Dafydd: the Gentle Spear of Box 9

As part of Hugh Hewitt's quixotic quest to review the trillions of pages of infodump on John Roberts, I was assigned Box 9 -- the Barry Box. (Like the Captain, my assignment came not from Sir Hugh hughmself but from his scribe and factotum and all-around varlet, Duane the Radioblogger.)

This portion of Box 9 comprises a long and tedious negotiation between the D.C. Council and Mayor Marion Barry, jr. on the one side and Congress, the Justice Department, and the White House Counsel's office on the other over what was to be done about the District of Columbia Self Government and Governmental Reorganization Act of 1983 -- which Assistant Attorney General Robert A. McConnell injudiciously kept referring to as "the Home Rule Act," conjuring up visions of the British Raj finally ceding authority to its various colonies in Africa and Inja, don'tcha know. Rawther.

After the Act was enacted by Congress, the Supreme Court came along and voided "legislative veto" as unconstitutional. This was rather embarassing for Congress, as the Act was just full of it... of legislative veto, I mean. The five-part disharmony quadrille was meant to restructure the Act to avoid having Congress itself declared unconstitutional, or somesuch dire consequence. Compromises were thrown back and forth, and finally McConnell wrote draft letters to Mayor Barry and to the D.C. Council. (The task was to find some way, not involving legislative veto, for Congress to overrule any weird or cockamamie legislative acts by the District of Columbia.)

Enter Mr. Roberts (what's past is prologue). Roberts was assigned by his boss, White House Counsel Fred Fielding, to review McConnell's letter and the compromise offer for constitutionality and for its political implications to the White House.

Roberts consulted with the Office of Legal Counsel and agreed with them that the McConnell counter-counter-compromise was constitutional. He went on to advise that it was a considerably better compromise than the one just proposed by the D.C. Council... but he cautioned that the White House should steer clear of becoming too involved in the brouhaha; it was a matter for Justice, not the White House Counsel.

There is only one sentence in this entire box of memos that could be called remarkable; and the specific "remark" that it conjures into my mind is “at last, somebody on the Supreme Court who can write without drooling dependent clauses and hacking up whereases and citations!” Here is Roberts’ concluding sentence about the McConnell letters:

I will call the attorney at Justice handling this matter and suggest use of a more neutral sobriquet than "the Home Rule Act" in the Clarke and Rolark reply, and some stylistic changes to prevent the last sentence in the Clarke and Rolark letter, which also appears in the Barry letter, from reading as if it were an awkward translation from Bulgarian.

(For reference, the objectionable last sentence in the McConnell letter to which Roberts refers is: "It is the alternatives which our letter attempted to address and what our efforts should be directed toward." I’m glad Judge Roberts understands that sentence; perhaps someday he can explain it to me.)

And that is the box, the whole box, and nothing but the box. Well, actually not; there are ten other sections to Box 9. But having blazed the trail this far, it must fall to others to carry on from here. For there are many Box 9s in the vasty deep, and many bloggers to slog through each soggy box of docs.

Here endeth the lesson.

Air America: Brian Maloney On NARN

The Northern Alliance Radio Network will have Brian Maloney on later during the show. We'll be discussing the ongoing scandal at Air America and the coverage of it by Brian and Michelle Malkin. Catch it on our webstream at AM 1280 The Patriot, and join the conversation right now at 651-289-4488!

Able Danger Fox Trot II: What Was Said In October 2003?

Col. Tony Shaffer's appearance on Hannity and Colmes last night on Fox has people on all sides of the Able Danger thread scratching their heads. Initial news reports about this interview claim that Shaffer denied naming Atta to the Commission staffers in October 2003. However, it appears that Shaffer said he didn't discuss the names of any other hijackers except Atta, as that was the only name he could recall at the time. The transcript from the show has already been posted, and Shaffer tries to make this point clear (emphases mine):

COLMES: Lieutenant Colonel, explain to me, how is it they deny it? They also — staff members, like executive director Phil Zelikow, say, despite your statements, they were not told the names of these hijackers, as you claim?

SHAFFER: Well, I don't know how they can overlook that, because the fact is this: They were told not once but twice by a fellow officer, a Navy captain, later on in 2004.

In my October discussion with him, I did not discuss the names of the terrorists. I'm not saying that. I never said that. I did talk about the fact that we found three cells through the use of some advanced technology, two to three cells which conducted 9/11 attacks, to include Atta.

Now, that was the only name I remembered. You have to understand, I was in Afghanistan deployed. I didn't have my documents with me. I didn't have the background. So during this discussion, it was using some notes that I put together myself, based on my memory as talking points, and I discussed the fact that Able Danger was able to use data mining techniques, that were at the time cutting-edge, to merge out of this information data.

To say that Shaffer failed in his bid for clarity seems an understatement, but this does appear to say that he gave them Atta's name in October 2003. In a later exchange with Sean Hannity, Shaffer pointed out the inconsistencies from the Commission on the nature of their meetings:

HANNITY: So there's two big questions here. Question number one is, who stopped the investigation and this important information from getting to the proper authorities to investigate these guys, one?

And number two, the 9/11 Commission had known about this. And in the last week, they've given at least five or six different accounts that I can tell about what you had told them. Explain that.

SHAFFER: Well, on the account thing, I don't understand it, because I've reread, and read, and reread their 12 August account. Their paragraph describing my meeting with them is not even in the ballpark with what happened.

Again, I have talking points that I prepared before the meeting. I used those talking points to talk of. I talked about another human operation, as well as outlining and, in a time line fashion, the whole Able Danger story. And none of those points are even addressed in their statement.

So I don't understand how they could be, like, so far, you know, off what I told them, based on the fact that I do have my talking points from that meeting.

I think that the original Fox News press release on this interview mischaracterized the content, to Shaffer's detriment. Shaffer never said that he gave them all of the names, only Atta's. As I recall, that matches with what Weldon originally said as well. We need to wait on analyzing these interviews until the actual transcripts hit the web.

'Al-Qaeda Brought The Matches'

After getting the silly e-mail responses from Think Progress' readers, most of whom had failed to even read any CQ posts on the subject of Jamie Gorelick or the wall that discouraged any coordination between law enforcement and intelligence operations prior to the Patriot Act, I received a handful from former members of the intel community. One of the more comprehensive came from a CQ reader whom I will call Big Sea. (Anonymity, in this case, is my idea, not the source.)

Big Sea writes about his experiences in several intelligence agencies, which span from the Reagan era to post-9/11. It's long but a must read:

From 1984 until 2002, I worked as a contractor doing mainly threat assessment and projection for most of the USG intelligence services but primarily CIA, DIA, Air Force and ONI. I assert that the main point about the Wall is that it was not a memo or a directive -- it was a culture. There were many walls, throughout the Intelligence Community, as well as between the Intelligence Community and Law Enforcement. Most of these were of long standing and existed for good reasons -- security and protecting civil liberties. But under Clinton, all the walls got taller and new ones were added.

The reason for all this was that the Clinton Adminstration viewed the Intelligence Community much more as a source of potential embarrassment than as a trusted advisor. Lack of a defined national strategy based on a coherent foreign policy -- the "Holiday from History" as it's been called -- coupled with Clinton's personal animosity towards foreign policy in general and the Intelligence Community in particular devalued intelligence. Intelligence is not a magical function that produces answers for any questions posed to it at random, and it works poorly when used in that way. But that is exactly how Clinton used it, or more accurately, let his proxies use it. [Clinton did not even deign to receive the PDB for most of his tenure; Sandy Berger received it and passed along to his Boss whatever he -- Berger -- saw fit.]

Not believing there were critical national security issuses for which the support the Intelligence Community was vital; acutely concerned about the potential for scandals and political embarassements [as only so scandel-plagued an Adminisrtation could be], and having a strong personal distaste for the whole business, Clinton set out to reduce the risk that the Intelligence Community could do him harm by making it as difficult as possible for the Intelligence Community to do anything. He did this thru his appointments, seeing to it that political animals and risk-adverse adminstrators got key postions; by changing the rules by which intelligence could be collected -- for example, banning using people with crimnal associations or "human rights abusers" as HUMINT sources, which meant that no one in the Intelligence Community could talk to a disaffected terrorist; a huge blow that badly hurt our ability to keep tabs on terrorist organiszation after 1998 -- and by building walls.

To give you a concrete example of how far the "Wall" culture went, I offer the following personal anecdote:

In Oct 1999, my group, of which I was lead analyst, was given a task to evaluate threats from about 6-8 different countries. State-sponsored terrorism was one of the threats. In our proposal, we argued that evaluating state-sponsored terrorism without considering the actual terrorists organizations themselves made little sense. We knew this was a bit dicey because terrorists fell under the rubric of "non-state actors" who tended to be dealt with by different organizations than those who dealt with "state actors." The reason for this was that non-state actors [mainly terrorists, drug lords, and mafias] were seen as law-enforcement problems, to be dealt by the FBI, DEA, and such, while hostile states were obviously the concern of the State Dept, the CIA, DIA, and the other intelligence agencies. So terrorists fell in one camp, while the states that sponsored and supported them fell in a another. And of course those two camps were heavily constrained in how they could communicate and cooperate. But our customer, DIA, agreed with us and thought the "wall" issue could be dealt with, and so terrorists were added to the statement of work.

All such projects have a kickoff meeting where we and the customers go over the analysis plan in detail, discussing data issues, security issues, potential problems and limitations, and the scope of the conclusions we expect to be able to produce. Attending our kickoff meeting were us, the DIA team for whom we were doing the analysis, and a CIA rep acting a liaison. Everything went great until the topic of terrorists came up.

At once, the DIA guys explained that maybe they’d been too optimistic about the "wall" issue. Our tasking included suggestions for threat mitigation, and since that was clearly counter-terrorism in this case, that was right out. We can’t give any counter-terrorist advice, they flatly said. OK, we said, what about assessment?

That depends, they replied.

So we starting giving them examples of things we thought we might be able to say. No, we can’t say that, they would say, it still sounds too much like advice.

Well, what about this? we’d ask. Maybe not, they’d say, such-&-such organization vets those kind of conclusions; they’re the experts and we can’t step on their charter.

