but didn't bother to copy it to their own servers. That meant that every time the page loads, the graphic gets downloaded from Joe's server and eats up Joe's bandwidth. The diarist didn't even give a link back to Joe.

In response, Joe has changed the graphic to read, "The operator of this site is a cheapskate, a bandwidth thief, and a jerk." That may be a bit unfair. No one knows if Markos has any awareness of what his diarist did, but Joe's commentary certainly applies to 'theglobalizer'. In the end, though, Markos as the site operator has the responsibility to make sure his blog doesn't do things like this.

Daily Kos can afford its own bandwidth. It shouldn't poach it from Joe, nor should it take graphics off of other sites without getting permission and giving credit. As Joe notes, it is similar to to siphoning gas from a Plymouth coupe to a party limo. I'm sure that Markos will take the appropriate action when this comes to his attention.

UPDATE: As I predicted, Markos set this right:

Now, he doesn't understand ... that I have no control over the diarists. If he had emailed me about it, I would've deleted the image in question.

But the fact they can't distinguish between me and the diarists doesn't negate the fact that he's got a point about hot linking images from small sites, especially when you aren't offering a link or anything tangible in return.

Don't do it. If you want to post an image, upload it to a personal account and link to that. Hotlinking to images on other sites is rude, it's theft. You do it, and it's a potentially bannable offense.

I said that Markos would fix the problem if he found out about it, and he did. Good for him.

Peter Jennings, RIP

Peter Jennings has passed away after a months of combating lung cancer, his colleagues at ABC News announced late tonight:

In announcing Jennings' death to his ABC colleagues, News President David Westin wrote:

"For four decades, Peter has been our colleague, our friend, and our leader in so many ways. None of us will be the same without him.

"As you all know, Peter learned only this spring that the health problem he'd been struggling with was lung cancer. With Kayce, he moved straight into an aggressive chemotherapy treatment. He knew that it was an uphill struggle. But he faced it with realism, courage, and a firm hope that he would be one of the fortunate ones. In the end, he was not.

"We will have many opportunities in the coming hours and days to remember Peter for all that he meant to us all. It cannot be overstated or captured in words alone. But for the moment, the finest tribute we can give is to continue to do the work he loved so much and inspired us to do."

Jennings was 67 years old, having been the anchor for ABC News for 22 years. Our condolences go to his wife Kayce Freed, his children Elizabeth and Christopher, and his sister Sarah Jennings. We will add the Jennings family to our prayers.

UPDATE: In a show of bad taste, this group waited all of one hour to send out a broadcast e-mail to presumably a large number of recipients with this header: "Jennings' Death Shows Tenacious Nature of Smoking". A Professor John F. Banzhaf from George Washington University law school sent out the e-mail using Jennings' death to tell people that it predicted the likelihood of his death when Jennings first disclosed his illness.

Like others who support good causes with no brains and no soul, Professor Banzhaf needs to remember that the cause does not excuse the means. ASH and the professor should be ashamed of themselves.

Tancredo Is Too Late

Rep. Tom Tancredo received a deluge of criticism after suggesting that the US might target Mecca in the event of a nuclear attack on America. According to the British newspaper, the Independent, radical Islam may have made that strategy moot. The cities of Mecca and Medina have suffered the fate of the Buddhist monuments of Afghanistan under the Taliban, and for much the same reasons:

Historic Mecca, the cradle of Islam, is being buried in an unprecedented onslaught by religious zealots.

Almost all of the rich and multi-layered history of the holy city is gone. The Washington-based Gulf Institute estimates that 95 per cent of millennium-old buildings have been demolished in the past two decades.

Now the actual birthplace of the Prophet Mohamed is facing the bulldozers, with the connivance of Saudi religious authorities whose hardline interpretation of Islam is compelling them to wipe out their own heritage.

It is the same oil-rich orthodoxy that pumped money into the Taliban as they prepared to detonate the Bamiyan buddhas in 2000. And the same doctrine - violently opposed to all forms of idolatry - that this week decreed that the Saudis' own king be buried in an unmarked desert grave.

A Saudi architect, Sami Angawi, who is an acknowledged specialist on the region's Islamic architecture, told The Independent that the final farewell to Mecca is imminent: "What we are witnessing are the last days of Mecca and Medina."

The voracious iconoclasm of Wahhabism and radical Islamists will do what Muslims feared the West wanted in the first place -- the destruction of the Prophet's cities. It won't take long before the Ka'aba stone itself will disappear as well. Once that happens, the Islamists will find themselves surrounded by a whole new class of enemies, enemies from the ranks of moderate Islam whose religion insists that Muslims must make at least one pilgrimage to Mecca in their lifetime.