This went on for more than an hour and finally, somewhat exasperated, we asked them exactly what we could say; what type of conclusions we were allowed to draw. At this point, the DIA guys and CIA rep got together and basically gave us a dump on who in the government was doing what with respect to terrorism and what the rules of cooperation [or lack of it] were. At one point, they started talking about an organization we recognized as being in DIA. Wait a minute! we said, those guys are DIA! If they are working that, then we can say this and this and this!

"Yeah," the head DIA guy said, a bit sheepishly, "they are DIA, but they’re a different part of DIA and we can’t talk to them." [That's the only quote from the meeting where I recall actual words spoken.]

We blinked a few times, and then all consideration of terrorism was dropped from the task. But not before it was pointed out that we and DIA weren’t really counter-terrorism experts [although we were threat assessment experts], that the problem was probably being worked by so-&-so and such-&-such, and that they probably had better data, more experience, more resources than we did.

That is what Clinton and Gorelik's Wall culture did. It just didn't just prevent more effective cooperation and data sharing; it prevented the whole question of terrorism being addressed in a coherent fashion at all. No one was working the problem effectively, but I bet they all thought -- just like we were told – that someone else was. That’s the "I thought you brought the matches" school of intelligence analysis, and that was the end effect of Clinton's intelligence policy: it turned the whole process of intelligence into one big game of "Who brought the matches?"

And on 9/11 we found out who: Al Qaeda brought the matches.

In a nutshell, the Think Progress assertions on Gorelick suffer from the same problem as the Clinton Administration approach to intelligence work -- a slathering devotion to parsing the meaning of the myriad of rules and regulations and a failure to see their overall effects.

Air America: Stiffing The Talent (And The Union)

The third installment in the investigative blog series by Michelle Malkin and Brian Maloney covers the litigation arising from former host and programmer Lizz Winstead, the first of the 'talent' to join Air America well before its launch. Winstead also has the distinction of being the first host they fired after the Piquant fraudulent conveyance buyout. At the time it raised a few eyebrows; after all, the ratings for "Unfiltered" couldn't have been that much worse than the rest of the AAR lineup.

The counterclaims filed by Winstead and Piquant Media clear up quite a bit of the mytery, as Michelle and Brian point out:

On May 20, 2005, comedian Lizz Winstead filed suit in New York, detailing a laundry list of allegations against Air America Radio parent Piquant LLC.

Accusing the company of failing to pay wages, promotional fees, accrued holiday compensation and severance, Winstead is seeking $290,716, plus interest. ...

It seems clear Winstead was utilized in dual programming and on-air roles at Air America. Published reports from early 2004 listed her in both, here and here. Mediaweek noted she'd been programmer and host, in this blurb regarding her exit.

It's not known what was in her original employment agreement, or for which programming decisions Winstead may have been responsible (other than her own "Unfiltered"). One thing isn't in dispute: on May 24, 2004, she agreed to sign a release supplied by the company.

What exactly it was intended to cover is exceptionally confusing. Winstead believed it to be a release of monetary claims against Progress Media, so Piquant could take it over, without facing demands for unpaid compensation.

But wait a second-- Air America's party line is that Piquant merely purchased the assets of Progress Media, not its liabilities. Why the worries, then, about past claims being brought against the new company?

It gets much better than that. After the transfer to Piquant, AAR simply quit paying her on-air salary and stopped reporting her wages to AFTRA, the union that represents on-air talent. AAR only honored the management compensation (for program management) portion of the agreement, despite Winstead's continuing on-air performance. When Winstead woke up and sniffed the java, AAR terminated her and reassigned her two on-air hosts to other duties.

To no one's surprise, Winstead sued, claiming back wages. Incredibly, AAR responded by saying that Winstead never served in a management capacity, even though they had stopped paying her on-air talent fees. Michelle and Brian have the court filings that either enraged or amused Winstead to no end. Read through the entire installment.

But here's one macro political point that Michelle and Brian missed, understandably so given their highly detailed investigation into Air America's scandalous conduct. Their sponsors, especially in the Twin Cities market, tend to heavily represent labor unions. Unions flock to the populist/liberal messengers in order to bolster their organizing efforts and push their members to listen to AAR to underscore their own political messages. With Winstead's lawsuit showing that AAR shafted a major union on dues by refusing to compensate on-air talent, how long will those unions stick by AAR? And if AAR's response to Winstead's lawsuit claims she never worked in management, how exactly do they explain to AFTRA their failure to report her compensation?

It looks to me like Sheldon and Anita Drobny and the rest of the far-left management at Piquant love labor unions as long as they keep their questionable businesses afloat. When it comes to partnering with labor, as AAR hosts demand from places like Wal-Mart and other corporate entities, the Drobnys and other Piquant owners have granted themselves a huge, hypocritical exception.

Pull up a chair and pass the popcorn, folks. This is really getting good now.

The Coming Smear In Box 31?

As part of the Hugh Hewitt effort to review the papers of John Roberts from the Reagan Library, Radioblogger assigned me Box 31 - Laws of War. Hugh and Duane sent me the PDF file for this set of records containing the thoughts and opinions of John Roberts on this topic during the Reagan administration, looking for potential issues that might come up in Roberts' confirmation.

At first glance, the file appeared to have little substance in it at all. Most of the records consisted of lists of meeting attendees and cover sheets. Only one memo contained anything of note -- but considering the current war on terror, I predict that this one file may well wind up getting twisted into an argument against Roberts.

On May 8, 1985, John Roberts prepared a memo for Richard Hauser for a response to a NATO request about US intentions for proposed changes to the Geneva Conventions. The proposal, called the 1977 Protocols, had not yet been ratified by any of the major powers, and NATO was due to meet to discuss what action should be taken. Not surprisingly, most NATO members wanted to see what the US would do, especially since the Reagan administration had failed thus far to complete a nuclear-arms agreement with the Soviets. The memo from Roberts points out that the Joint Chiefs had objected to Paragraph 4 of the 1977 Protocols:

The main objection is found in paragraph four: the Protocols would treat many terrorist organizations as if they were countries engaged in war, legitimizing their activities and offering them protections and courtesies that should not be extended to common criminals.

I have no objections.

A subsequent memo, dated July 22, 1985 to Fred Fielding, reviewed the May 1985 memo on the subject and Roberts' lack of objection to the Joint Chiefs' opposition to the Protocols. Roberts told Fielding that the State Dept. wanted the Protocols ratified to show that the Reagan administration took a less unilateral approach to foreign policy.

Does that sound familiar at all?

This represented an important stance for the United States, although its impact would not come into play for another sixteen years. The Joint Chiefs wanted to ensure that terrorist groups didn't get treated as "nations at war", a ruling that undoubtedly would get applied to groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah, if not al-Qaeda itself. At the time, however, the Reagan administration came under fire for its intransigence in rejecting the protocols. Most of the criticism came from those who never read the Protocols and just bought into the hype that the new proposals actually fought terrorism. However, the language in Article I, paragraph 4, makes it clear that the entire meaning of "lawful combatant" would have disappeared for all practical purposes:

The situations referred to in the preceding paragraph include armed conflicts in which peoples are fighting against colonial domination and alien occupation and against racist regimes in the exercise of their right of self-determination, as enshrined in the Charter of the United Nations and the Declaration on Principles of International Law concerning Friendly Relations and Co-operation among States in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations.

This distinction has come into play in the current debate over the Global War on Terror, especially regarding American detention facilities at Gitmo and elsewhere. The Senate Democrats will not fail to seize upon Roberts' memo as proof of his conservatism, both in supporting a unilateral approach to international law and the legal structure that allows the US to detain terrorists outside the Geneva Convention. That has already arisen in the days after the nomination, when Democrats pointed out that Roberts supported the Gitmo detentions as part of a unanimous DC appellate court decision on the Hamdan case.

Of course, they will not succeed with these memos. The May 1985 memo only stated that Roberts had no legal objections to declining the ratification. Roberts just pointed out that Defense would apparently prevail over State once their decision became final. The second memo, which outlines the objections of Defense to ratification in more detail, just recaps the May memo and notes that a decision had been made. The information got leaked to the New York Times, and Roberts expected that to mean that Defense had finally reached its decision. Neither memo really expressed any personal agreement or disagreement with Defense on their rejection of the Protocols.

Expect the Democrats to avoid such fine distinctions. They will not miss this opportunity to criticize both Roberts and the Gitmo detentions.

Dafydd: She Does Not Speak For Them

Please note: this post is by Dafydd ab Hugh, not by Captain Ed. I speak only for myself, as we all should; I don't know how the Captain feels about this. Just bear it in mind.

Whenever anyone has the temerity to object to anything Cindy Sheehan says, no matter how objectively bizarre, unAmerican, and repugnant it may be, the usual suspects jump on chairs, pull up their skirts, and howl that criticism of any kind against Mrs. Sheehan is forbidden unless you, too, have lost a child in the Iraq War. This is one of the weasel clauses (number four, in fact) noted by Tom Bevan over on Real Clear Politics that are used to stifle opposition to the Left's opposition.

(The actual permalink is here; but at the moment, you get a server error. It's the top item in the regular Commentary page, but eventually, you should use the permalink. When they get around to fixing it. Whenever that is.)

Get ready for a shock: it turns out there actually are other grieving parents whose children made the ultimate sacrifice for our country and were every bit as heroic as Casey Sheehan. And many of these other voices do not share Cindy Sheehan's hatred for the country her son loved so much. In a poignant and moving piece published in the Wall Street Journal, She Does Not Speak for Me, Ronald R. Griffin, himself just such a parent of an American hero of the Iraq War, speaks for himself; and he also allows other mothers, fathers, and wives to speak with their own voices, not Cindy Sheehan's, about their own sons and daughters -- what they believed in, and what they ultimately laid down their lives to defend.

I cannot fully understand Cindy Sheehan's pain, and I do not pretend to be able to do so. But these parents understand exactly, having suffered the same staggering blow. And their own courage under what must be the most horrible thing a parent could ever have to do, to bury his child, is as awe-inspiring as the sacrifice of the soldiers themselves.

I think the soldiers, sailors, aviators, and Marines would be the very first to point out that sometimes, dying is the easy part; it can be infinitely harder to have to go on living without someone you loved from long before he was born, one you expected to outlive you by decades.

But all of these surviving parents agree that the first thing, the very first thing they must do to make some peace with a grief that will be eternal is to honor the very ideals for which their children willingly risked death: honor, duty, justice, and above all else, freedom -- the freedom that America, more than any other nation, has represented for over two hundred years.

There really are things worth fighting for; and some ideas and ideals are even worth dying for. Anyone who does not understand this, whether through grief-induced amnesia or because he never knew it in the first place, has lost far more than a child.

Prayers For Harry Reid

CQ will add the Senate Minority Leader, Harry Reid (D-NV), to our prayer list this evening. The Democratic caucus leader suffered a transient ischemic attack (TIA), a type of mini-stroke which usually leaves no permanent damage:

The Senate Democratic leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, suffered a brief mini-stroke Tuesday but suffered no complications and feels fine, aides said Friday.

The 65-year-old minority leader, one of the Democratic party's most visible national leaders, was examined by doctors and now feels fine, his press secretary Tessa Hafen said.

"There are no complications or any restrictions on his activities. He has undergone evaluations this week, and his doctors have recommended that he take advantage of the summer congressional recess for some downtime," Hafen said.

All partisan politics aside, I understand what Senator Reid's family must be feeling tonight. A week before the First Mate's kidney transplant, she suffered a TIA -- actually, a short series of them -- and wound up hospitalized for a couple of days for observation. We went to Toys 'R Us to shop for the Little Admiral's second birthday party when it first happened. The left side of her face would not respond and she had slurred speech for quite a while. Luckily for us, the hospital was right around the corner. I have gone through a number of medical emergencies with the First Mate, but that was one of the most frightening.

I'm glad to hear that Senator Reid has been released by his doctors to go home. Most people who experience a TIA have no further complications, and of course we hope and pray that Senator Reid will be among that group. His overall excellent health will probably boost the chances for that. (For those wishing to find out more about TIAs, this site has good information for the layman.)

Another AP Smear On Roberts

The AP attempts to assist the Left in their next big smear against John Roberts as a male chauvinist pig. It started this morning with the Washington Post's ridiculous "analysis" of Roberts' record of commentary on comparable worth, a long-discredited line of thought that the Post misrepresented as "a curb on workplace discrimination against women" when in fact it does nothing to change hiring practices, but instead puts government in charge of setting wages. Now Hope Yen has found another snippet out of a Roberts memo that they will claim attacks Sandra Day O'Connor, who Democratic Senators recently discovered as an unrecognized saint of modern jurisprudence:

As a lawyer in the Reagan White House, John Roberts scoffed at the notion of elevating Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor to chief justice as a way to close a political gender gap, calling it a "crass political consideration." ...

"Many of the documents made it clear that as a junior official in the Reagan administration, he was part of an intense effort to impede progress on numerous key issues, such as progress on equal rights for women," said Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., a member of the Judiciary Committee that will consider Roberts' nomination.

Added Sen. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J.: "The question before the Senate is whether this is the person who should replace the first female justice of the Supreme Court."

The AP supplies the needed context later in the article. John Sheehan had suggested to Ronald Reagan that he start packing the Supreme Court with women as a way to close the "gender gap" for the 1984 election. The plan, which sounds more than a little far-fetched now, had Reagan giving Chief Justice William Rehnquist an ambasadorial position, nominating another woman to the Supreme Court, and making O'Connor the new Chief Justice.

Bear in mind that Reagan had already broken the gender barrier on the Court, and had received little credit for that among the feminist class. Also consider the likelihood that Rehnquist would give up the lifetime appointment to the Court for at best four years as an ambassador (and just months, if Reagan lost the election). The transparency of such a ridiculous arrangement would readily demonstrate its true purpose, which is why Roberts wrote the following:

"The president would elevate Justice O'Connor two weeks later, and then name yet another woman to succeed O'Connor two weeks after that. Presto! The gender gap vanishes," Roberts wrote.

"Any appointments the president may make to the Supreme Court will not be based on such crass political considerations," Roberts advised in a memo to his boss, Fred Fielding.

The AP fails to make clear in its lead, and especially in its headline ("Roberts Scoffed at Promotion for O'Connor"), that Roberts didn't object to promoting O'Connor, but that he objected to such a clumsy, self-defeating, and ludicrous proposal. In fact, Roberts earlier had worked with O'Connor to prepare her for her confirmation process in the Senate. He gives no indication that he has anything but respect for her and her work.

This article follows the earlier smear attempt by the AP to paint Roberts as a bigot because where he lived as a boy. It shows the depths to which his opposition must plumb in order to gin up any kind of momentum for their ill-chosen attack on his integrity. The AP has made it painfully clear that they have tossed objectivity to the winds regarding Roberts.

Dafydd: Jamie Gorelick's Other Job (Update From Captain Ed)

A commenter, vnjagvet (does that stand for Vietnam JAG veteran?), on my previous post, Dafydd: An Atta By Any Other Name, discovered a very interesting and provacative connection between the Department of Justice and the Department of Defense (under the Clinton administration) that may have a very strong bearing on the Able Danger scandal.

As noted earlier by many, many people, Jamie Gorelick, who was deputy attorney general (number two in the department) under Janet Reno, is widely credited, if that's the word I want, with explicating the wall of separation between intelligence and criminal investigations in a 1995 memo to FBI Director Louis Freeh and U.S. Attorney Mary Jo White. From the Wall Street Journal's OpinionJournal.com, Gorelick's Wall: (paid subscription probably required)

At issue is the pre-Patriot Act "wall" that prevented communication between intelligence agents and criminal investigators--a wall, Mr. Ashcroft said, that meant "the old national intelligence system in place on September 11 was destined to fail...."

What's more, Mr. Ashcroft noted, the wall did not mysteriously arise: "Someone built this wall." That someone was largely the Democrats, who enshrined Vietnam-era paranoia about alleged FBI domestic spying abuses by enacting the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).

Mr. Ashcroft pointed out that the wall was raised even higher in the mid-1990s, in the midst of what was then one of the most important antiterror investigations in American history--into the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. On Tuesday the Attorney General declassified and read from a March 4, 1995, memo in which Jamie Gorelick--then Deputy Attorney General and now 9/11 Commissioner--instructed then-FBI Director Louis Freeh and United States Attorney Mary Jo White that for the sake of "appearances" they would be required to adhere to an interpretation of the wall far stricter than the law required....

The memo is a clear indication that there was pressure then for more intelligence sharing. Ms. Gorelick's response is an unequivocal "no":

"We believe that it is prudent to establish a set of instructions that will more clearly separate the counterintelligence investigation from the more limited, but continued, criminal investigations. These procedures, which go beyond what is legally required, will prevent any risk of creating an unwarranted appearance that FISA is being used to avoid procedural safeguards which would apply in a criminal investigation" (emphases added).

In case anyone was in doubt, Janet Reno herself affirmed the policy several months later in a July 19, 1995, memo that we have unearthed. In it, the then-Attorney General instructs all U.S. Attorneys about avoiding "the appearance" of overlap between intelligence-related activities and law-enforcement operations.

Gorelick's Wall has been blamed by many for the refusal to allow the data-mining Pentagon unit Able Danger to alert the FBI to the existence of an al-Qaeda cell operating in Brooklyn in August 2000... a cell that contained a certain person-of-interest named Mohammed Atta, along with three other eventual 9/11 hijackers. Many, including myself, have speculated that if that warning had been given, and if the FBI had taken it seriously and investigated, they might have broken up the cell a year before 9/11 -- and the attack might never have happened.

Jamie Gorelick has gotten a lot of blocking from her fellow 9/11-Commission teammates. Former Sen. Slade Gorton, for example, made the point, during his appearance on Michael Medved's radio show Wednesday, that the decision not to allow Able Danger to alert the FBI was not made by the Justice Department, where Gorelick then worked, but by "DoD lawyers." This has been taken as strong evidence exonerating Gorelick from any responsibility for this ghastly and foolish decision.

Enter vnjagvet. He first alerted me to a fascinating connection, which can be found on the 9/11 Commission's Website:

Prior to joining Fannie Mae in May 1997, Gorelick was deputy attorney general of the United States, a position she assumed in March 1994. From May 1993 until she joined the Justice Department, Gorelick served as general counsel of the Department of Defense.

As general counsel to the DoD, Gorelick was the top lawyer in the department (the position requires Senate confirmation). Recall that Janet Reno, Gorelick's soon-to-be boss, was attorney general during this entire time, and that Gorelick herself was the protege of none other than Hillary Clinton.

Warning, Speculation Alert!

It does not require very much imagination to suppose that Janet Reno had similar ideas about the required separation of intelligence and criminal investigation in 1994 as she did in 1995... hence, it is not much of a stretch at all to conclude that Jamie Gorelick would likely have the same attitude -- for career viability, if for no other reason. (And it seems logical that if she did not, she would not have been picked for such a political, mission-critical job as deputy attorney general less than a year later.)

So if, in fact, while Gorelick served as the top lawyer in the Pentagon, she had the same attitude towards sharing data between the intelligence and criminal divisions as she did a couple of years later, she would certainly have made crystal clear to her subordinates, the DoD lawyers, "which way the wind blows."

Then, after a scant ten months, she is given a huge promotion; and she quickly puts out an official memo reinforcing Gorelick's Wall... a memo swiftly reaffirmed by the AG in her own memo four months later. I believe the lawyers in the Department of Defense could be excused for believing that Gorelick's Wall was still very much in effect, even six years after she herself had moved on, first to Justice, then Fannie Mae. After all, Janet Reno was still attorney general; and Bill Clinton was still president.

So the Gorton defense of Gorelick starts to look mighty slim. It seems very likely (to me, at least) that Gorelick was just as responsible for erecting an informal wall among the DoD lawyers as she was for erecting a formal, written wall of separation at the Department of Justice a couple of years later.

And that puts her right back squarely in the responsibility crosshairs of the Able Danger scandal. Jamie Gorelick needs to be called as a sworn witness before any Congressional inquiry into the recent revelations about the 9/11 attack: the American people need to know what wall she erected -- and when she first erected it.