The impulse against idolatry in radical Islam will provide its undoing. Already the House of Saud has bulldozed even more archaeological sites, such as the house of the grandson of the Prophet. Ironically, in the place of the buildings that can trace their origins to Mohammed and his family, the Wahhabists have erected modern buildings of steel and glass, turning Mecca from a touchstone of the faith into a bland, ordinary commerce center designed to pick the pockets of the Muslims who come on their hajj.

The destruction of Mecca and Medina will not come at the hands of the West, despite the suggestions of Tancredo and others. The Islamists have almost completed this task before any others could. In doing so, they have made themselves even more the enemy of moderate Muslims around the world and may have done mortal damage to the conservative wing of the House of Saud as well. The outrage over the the loss of the two most sacred cities in Islam will demonstrate the danger to Islam the Islamofascists present on their own. Just as in politics, the best policy for the West to pursue is to allow our enemy to complete their own destruction rather than interfere with it ourselves.

Insurgents Not Happy With Current Management

American forces in Iraq have intercepted a letter from a local terrorist leader from the Mosul area to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. The letter does not claim glorious progress against the infidel invader; instead, it complains about the quality of leadership in Northern Iraq and the decreasing effectiveness of the al-Qaeda effort:

A letter apparently written by a rebel leader to terrorist mastermind Abu Musab al-Zarqawi decries the insurgency's leadership in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, a hotspot in the war.

Security forces seized the letter last week in a raid on a safe house that netted arrests and other items. Task Force Freedom, based in Mosul, issued a copy of the letter and a statement about it Saturday.

The letter, from an insurgent named Abu Zayd, who calls himself "emir of Farming reform battalion on the west side," cited the incompetence of Mosul's emirs and the disobedience of other people in the network.

Besides incompetent leadership and mutinous terrorists, Sayd has other, more specific complaints about the Zarqawi network in the north. He says that the attacks have deteriorated as the terrorists have concentrated on quantity rather than quality, and that foreign fighters now must endure "deplorable" conditions -- including "marginalization".

Marginalization? I thought that the press considered this a fight against occupation? We have heard over and over again that our presence in Iraq causes all the violence, that the Iraqis have run out of patience with our troops remaining in their country, and that they support Zarqawi's goal of pushing us out. Sayd, who appears to be much closer to the issue, notes that his terrorists face marginalization and a dire shortage of shelter.

That hardly sounds like the kind of situation the media has described for us in Iraq. It does, however, sound exactly like what Donald Rumsfeld and soldiers on the ground have described for two years now. The Iraqis do not want to be occupied by anyone, but they especially do not want foreign terrorists attempting to do to the entire country what they once did to Fallujah. They want us to get rid of the Zarqawi lunatics, and to help them develop an army to keep the Islamofascists out for good.

Zarqawi apparently never got Sayd's warning. Hopefully, the American public will notice it instead.

'Just Following Orders' Is Never A Defense

The New York Times runs a sympathetic article on the plight of Mohamed Yousry in its Regional section this morning. Yousry worked as a translator for Lynne Stewart, the attorney representing "The Blind Sheikh" behind the first World Trade Center attack -- and he got convicted of providing material assistance to terrorists along with Stewart and Ahmed Abdel Sattar. The Times tells us that Yousry remains defiant and bemused by his conviction, claiming that he only followed orders from Lynne Stewart:

Mr. Yousry's lawyers, David Ruhnke and David Stern, showed in court that he took no actions on his own to help the sheik politically and did his translation work based on instructions he received from Ms. Stewart and other lawyers for Mr. Abdel Rahman, a blind Muslim cleric who is serving a life sentence in federal prison for conspiring to bomb landmarks in New York City.

Mr. Yousry's case seemed particularly solid, because unlike Ms. Stewart, he never signed documents pledging to abide by prison regulations. Mr. Yousry's lawyers specified that it was up to Ms. Stewart, as the lawyer, to see that her staff complied with the rules.

The prosecutors presented evidence that Mr. Yousry knew that Ms. Stewart was at least bending the prison rules when she took messages from the sheik, which had been translated by Mr. Yousry, out of jail. They argued that he knew full well of the dangers of any communication between the virulently anti-American sheik and his Egyptian followers.

Andrew Dember, an assistant United States attorney, assailed the defense arguments as "nonsense!" in his closing summation. "He knew the restrictions, what they consisted of, and he was aware of the fact that he was doing wrong because of those restrictions. He knew full well that he was bound by the restrictions himself."

He added later, "Clearly, obviously, Ms. Stewart and Mr. Yousry know what they're doing is improper, illegal, criminal."

The Times goes into great detail to show that Yousry did not run in radical Islamist circles. Julia Preston points out that he had Jewish and Christian friends, and that he even attended a bar mitzvah after helping to organize it. She quotes Yousry as claiming himself as "part of the collateral damage" of 9/11, and refusing to blame Stewart for his problems.