UPDATE FROM ED AND BUMP: I'm getting plenty of e-mail based on the releases at Media Matters and Think Progress about how the Gorelick memo only applied to the Department of Justice and not the Department of Defense. That's true as far as it goes, but the critics who have called on CQ to retract our statements of Gorelick's responsibility miss one important point: the Gorelick memo restricted the FBI from using intelligence data in domestic law-enforcement just as much as it prohibited it from sharing law-enforcement data with intelligence services. The wall runs in both directions, and the Army obviously does not have a law-enforcement agency with which to share Able Danger or any other intelligence information. Either it would go to the FBI or nowhere at all, and as Gorelick and Reno made clear, the FBI could not coordinate with intelligence services, inside or outside the DoJ. If one reads the 9/11 Commission's own report, as I noted yesterday, that's certainly how Gorelick's wall was understood by the FBI agents themselves.

Not only that, but as Dafydd alludes above [and as CQ readers Robert Crawford, vnjagvet and Barnestormer discussed in comments on another thread earlier today], Gorelick represented offical White House policy at both the DoD and DoJ. Those standards which she implemented would have been clearly understood as administration policy -- an administration that had communicated its mistrust of intelligence services in the past. Her role as a political appointee in both departments would make that crystal clear to the attorneys who had to decide whether to move forward with coordination. And the message that the Clinton White House clearly sent to all law-enforcement and intelligence services was that compliance with the law was insufficient; they wanted to avoid the least appearance of impropriety, at the expense of national security.

As Dafydd says, the issue should have been thoroughly investigated by the Commission, and Gorelick should have been a witness and not a panel member. The policy belonged to the Clinton Administration, but she was the instrument by which it was implemented.

UPDATE II: Here's the only relevant reference to this in the Commission report:

In July 1995, Attorney General Reno issued formal procedures aimed at managing information sharing between Justice Department prosecutors and the FBI.They were developed in a working group led by the Justice Department’s Executive Office of National Security, overseen by Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick.33 These procedures—while requiring the sharing of intelligence information with prosecutors—regulated the manner in which such information could be shared from the intelligence side of the house to the criminal side.

These procedures were almost immediately misunderstood and misapplied. As a result, there was far less information sharing and coordination between the FBI and the Criminal Division in practice than was allowed under the department’s procedures. Over time the procedures came to be referred to as “the wall.”

So what did the Clinton administration and Jamie Gorelick do to fix the problem? The report remains silent on this, as does Jamie S. Gorelick. She should have testified in the public hearings on the steps taken to identify the effects of the Clinton policy of hypersensitivity and to correct them. Instead, she hid out on the panel, and the report gives no mention whatsoever after page 79 about Gorelick until the footnotes.

Air America: The Sun Rises To The Occasion

I received this e-mail earlier today from Maggie Shnayerson, the communications manager for the New York Sun -- the one newspaper in the Empire State (or almost anywhere else) that has devoted a reporter to ongoing news coverage of the Air America financial scandal:

Hi Ed,

Because of the high demand for access to the Sun’s Air America stories, we have decided to put together a special web page containing the entire series. I have included a free link to the site created for you and your readers. Enjoy!

http://www.nysun.com/airamerica.php

Best,

Maggie Shnayerson
Communications Manager
The New York Sun

Now you can follow their excellent Air America coverage for free -- and perhaps that might convince you to subscribe, as I do, to their on-line newspaper. Ira Stoll and the rest of the Sun's team puts together an excellent weekday newspaper that features some of the best and most fearless reporting in the country. It also manages to scoop the Goliath-sized Times on many occasions.

Speaking of the Times, RightWingDuck at IMAO has the Top Ten Reasons that the Times has not covered the Air America scandal. My favorites were #10 and #3. Be sure to check out the whole list!

9/11 Updates: Able Danger And A New Memo

The full-court press continued on discovering why the Able Danger project did not get any attention or mention from the 9/11 Commission, and the State Department has discovered another memo that the Commission overlooked. Fox News reports that the Senate will consider open hearings on Able Danger as Col. Tony Shaffer traveled to Capitol Hill today to brief their staffers on what he knew about the project:

The military intelligence official who first spoke publicly about Able Danger, the pre-Sept. 11 task force looking for terror threats to the United States, went to Capitol Hill Thursday to brief staffers who work for Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

A congressional source told FOX News that hearings could be in the cards this fall over Able Danger's findings and its omission from the Sept. 11 commission's report issued last year. Neither Specter's office nor Lt. Col. Tony Shaffer, who made the explosive allegations, would confirm a plan for hearings.

In the meantime, Commission members still attempt to shift blame for their lack of investigation into Able Danger despite hearing about it from two sources. Thomas Kean and Tim Roemer both point to the Pentagon for not supplying them with documentation, and Roemer also insinuates that they didn't take either source seriously because neither brought their own documentation of the hypersensitive program along with them:

"The files are in the possession of the Defense Department, so really nobody else besides the administration can get to the bottom of it ... if there exists a file on Able Danger," said Chairman Tom Kean. ...

"If Atta's name is mentioned, you send off a host of fire alarms, neon lights, people's hair gets on fire and you're going to find out what that's all about. But you also need evidence, you can't just say here's my recollection of something I thought I saw in a notebook. You've got to say, 'Here is the chart,'" Roemer said.

Having heard this from two separate sources, one would expect that the Commission would insist on getting the data from the Pentagon themselves. When people call in tips to investigators on criminal cases, do police refuse to follow up because they didn't provide video and fingerprint evidence when they called? Kean says that the Commission requested the data three times from the Pentagon and didn't get the documentation they wanted, but that statement should be evaluated in light of the initial denial from Kean and Hamilton last week of any knowledge of Able Danger's existence at all. Also, given the highly partisan nature of the public hearings in the spring of 2004 (and the presidential election), I don't recall any Commissioner that was too shy to say that the administration tried to withhold key information from the panel. In fact, panel members made that allegation repeatedly, especially in demanding public testimony from Donald Rumsfeld and Condoleezza Rice.

If the Pentagon had been that difficult about delivering documentation at the time, believe me, we would have heard about it.

The State Department also takes center stage again with a new memo showing that the Clinton Administration tried to bargain with the Taliban for Osama bin Laden's expulsion, promising a "different kind of relationship," insinuating diplomatic recognition:

A year before the Sept. 11 attacks, a U.S. diplomat assured a top official of Afghanistan's ruling Taliban regime that international sanctions on that country would be lifted if it expelled Osama bin Laden, newly declassified documents show. ...

"The ambassador added that the U.S. was not against the Taliban, per se," and "was not out to destroy the Taliban," Ambassador William B. Milam wrote in the secret cable to Washington. Milam told the Taliban official, whose name is excised from the declassified document, that bin Laden was the main impediment to better relations between the Taliban and the United States.

"If the U.S. and the Taliban could get past bin Laden, we would have a different kind of relationship," Milam said he told the official.

At the time, Washington had no formal diplomatic relations with Afghanistan because concerns over human rights and other abuses by the militant Islamist Taliban regime.

Due to its oppressive regime and diplomatic incompetence, the Taliban actually had recognition from three nations at the time, all Islamic countries, notably Pakistan. The US opposed the Taliban on a number of criteria -- human-rights abuses, tyranny, and support for terrorism being among them. An offer that implied diplomatic recognition would have been considered extraordinary and may have created a huge headache for the Clinton administration, but could have disrupted 9/11 had it been successful.

Of course, once again the 9/11 Commission's final report makes no mention of this overture. I wonder what we will find tomorrow that the Commission overlooked.

UPDATE: Tom Maguire keeps up with today's developments. Like him, I find the time-based arguments against the Able Danger information rather weak. I also think that the Pentagon's delayed response has more to do with an upcoming admission that they can't find any of the relevant documentation now -- just a hunch.

Dogs And Cats, Living Together

A news report on John Roberts and an editorial by Ted Kennedy in today's Washington Post has Bench Memos rightly up in arms today. Both breathlessly use general language and out-of-context snippets to paint Roberts as a women-hostile idealogue who would repeal the 19th Amendment if the Court had the power to do so. In fact, Kennedy's essay relies so much on generic assertions of his own opinion as fact that its incoherence renders it almost moot, even without the Bench Memos rebuttals:

Specifically, and contrary to the intent of overwhelming majorities in both the House and the Senate, it appears that Roberts proposed a very narrow and crabbed interpretation of the Voting Rights Act that would essentially eviscerate the meaning of that law. Fortunately, his view did not prevail. But if a nominee to the Supreme Court believes in such a strained and narrow interpretation of such a fundamental right, then I believe he is not qualified to serve in that important position. The information we have requested from the administration would give us a more in-depth understanding of Roberts's views on this key civil rights issue, and we are entitled to it.

Well, speaking of specifically, Kennedy never specifies the case on which he bases this supposed evisceration, nor does he provide Roberts' arguments, let alone any context at all about the situation. This makes it rather difficult to debate or rebut Kennedy, almost surely a purposeful strategy. Kennedy's rhetoric, in fact, sounds almost exactly like that he employed in his notorious hack job on Robert Bork.

Amy Goldstein, Jeffrey Smith, and Jo Becker get more specific -- and at the same time, less intellectually honest. After accusing Roberts of repeatedly trying to oppose womens' rights during the Reagan administration, it turns out that their major complaint consists of his argument against "comparable worth", a particularly stupid concept that grew out of the Equal Rights Amendment movement:

In internal memos, Roberts urged President Ronald Reagan to refrain from embracing any form of the proposed Equal Rights Amendment pending in Congress; he concluded that some state initiatives to curb workplace discrimination against women relied on legal tools that were "highly objectionable"; and he said that a controversial legal theory then in vogue -- of directing employers to pay women the same as men for jobs of "comparable worth" -- was "staggeringly pernicious" and "anti-capitalist."

Comparable-worth proposals did not mean equal pay for equal positions between men and women (considering seniority), something that Congress had already begun to mandate through federal legislation in the 1970s as part of its EEO regulations. Proponents of comparable worth wanted jobs, especially those with traditional gender gaps, to require arbitrary analysis to equalize pay. Nurses, for instance, should make as much as doctors, so the argument went, and teachers should make as much as lawyers.

It sounds nice, until the first obvious question enters your head: who determines this "comparable worth"? Why, the government does, silly! This notion that government should set wages rather than the marketplace itself has other names: socialism, communism, and others. It would have done the opposite of what the feminists wanted anyway; it would have perpetuated the gender gaps by removing the market incentives favoring the higher-priced jobs.

Roberts took the correct position in the 1980s, as history has shown. The comparable-worth issue died a well-deserved natural death as the decade wore on and more women entered male-dominated industries without the government mandating quotas and wages. Not even the Clintons thought comparable-worth policies to have any value. Now the Post wants to pillory Roberts for getting both the legalities and the politics of comparable-worth correct.

For once, the New York Times runs a more sane, less inflammatory look at Roberts from the exact same material. Todd Purdum and John Broder give a more measured analysis and determine that while Roberts obviously has his conservative point of view, he advised caution and restraint to the Reagan administration on a number of issues:

As a young lawyer in the Reagan White House, it was John G. Roberts Jr. who often found himself urging caution on his elders - including the president himself - in an effort to shield them from not only legal errors but also political blunders and public relations missteps, great and small.

Newly released documents from the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library reflect Mr. Roberts's repeated efforts to protect Mr. Reagan and his aides and supporters from some of their own most zealous instincts. He warned against excessive public presidential support for the Nicaraguan contra rebels. In 1984, he wrote a somewhat defensive note to his boss, the White House counsel Fred F. Fielding, arguing that it was all right for a presidential letter on minority business enterprise to speak of "encouraging government procurements," adding, "I do not think 'encourage' connotes anything in the nature of a set-aside or quota."

In 1984, Mr. Roberts objected to the proposed draft of a presidential campaign speech that would have had Mr. Reagan refer to the United States as "the greatest nation God ever created." Mr. Roberts wrote, "According to Genesis, God creates things like heavens and the earth and the birds and the fishes, but not nations." He added that the phrase was "a likely candidate for the 'Reaganism of the Week.' "

Like the thousands of pages of documents already released, the new files opened by the National Archives on Thursday show Mr. Roberts to be a faithful foot soldier in the conservative revolution that Ronald Reagan brought to Washington, embracing and echoing the administration's opposition to liberal programs like affirmative action and a controversial remedy for employment discrimination against women known as "comparable worth." But they also reflect his unwavering penchant for caution - and precision - in language and thought. He corrected misuses of the words "which" and "that" in draft White House documents. And in reviewing a proposed economic message in 1986 in which Mr. Reagan was to say, "I just turned 75 today, but remember that's only 30 Celsius," Mr. Roberts noted that 75 Fahrenheit is actually 23.9 Celsius.

The portrait that emerges from the Times analysis differs greatly than that of the Post's. It's almost enough to make one believe that Bill Keller may have been serious about changing the partisan tone of the Gray Lady earlier this year. Is that a sign of the pending Apocalypse?

Abdullah Sees Elections In Saudi Arabia In Next Decade

The Washington Times reports that King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia wants to work towards tranforming the desert kingdom from an absolute monarchy to an elected, representative government over the next ten to fifteen years. Abdullah, whose mildly pro-Western stewardship over the last ten years of his brother's reign turned serious after the Riyadh bombings of May 2003, hals already authorized municipal elections and has pardoned constitutionalists that his brother had held as political prisoners:

Saudi King Abdullah promised Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice a series of reforms that could give the desert kingdom an elected government within 10 to 15 years, says a senior U.S. official who was present when the two met in June.

"He professed to transform his country and talked about having a representative government within a decade or a decade and a half," said the official, who asked not to be named.

The 82-year-old king made the pledge during a June 20 visit by Miss Rice to the capital, Riyadh, when he was still crown prince and the kingdom's de facto ruler.

It is thought to be the first time a Saudi ruler has attached a timeline to moving toward a democratic process.

While this move makes sense for any number of reasons, it is far from clear that Abdullah could deliver on the promise. For one thing, he's in his eighties already. He likely will only sit on the throne for a few years, and the crown prince who will succeed him is only a few years younger than Abdullah. Oil revenue will present almost as large of a problem. The bin Abdul-Aziz royal family collects billions, and even with the hundreds of people in the family over which that revenue must spread, it makes for powerful incentive to hang onto power. Abdullah and Crown Prince Sultan need to tailor the succession carefully if they want to ensure the development of a constitutional monarchy along the lines of Britain or the Netherlands.

The benefits should be self-evident. The Saudis now recognize that they have a self-inflicted problem with radical Islamists. Fahd tried to suck up to the terrorists in the 1980s, but all that did was encourage them to demand more from the Saudi royal family in their attempts to turn the already-conservative Wahhabist tyranny into a Taliban-style horror. Clearly, the anti-Western rhetoric that the royal family used to defuse anger against the Saudi government made their problems worse, not better -- and they need a new strategy for the future if they want to prevent a coup which will completely cut them off from the oil resources which make them incredibly wealthy.

Abdullah will have to go slow in order to keep the process from running away and exposing the bin Abdul-Aziz dynasty to danger. Unfortunately, in almost all democratizations, the situation reaches a tipping point where the people take control regardless of the best planning possible. In Lebanon and Ukraine, it meant little violence and withdrawal with some honor for the eventual losers of democratization. In Romania, it resulted in a much different outcome for the Ceaucescus. Abdullah and Sultan need to start building bridges between democracy advocates and the rest of their family to ensure an outcome more like the former than the latter.

Terrorist Attack On US Navy Misses Target

Terrorists launched a missile attack on American Navy amphibious craft from the 5th Fleet, but missed and hit a warehouse instead, killing at least one Jordanian:

Unknown assailants fired at least three missiles from Jordan early Friday, with one narrowly missing a U.S. Navy ship docked at port, an attack that killed a Jordanian soldier. One missile fell close to an airport in neighboring Israel, officials said.

The U.S. Navy's 5th Fleet, based in Bahrain, said two American amphibious ships were docked in Aqaba when a mortar was fired toward them. The vessels later sailed out of port as a result of the attacks, U.S. Navy spokesman Lt. Cdr. Charlie Brown told The Associated Press in Bahrain.

Jordanian soldier Ahmed Jamal Saleh was fatally wounded when the mortar sailed over one of the U.S. ships and slammed into a warehouse, a Jordanian security official said on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media.

The soldier died in the ambulance taking him to hospital; another Jordanian was also wounded, the official added.

The rocket attacks came from residential slums around Aqaba, Jordanian officials say. This demonstrates a change in tactics for al-Qaeda terrorists in the five years since the attack on the USS Cole in Yemen, assuming for the moment that AQ carried out this attack; Hamas and Hezbollah likely would prefer to avoid taking on the US directly for the moment. Five years ago, AQ used suicide bombers to deliver a powerful bomb point-blank to the ship. It hit the target, killing seventeen sailors. This attack used Katyusha rockets, a more crude and ineffective tactical weapon that rarely hits its targets, as demonstrated by this attack.

What does that mean? It could indicate that the terrorist network has depleted its resources for suicide bombers, at least outside of Iraq. That would show that the flypaper theory actually does play out as the Bush administration predicted, and that rather than generating thousands more martyrs to the cause of radical Islam, Iraq simply draws those foreign terrorists who would otherwise attack American interests elsewhere. This ineffective Katyusha attack also shows that the training and materials used by AQ have degraded significantly, or possibly that because of the lack of other resources (human and materiel), they have had to change tactics to the Palestinian-style rocket attacks and have not had the time to master it, to the extent it can be mastered.

All of these scenarios add up to a serious loss in command and control functions, as this attack had no particular planning and the terrorists obviously had little expertise in the use of the materials. It also indicates that suicide attacks may play less of a role in the future for AQ, meaning that their recruitment may not be anywhere near as robust as American pessimists and radical Islamists declare it to be. Iraq may have worn down the flow and the desire of postential suicide bombers, the only tactical weapon AQ has with an advantage over Western forces. If so, then AQ and its associates will shortly have to pull back and rethink their entire war effort.

Air America: The Bill Gets Bigger As We Speak

David Lombino continues his coverage of the Air America financial scandal, advancing the story in parallel to the extraordinary efforts of Michelle Malkin and Brian Maloney. Lombino reports in today's New York Sun that Piquant Media's bill from Multicultural Radio far exceeds the $225K described in the investigative report by the bloggers, and in fact now exceeds a million dollars:

An attorney whose client is suing the Air America radio network said yesterday that the May litigation is part of a larger attempt by the client, an owner of radio stations, to collect more than $1.5 million it says it is owed. ...

The lawsuit filed by MultiCultural in May charges that the transfer of ownership of Air America to Piquant LLC from Progress Media in May 2004 was illegal and was intended only to maintain the network's assets while abandoning its creditors.

"It's called a fraudulent conveyance - same people, same assets, they are just trying to avoid their liabilities," Mr. Mastro said yesterday. "A company that has debts can't just change its name, assume all the assets, and refuse to pay its liabilities. ... The same individuals who contacted us and described themselves as Piquant were also part of the management and ownership of Air America."

That matches the description of the Progress Media-Piquant Media "sale" given by other attorneys, including that of frequent CQ analyst Eric Costello. Costello gave Malkin and Maloney a detailed and comprehensive review of the documents in the blog report which defy easy summarization and excerpting; Michelle posted the entire review at her site.

This story actually hails back to April 14, 2004, when Matt Drudge first reported that Air America had itself locked out of its offices in Los Angeles and Chicago. At the time, Multicultural Radio made it clear that AAR owed them over a million dollars in airtime fees, a claim which AAR hotly denied:

MultiCultural Radio Broadcasting's conduct in this matter has been disgraceful. To shut off a broadcast that listeners rely on without warning and in the middle of discussions is the height of irresponsibility and a slap in the face of the media industry. In addition, it is a clear violation of their contractual obligations, and we are seeking legal remedies against them in court.

In the past two days, what we have seen are the aftershocks of the two different but related court actions. The $225K judgement against AAR came from their lawsuit against Multicultural for taking them off the air and locking them out of LA and Chicago. They lost that lawsuit -- actually wound up dropping it -- and according to the contract between AAR and Multicultural, the losing party in any legal action assumes responsibility for legal fees. AAR had attempted to argue that their agreement to withdraw the action meant that no one lost, and therefore all parties paid their own attorney fees -- wich as Michelle and Brian reported two days ago, the court found both unconvincing and highly unamusing.

Multicultural still wants its airtime fees paid. One assumes that since even AAR admitted it couldn't sustain its countersuit, Multicultural has a high likelihood of winning on the merits -- and that AAR will not only have to pay the $1.5 million, but also another round of legal fees. In light of yesterday's Part II of the blog series, one has to ask whether Piquant disclosed all of these liabilities to the potential investors in Nova M, the new company being formed by Piquant/Progress investors to purchase rural radio stations for AAR broadcasts.