However, the Nuremberg defense didn't work for the defendants at Nuremberg, and it doesn't apply here, either. Yousry should know what rules and laws apply to his work as a translator for criminal defendants, especially after 9/11 and especially while working for a radical-activist attorney like Stewart. His claim that he just "followed a process that was designed by the lawyers" does not magically wipe away criminal activity at any level. When Yousry translated messages and handed them off to Sattar, who busily retransmitted them to known terrorists in Egypt, that made him part of a conspiracy to aid and abet terrorism.

It really makes no difference with whom Yousry kept company for his social calendar. If he took part in a conspiracy to pass messages along from Omar Abdel Rahman to the terrorist mastermind's minions in Egypt and elsewhere, then he deserved the conviction that the jury delivered. The Times should reserve its sympathy for the victims of the terrorism that Yousry, Stewart, and Sattar enabled through their toadying to Rahman instead of a man who claims martyrdom through the violent and brutal deaths of the 9/11 dead.

Air America: Compare The Scandals

Today we will hold a contest to see how the Exempt Media coverage of Air America's funding scandals holds up against that of another stoy of financial shenanigans. Let's take a look at how many articles the Exempt Media has written about the Air America-Gloria Wise misappropriation of public funds, as opposed to the Martha Stewart insider-trading case -- in the past 30 days:

Media outlet.....AA/GW......Martha
NY Times..........0...........16*
Wash Post.........0..........10 (14 day search)
LA Times..........0..........3
CBS News..........0..........1
ABC News..........0.........4

What does this show? The Exempt Media has plenty of resources to continue coverage of a single celebrity who allegedly engaged in insider trading over 4,000 shares of ImClone stock, avoiding $51,000 in losses when bad news hit just afterwards. (Stewart wasn't convicted for insider trading, but obstruction of justice and perjury.) That amounts to 1/18th of what Air America got in misappropriated public funds by sucking money out of Bronx charity -- money intended for poor kids and Alzheimer's patients. Yet the New York Times has mentioned Martha Stewart* in 16 articles over the last 30 days, some of those in-depth reporting on Stewart and her ongoing legal struggles, but have not managed to put "Air America" and "Gloria Wise" into the same article even one time -- despite the misappropriation of public funds occurring in the Paper of Record's own back yard.

Instead of dumpster-diving into the private records of the adoptions of John Roberts' children, Bill Keller should have his paper looking into the public records of the malfeasance that took place in his own back yard. It certainly seems more newsworthy than covering a months-old scandal that has been thoroughly played out. (Inspired by CQ reader Dan Kauffman)

Michelle Malkin also points readers to David Reinhard's column in the Portland Oregonian this morning (Power Line also notes it):

First, its listeners should unleash their "we know better" candlepower and their you-can't-fool-us cynicism to get to the bottom of the Air America's kids-for-kilowatts scandal. And, clearly, a scheme that hurts children and Alzheimer's patients to fund left-wing outreach should appeal to progressives' dark sense of irony.

Second, Air America's listeners should go beyond the network owners on the financial front. Simply repaying funds to club isn't enough. Really, how cover-your-assets corporatist is that? Leftist listeners need to really showcase that storied compassion of theirs. Yes, how about a radio-thon to raise funds for kids and Alzheimer's patients across this broad land? Lefty listeners could, well, "Give piece of change."

Mark Steyn also lends his considerable intellectual heft to increasing the coverage of this scandal, in his latest column, "The New Democratic Strategy -- Almost Winning":

Speaking of shivering coatless girls in Bush's America, spare a thought for the underprivileged urchins of the Bronx. The Gloria Wise Boys & Girls Club, a nonprofit social-services organization in New York, receives millions of dollars in government funds to give disadvantaged youth in poor neighborhoods a leg up the ladder of life. But mysteriously much of the money wound up being diverted to the coffers of Air America, the liberal talk-radio network whose ratings are yet another example of "deferred success." The needs of disadvantaged Al Franken and his pals apparently outweigh those of Bronx welfare recipients. Perhaps Janeane Garofalo is the coatless girl John Edwards was talking about all those months. Air America looks like the broadcast version of the U.N. Oil-for-Food program, whereby money earmarked to save starving moppets somehow winds up in the bank accounts of bloated self-described do-gooders with political connections.

The Exempt Media covered for Eason Jordan for nine days. They've protected Air America for almost two weeks now.

UPDATE: If one does a search following the instructions of the NYT on "Martha Stewart" and "prison" using the Boolean + sign, it generates 270 matches. If "prison" is removed and just run on "Martha Stewart", it drops to 16. I'm using the latter number as more accurate. It still shows that the NYT finds Stewart so fascinating that they have to run a story on her every other day.