Addendum: The Sun notes that Evan Cohen told Gloria Wise that he needed a $35,000 personal loan in 2003 to take care of his "gravely ill" father. It turns out that his father was more ill than anyone at GW knew; he died in 1991. Who knew that Cohen was related to Generalissimo Francisco Franco?

Air America: More Shell Games

In the first part of the multiple-installment series by Michelle Malkin and Brian Maloney, the pair expose Air America's transfer of ownership between original parent firm Progress Media and current owners Piquant Media as little more than a shell game. In part II, the two show that the shell game may not have ended with the first allegedly fraudulent conveyance:

On July 21, 2005, a standing room-only crowd of Democrats filled a Highland Park, Illinois, public library conference room to hear two local businesspeople talk about their company and its future plans.

The attraction? These weren't your everyday corporate suits: it featured Sheldon and Anita Drobny, who last year put Al Franken and Janeane Garofalo on their upstart liberal Air America talk radio network. Hearing about their "success" was surely appealing. ...

Sheldon's wife Anita took to the podium to spill the beans about Nova M Radio.

Disclosing Air America's future plans to a room full of rabid supporters might seem smart, especially if it brings potential investors to what inside sources say is an effort to raise $5 million to fund the new company.

Was such a public disclosure legal, however? Since Nova M Radio's offering is set up as a private placement, there have been no indicated or available US Securities and Exchange Commission filings.

Be sure to read this latest entry in the Air America scandal -- the story that even the New York Times admits we should be reading even if they're not covering it.

Dafydd: An Atta By Any Other Name

The Able Danger argument du jour is whether the group actually had Mohammed Atta's name, or whether they had "merely" identified his al-Qaeda cell in Brooklyn... as if that makes all the difference.

Oh, well, if they didn't have his actual name, then busting up the cell and arresting everyone wouldn't have made any difference, right?

That cell contained not only Atta but several other eventual 9/11 hijackers. If the FBI had gotten the information, they would -- one hopes -- have surveilled the cell and eventually broken it up. Atta would have either been captured with the rest or forced to flee with a manhunt on his heels; he likely would have used one of his many aliases to flee the country. He may have been caught, or he may have ended up in Iraq.

Because of the cell structure of al-Qaeda, the other hijackers left in the United States would not only not be able to carry on the attack, they probably didn't even know what their mission was. There is evidence that many of them still didn't know even during the hijacking that they were going to fly the planes into buildings. Without Atta, the attack would have been aborted; and the intelligence gained from breaking up Atta's cell in 2000 would probably have included details about the 9/11 plan itself, making any future attempt nearly impossible.

Of course, this is speculation; maybe it would only have postponed the attack for a few years. But the point is that this scenario plays out whether or not Able Danger gave the FBI Mohammed Atta's actual name. The important datum was the cell information -- not the name of one particular member. (Likely, Atta's name would have bubbled up in the course of the FBI investigation anyway, since he was already known.) Gorelick's Wall prevented the FBI from learning about the cell at all.

And one final point. Sen. Slade Gorton was on Michael Medved yesterday, and he sought (what a shock!) to exonerate fellow 9/11 commissioner Jamie Gorelick. He argued that we can't blame her policy for the Able Danger scandal (Dangergate?) because her wall of separation of intelligence and law enforcement "only applied to the Justice Department"... and it was DoD lawyers who made the call not to allow Able Danger to brief the FBI. There, she's off the hook!

This is a real eye-roller. Gorton has been around Washington for what, twenty years? One would expect that by now, he would understand how it all works. And the first rule of any administration is that when the president says "jump," you act like the Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County -- before the buckshot.

Clinton picked Reno. Reno (and Hillary Clinton) picked Gorelick. Gorelick erected a wall of separation at Justice... and that tells everyone else in the administration everything he needs to know. Bill Cohen and certainly the DoD lawyers "don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows." They know what's happening over at Justice, and what, obviously, the president wants them to do.

Come on, Sen. Gorton... how hick do you think we are? The president cries out "who will rid me of these meddlesome intelligence agencies?" and four cabinet members rush forth with swords in their hands.

The German Connection: More Threads (Updated!)

Thanks to CQ reader Elly in Australia, we have a couple of more threads from which to work on the arrests of Iraq spies in Germany during the same period that the 9/11 team leaders traveled through that country. She finds two German reports still available from the time of the arrests (March 1, 2001). The first, from Berliner Kurier, provides just a headline/flash report. The second, which Elly translates, gives more speculation than background:

Berlin Newspaper (Berliner Zeitung)

Two Iraqis on remand on suspicion of espionage

Federal Prosecutor's office accuses them of acting as intelligence agents / no details on the background to the arrest

Berlin, March 1 (2001). The Federal prosecutor's office has had two Iraqi men arrested on Sunday and Tuesday of this week. They stand under urgent suspicion of espionage activity, the Prosecutor's Office explained on Thursday.

On the background to the arrests no information was given.

Information from ARD (German radio/news) as to which the Iraqis were located in the area of Heidelberg, was not confirmed by a spokesman for the agency. In an explanation it said solely that the two under arrest "stand in suspicion, since the start of 2001, of carrying out missions for an Iraqi intelligence agency in various German states." As to whether these missions had a political background or were in the service of preparing possible attacks, the Prosecutor's Office spokesman would not comment. He also left unanswered the question of whether the Iraqis might have been engaged in business- or weapons-espionage, "for inquiry-tactical (?) reasons".

Dealings in Germany

In its Intelligence Service report for the year 1999, the Cologne Federal Agency mentioned intensifying efforts by the Iraqi intelligence service to boost intelligence gathering activities also against Germany. To this end, the report said, the officers recruited primarily "provisionall / interim (?) naturalized and asylum-seeking Iraqis in Germany."

In addition, it concluded that the intelligence services of Iraq had intensified their efforts to procure from German technology companies products which relevant to their weapons production. Involved in these procurement arrangements were Iraqi officials, who traveled to Germany in order to close the respective deals in person.
Also, in an October 1999 study on the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, the Intelligence Service (German) pointed out the activity of the Iraqi intelligence service. According to it, Iraq is seeking, in Germany and other West European states, to buy and source companies which could work together with the nation's weapons program.

Target US Army?

It is as yet unclear whether the two arrested Iraqis were preparing potential attacks on facilities of the US Army in Germany. Iraq threatened retaliation after recent air attacks/raids on targets near Baghdad.

The spokesman for the US Army in Europe, Jim Boyle, commented on the arrest of the Iraqis only with the words: "We have spoken with the Federal Prosecutor's Office." However, the spokesman said he will make no comment pending the determinations / inquiries.

This didn't come from any background briefing but from the journalist's own speculation and prior intelligence analyses, notably from 1999, an analysis which would have been over a year old. The assessment of German intelligence for 2001, curiously, does not appear on the Verfassungsschutz site, at least not in English. The 2002 assessment does have an interesting description of a nexus for neo-Nazis, Iraqi agents, and radical Islamists (page 86-87):

2. German right-wing extremists’ contacts to Iraq and radical Islamist circles

There were only isolated indications that German right-wing extremists had contacts to radical Islamists and representatives of the Iraq regime. For example, on his website Gary Rex LAUCK (see 3 below) reported that leading functionaries of the Kampfbund deutscher Sozialisten (Combat Alliance of German Socialists, KDS) had attended a reception at the Iraqi Embassy in Berlin on 17 July. On its homepage, the KDS declares that it practises “active solidarity” with Iraq and Saddam Hussein.

Swiss revisionist and right-wing extremist Ahmed HUBER (see 1 above), who has maintained links with German right-wing extremists for years, is thought to be pursuing contacts to radical Islamists.

The NPD national party chairman, Udo VOIGT, and the NPD’s representative in the Federal Constitutional Court’s proceedings to ban the party, Horst MAHLER, were among those attending an event with links to the radical Islamist organisation Hizb ut-Tahrir (Islamic Party of Liberation) held at the Technical University in Berlin on 27 October.

Their shared anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism is what brings right-wing extremists, radical Islamists and Iraq together.

The 9/11 report makes no mention of this nexus, of course.

All of this background would appear to have been superceded by the information reported by al-Watan al-Arabi in Paris two weeks later. The summary from MEIB demonstrates more immediate sourcing specific to the arrests, and reports that the CIA and FBI had participated in the investigation (emphases 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.

Given the German assessment of national-security threats that they developed for 2002, it seems that the Germans may have connected a few more dots than the Americans along those lines. Far from insisting that no such cooperation occurred, their intelligence showed that Iraqis and Islamists had bridged together on occasion through neo-Nazis and other extreme right-wingers within Germany. This assessment, mind you, came out more than a year after 9/11, when the American political bureaucracy kept insisting that no such connection existed.

We seem to have moved the ball in a significant manner with this information. We need more information from Germany, probably information only German or German-speaking bloggers can access. One direction would be to find public reports of operations or campaigns that included all three elements (Iraq, Islamist, neo-Nazi). We also still need to find out what the CIA and FBI found out when interrogating the two Iraqi spies, and whether the network the Germans found ever had any contact with the known AQ agents working on the 9/11 plot.

Addenda: The German assessment for 2000 does not include any of the data linking the three elements; that intelligence got developed either in 2001 or 2002, making it a rather new development. Why didn't the 9/11 Commission know anything about that, and why haven't American media sources paid attention to it?

Tom Maguire joins me in asking for German bloggers and researchers to find more references to this nexus. I will float this post at or near the top all morning long, so scroll down to find newer posts.

BUMP: Back to top. I'm getting some preliminary information on other German resources, but just pointers at the moment. I'll keep you posted, of course, on any new developments.

It might be helpful, to start, to find out why this document (their 2001 assessment) isn't offered in English as in other years. For CQ readers fluent in German, perhaps they could read through this and determine whether the report mentions these arrests and any AQ/Iraqi connections, especially earlier in the year. A search on 'Irak' turns up 28 references within the document; 'Qaida' turns up 20.

Canadians Rejecting Exclusive Single-Payor Health Care

Earlier this year, the Canadian Supreme Court struck down the ban on private health insurance in Quebec due to an inability of the province to deliver timely health care. Now the Canadian Medical Association argues that the ban should be revoked throughout the country, and for much the same reasons:

All Canadians should have the right to buy private health insurance to complement their care in the medicare system, the country's leading doctors' group says.

The Canadian Medical Association said, in essence, that a recent Supreme Court of Canada judgment, which struck down a ban on private health insurance in Quebec because patients were not ensured timely access to care, should apply to all Canadians.

In doing so, the CMA, which represents the country's 62,000 doctors, also clearly rejected the notion yesterday that there should be a medicare monopoly. It did so just one day after doctors gave their backing to the existence of a parallel, private for-profit health system.

This does not come unexpectedly. While Americans tend to think of the Canadian health-care system as a model of nationalized medicine, many Canadians have to travel to the US in order to get timely treatment. That requires money, which means that the wealthiest Canadians wind up getting much better treatment than the rest of their fellow citizens. Oddly, that also seems to be the argument that those opposed to legalizing private insurance use:

Atul Kapur, an emergency-room doctor from Ottawa, said only healthy, wealthy Canadians would be able to afford private insurance and the privileged access to care it provides, and that would undermine medicare.

"This is not a solution that will help our patients," he said. "It will help private insurance companies to skim and cream healthy patients."

Dr. Kapur has it backwards. The wealthy might well get better representation with private insurance, but that will allow them to at least stay within the Canadian system for their needs. With the ban, the wealthiest have to flee the country to get the attention needed in the time frame they need. How does that help Canadian doctors? If the doctors create a parallel system of private healthcare, doesn't that take some of the pressure off of the public system, allowing for quicker response time to less-wealthy patients as well?

What Canadians have discovered is that government-rationed health care provides slow and limited options for patients, just like everywhere else it has been tried. The American healthcare system, in comparison, uses the market to ration care and results in much more responsive providers. It also provides higher degrees of innovation and gives doctors incentives to specialize. In Britain, for example, hospitals discarded viable transplantable organs due to a lack of trained physicians to perform the operations -- a shortage caused by the lack of compensation for transplant surgeons despite the increased cost of certification for the procedure.

Market-based rationing may have its flaws, especially in a litigation-heavy arena like health care. However, those rarely get solved by government-based rationing, which not only make the same flaws worse but compound them with a raft of other destructive practices. The CMA should be congratulated for starting to comprehend this pattern. Their patients have already made their diagnosis.

Another 72-Virgins Moment In Saudi Arabia

Saudi security forces found and killed another al-Qaeda leader in the desert kingdom today. The Saudis conducted a series of seven raids, the last of which turned up Saleh Mohammed al-Aoofi, whom they killed in a gun battle:

Al-Qaida's leader in Saudi Arabia was killed Thursday during clashes with police in the western city of Medina, the Interior Ministry said.

Saleh Mohammed al-Aoofi was among six al-Qaida militants reported killed during police raids on numerous locations in the holy city and the capital, Riyadh, security officials told The Associated Press.

Al-Aoofi, a Saudi in his late 30s, and another militant were killed during one of seven police raids in Medina, the Interior Ministry said.

The Saudis have done a remarkable job in cleaning up al-Qaeda leadership since AQ attacked foreigners in Riyadh in May 2003. Shortly after that attack, the Saudis listed 26 known terrorist leaders wanted by their security services. With the death of Aoofi, 25 of 26 have either been captured or killed by the Saudis. They also captured 10 Islamist "militants" in Medina, and killed another in a separate raid in Riyadh. The Riyadh operation also turned up a number of weapons, bombs, and documentation.

It looks like the Saudis scored a couple of big victories today. It may also show that Abdullah's reign, as expected, will bring no change in official Saudi policy towards al-Qaeda. Since Abdullah ran the country in Fahd's name for the last ten years, no change was expected anyway. The next transition will undoubtedly be the key.

Air America: Garbo Gray Lady Speaks Again!

After apparently receiving a number of e-mails and letters regarding the New York Times' almost-total noncoverage of the Air America/Gloria Wise funding scandal, the public editor has published a response on his forum. Byron Calame, who recently took over the position from the Times' first ombudsman Daniel Okrent, acknowledges that the Times has not kept up with the story -- but blames disorganization rather than bias:

Readers of The Times were poorly served by the paper's slowness to cover official investigations into questionable financial transactions involving Air America, the liberal radio network. The Times's first article on the investigations finally appeared last Friday after weeks of articles by other newspapers in New York and elsewhere. ...

"We were slow in the first place and need to do more," Rick Berke, an associate managing editor at The Times, told me Monday. While it's no excuse for such a belated response to the brewing scandal, it's true that pieces of the unfolding story fell in the domains of three different parts of the newsroom: the metropolitan desk, the business desk and the culture desk. There was, my inquiries suggest, a lack of coordination and awareness of what the paper's competitors across town were writing.

I don't want to do a complete fisking of Calame's statement, because he mostly admits that the Times has dropped the ball on Air America. I also think that the Times has done a pretty good job so far on Able Danger, which may not have the same level of fun that the Air America story has but means a lot more to American security.

However, a couple of statements in here need serious challenge. Calame asserts that this story is still unfolding, as a weak rejoinder as to why the coverage has been somewhat less than extensive. Perhaps the story is still in motion, but that's due to the coverage given to it by other people -- reporters like David Lombino at the Sun, and bloggers like Michelle Malkin and Brian Maloney. Newspapers used to cover stories in motion, not wait for them to come to a screeching halt and issue meaningless post-mortems.

Calame also wants us to dismiss the notion that a left-wing bias has affected their attention to the scandal. He asserts that "conservative bloggers" have inspired that analysis, but that their attention really got diverted by the fractionalization of data across three different beats in the newsroom. Calame himself, however, demonstrates the silliness of that excuse in his defense of the coverage:

The Times's recent slowness stands in contrast to its flurry of articles about Air America in the spring of 2004, when the network was launched. "Liberal Voices (Some Sharp) Get New Home on Radio Dial," read the headline on The Times's article the morning of March 31 when the network went on the air. The article noted that the network had a staff headlined by comedian Al Franken and hopes of establishing a counterpoint to conservative radio personalities such as Rush Limbaugh.

Two months later, The Times reported that the network had come close to running out of money in April but had received an infusion of an undisclosed amount of cash from sources that weren't identified. The article noted that Evan M. Cohen, a primary early backer and the chairman of the network, had resigned.

Yet The Times was silent as other publications reported that city and state investigators were looking into whether the Gloria Wise Boys and Girls Club in the Bronx had made improper loans of as much as $875,000 to Air America. Mr. Cohen, it turned out, had served simultaneously as a top executive at Air America and as the club's development director. And since the club operated largely with grants from government sources, any money passed to Air America may have come from the public till.

Calame has a case of modesty. A search of the phrase "Air America" since January 2003 results in 64 matches, only two of which relate to the scandal, and one of those is a correction of the other. The New York Times had the resources to coordinate information on 62 other Air America stories, almost all of them positive public-relations stories about the startup and the personalities involved in Air America and its programming. Obviously, the news desk had no issues pulling together across the beats to produce those stories, and yet when it came to looking at a scandal involving a corporation dedicated to broadcasting a liberal message, the Times suddenly became The Gang That Couldn't E-Mail Straight? That explanation beggars belief.

If the Times wants us to believe that it objectively reports the news, especially that which occurs in its own back yard, then we expect to see some in-depth coverage of the apparent fraud involving Piquant Media, Progress Media, Air America, and Gloria Wise, and not just a bloodless regurgitation of facts already well known to anyone with an Internet connection. Blaming conservative bloggers for their poor reputation after sitting on this story for three weeks demonstrates that the Times doesn't hold a very high opinion of its readers or itself.

UPDATE: Bruce Kesler has a better experience with his local ombudsman, who understands that the straightforward approach works much better.

Able Danger: More Sources Forthcoming?

Deborah Orin continues her coverage of Able Danger, rivalling that of the cross-town Times which initially broke the story, with an interesting and somewhat contradictory follow-up with the first public source, Col. Tony Shaffer. Shaffer points out that he initially did not know that Able Danger had specifically identified Atta prior to 9/11, but did know that al-Qaeda agents had been identified as such:

Shaffer said Atta's name didn't ring a bell when he learned the hijackers' names after 9/11. But he got "a sinking feeling in my stomach" when the woman Ph.D. in charge of Able Danger's data analysis told him Atta was one of those who had been identified as a likely al Qaeda terrorist by Able Danger.

"My friend the doctor [Ph.D.] who did all the charts and ran the technology showed me the chart and said, 'Look, we had this, we knew them, we knew this.' And it was a sinking feeling, it was like, 'Oh my God, you know. We could have done something.' " ...

He said the unit tried three times to alert the FBI that it had identified al Qaeda cells in the United States — but military lawyers nixed it. Shaffer also says he alerted the 9/11 commission in October 2003 about how Able Danger identified Atta — but commission staffers blew him off and failed to properly follow up.

Shaffer has predicted that this PhD will come forward publicly in the next few days, just as soon as she gets assurances that she will suffer no retaliation for talking about the program publicly. The other source, the Navy captain who tried to get the Commission to investigate Able Danger in 2004, still wants his name withheld. However, Orin reports that the AP outed him yesterday. His rank and expertise in futuristic naval warfare has been apparently confirmed by the news agency. [CQ will not use his name until/unless he does so publicly himself out of consideration for his current assignment.]

Shaffer also added an interesting detail to the Able Danger story. Several CQ readers have wondered whether the program still exists. Shaffer says that his liaison to the program shut down months before the attack on the order of a "risk-averse" commanding general at DIA. In fact, this general had to order Shaffer to cut all ties with Able Danger, explicitly pulling rank over Shaffer's objections. His files at the DIA on Able Danger have also gone missing from their last known storage location, although the Pentagon has started a search, and files get jockeyed around enough to know that this may well be a simple case of misplacement.

It sounds like at least two more shoes may drop on Able Danger and the information it provided military intelligence. If the other sources involved in the actual data collection and analysis come forward, expect this to blow up even larger at the expense of the 9/11 Commission who ignored it.

Able Danger: Kean Punts

Thomas Kean, the chairman of the 9/11 Commission, has once again changed directions on the Able Danger program. As the New York Times reports this morning, the effect of Lt. Col. Tony Shaffer going public with his Able Danger information has forced Kean to punt the entire mess back to the Pentagon, backing away from last Friday's detailed defense of the Commission's dismissal of the intelligence:

The chairman of the Sept. 11 commission called on the Pentagon on Wednesday to move quickly to evaluate the credibility of military officers who have said that a highly classified intelligence program managed to identify the Sept. 11 ringleader more than a year before the 2001 attacks. He said the information was not shared in a reliable form with the panel.

The chairman, Thomas H. Kean, a former Republican governor of New Jersey, offered no judgment about the accuracy of the officers' accounts. But he said in an interview that if the accounts were true, it suggested that detailed information about the intelligence program, known as Able Danger, was withheld from the commission and that the program and its findings should have been mentioned prominently in the panel's final report last year.

"If they identified Atta and any of the other terrorists, of course it was an important program," Mr. Kean said, referring to Mohamed Atta, the Egyptian ringleader of the attacks. "Obviously, if there were materials that weren't given to us, information that wasn't given to us, we're disappointed. It's up to the Pentagon to clear up any misunderstanding."

In a statement last week, Mr. Kean and the vice chairman of the commission, Lee H. Hamilton, said that Able Danger, a computerized data-mining operation run from within the Defense Department's Special Operations Command, "did not turn out to be historically significant, set against the larger context of U.S. policy and intelligence efforts."

But Mr. Kean suggested Wednesday that the statement would need to be revised if information from officers involved in Able Danger proved to be true.

Once again, the Commission dissembles somewhat. Shaffer has explicitly stated, on the record now, that the Commission's staffers did hear that Able Danger identified Mohammed Atta and three of the 9/11 hijackers as early as 15-18 months before the attack. In fact, two different people told them at least once each: Shaffer in October 2003, and an as-yet unidentified Navy captain in July 2004. Shaffer even tried to follow up with the Commission to give them more information in January 2004, but found them uninterested in the evidence.

It's nice to see Kean acknowledge that any data that identified Atta prior to the attacks is self-evidently an important line of investigation to follow. Why didn't anyone believe that before all of this became public?

The Pentagon, meanwhile, has not yet issued any definitive statement on Able Danger. Media outlets and anonymous sources have expected one since last weekend, always speculating that the statement would come out the next day. It appears that the Pentagon also has been taken by surprise and may need more time to unravel Able Danger, or it may just need more time to establish the authorization and funding for such an extensive data-mining program. My guess is that Congress never authorized such a program, and probably neither did the Clinton White House. That will make Able Danger somewhat embarrassing to top brass and may also explain their reluctance to coordinate information between Able Danger and law-enforcement agencies.

No matter. The time for sheepishness and squeamishness has long passed. The Pentagon needs to get the records together and provide them to Congress along with a public statement that confirms or denies Col. Shaffer's account. The Commission, meanwhile, needs to quit issuing statements and let Congress and the White House get to the bottom of their failure, to determine whether it came from incompetence or corruption.

UPDATE: The 9/11 families will not find themselves mollified by Kean's blameshifting:

A coalition of family members known as the Sept. 11 Advocates blasted 9/11 commission leaders Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton for pooh-poohing Able Danger's findings last week as not "historically significant."

"They somehow made a determination that this was not important enough. To me, that says somebody there is not using good judgment. And if I'm questioning the judgment in this one case, what other things might they have missed?" Mindy Kleinberg, a member of the Sept. 11 Advocates, told The Post.

"I don't think you can understate the significance here. You're talking about the four lead hijackers. If we shared information and did surveillance on them, there is no telling what we could have uncovered and what we could have thwarted. I think we do need a new commission, and that's really sad."

That statement from last Friday was nothing more than an empty bluff, a last stand that depended on Able Danger sources remaining anonymous. Col. Shaffer's courage in jeopardizing his career to call this bluff has blown the Commission's credibility away entirely. Not only do we need an investigation into Able Danger and the Commission, but as Ms. Kleinberg suggests, we need to re-investigate 9/11 and the entire Islamofascist war against America, this time from scratch and without preconceived notions revolving around turf protection and election-year politics.

Air America: The Sun Rises Again, And Again, And Again

The one newspaper that has consistently covered the Air America/Piquant Media financial scandal has been the New York Sun and its reporter, David Lambino. Today he follows up on the revelations contained in the investigative report by Michelle Malkin and Brian Maloney posted yesterday on Michelle's blog:

A lawsuit filed by an owner of radio stations claims that the transfer of ownership of the Air America radio network from Progress Media to Piquant LLC in May 2004 was a "sham" intended to maintain the network's assets while deceiving its creditors, according to documents posted on a blog yesterday.

In the suit, which was filed in state Supreme Court at Manhattan in May, Multicultural Radio Broadcasting, a radio station owner with affiliates across the country, is seeking more than $255,000 it claims it is owed by the current owners of Air America, Piquant LLC. Multicultural's complaint, as posted on the blog of Michelle Malkin, a conservative commentator, states that the station owner is trying to enforce a judgment in its favor last November, in which the court ordered Air America's owners to pay it that amount.

Court actions naming a corporation a "sham" and accusing it of fraudulent conveyance to avoid paying its creditors normally would get some attention at most papers. If the corporation's creditors included an inner-city charity that helps out underprivileged children and the elderly, that would normally make the story banner-headline material. However, a look at the New York Times' Regional section shows no coverage at all.

Looks like the Sun ate the Times' lunch. Again. Do you think Bill Keller will ever feel embarrassed by this?

Brian will have Part II of this saga later today. Don't miss it.

Hugh Hewitt: The Reformation Sails To Starboard

Hugh Hewitt provides an analysis of the rapidly-increasing impact of the blogosphere, and determines that while the Leftist site have floundered, the center-right has expanded its reach and credibility. His Weekly Standard column will certainly prompt a furious debate in the blogs today:

While the lefty blogs are helping to push the Democrats over the cliff, the center-right blogs continue to grow in influence and to innovate. Two examples deserve widespread attention.

First, let us now praise Day by Day's Chris Muir, the funniest and sharpest three panel political cartoonist at work in America today. Muir's timeliness and productivity have created a large audience for him online, which is growing wider and wider as new blog consumers arrive in record numbers. Many bloggers routinely cite or even carry the Muir strip of the day (an innovation I first noticed at Captain's Quarters), and Muir's popularity further strengthens the center-right blogosphere's vast humor advantage over the relentlessly profane, vulgar and snarling left. ...

The second significant development is the recent launch of Power Line News by DAILY STANDARD contributors John Hinderaker, Scott Johnson, and Paul Mirengoff, who have been writing at their blog Power Line for years and who were Time magazine's Bloggers of the Year in 2004 for their work in exposing CBS and Dan Rather as gullible victims of a crude fraud. But the trio is no longer content with exposing mainstream media absurdities. Now they are about replacing one of mainstream media's remaining utilities: That of news aggregator and editor.

I wouldn't go so far as Hugh does to say that the port side of the 'sphere has hit the shoals. The Ohio 2nd CD race showed that the more rational among them can organize pretty effectively, although they couldn't beat the GOP in the end. However, it does seem that the Left's more influential sites continue to push the teeming masses ever further towards a radical-left agenda, leaving the center more and more undefended and open for socially-moderate Republicans to fill. Hugh mentions Jeff Goldstein at Protein Wisdom, but I could also mention Bill Ardolino at INDC Journal, Karol Sheinin at Alarming News -- all of whom, incidentally, have branched out into talk radio.

Read all of Hugh's analysis, and especially consider what the continued radicalization of the Left's bloggers might mean for 2008 -- the kinds of candidates that will get the rhetorical and financial support they can generate. It should make for an interesting year.

CQ On The Air Tonight

I will be a guest on The World Tonight radio show in Calgary at 8:30 pm CT tonight, speaking with Rob Breckenridge about Able Danger and the Sheehan stories. That's on AM 770 in the Calgary area, or you can listen on the webstream at the link above. Hope that you can join in!

The Next Roberts Smear

The AP has taken over where NARAL left off. In their report on John Roberts' upbringing, Tom Coyne and Ashley Heher do everything except paint a white robe and pointy little hat on his head while describing the neighborhood in which his parents raised him:

Like many towns across America, the exclusive lakefront community where Supreme Court nominee John G. Roberts Jr. grew up during the racially turbulent 1960s and '70s once banned the sale of homes to nonwhites and Jews.

Just three miles from the nearly all-white community of Long Beach, two days of looting and vandalism erupted when Roberts was 15, barely intruding on the Mayberry-like community that was largely insulated from the racial strife of that era.

It was here that the 50-year-old Roberts lived from elementary school until he went away to Harvard in 1973, and that decade — as well as the rest of his life — is receiving intense scrutiny as the Senate gears up for its Sept. 6 confirmation hearings on President Bush's first Supreme Court nominee.

If this last assertion proves true, it demonstrates how vile the Democrats will get in trying to trump up any kind of a smear against the Supreme Court nominee they desperately want to block. Now they want to hold Roberts responsible for a decision made by his parents about where they wanted to raise their children. How, exactly, did Roberts have any control over that decision?

The AP reports that the area had real-estate covenants about the resale of property to non-whites, a dodge used during the civil-rights era to keep minorities out of desirable suburbs. Long Beach, like a number of Lake Michigan towns during that era, had sales deeds that included these clauses, which legislation made illegal. So if the AP features them in a story like this, then Roberts' parents must have had one in their sales contract, right?

Uh ... no:

The family purchased land a few blocks from the beach in 1966 and built an unassuming tri-level house. The Roberts property did not include a racially restrictive covenant, according to LaPorte County deed records, and the restrictions had begun fading away by then.

Other homes built decades earlier in the town had covenants. Deeds on file from the 1940s in Long Beach ban the sale or lease of houses to "any person who is not a Caucasian gentile."

So not only did Roberts' house not include a covenant as part of its deed, neither did his neighborhood, and in fact the practice had mostly died out when he lived there. So, excuse me for asking this question, but what the hell is the point of bringing it up? Simply as an excuse to imply that John Roberts is a racist.

Hell, the Democrats elected a Ku Klux Klan recruiter to the Senate, and made him Majority Leader. He's served longer in his Senate seat than Roberts will likely serve on the Supreme Court. Why doesn't the AP cover the voluntary adult service of Robert Byrd instead of making the most ridiculous stretch I've ever seen to paint someone as a bigot?

Here's a more germane story from the AP, one that reports on something that has to do with what kind of jurist John Roberts will be on the court. The AP notes that the man they want to paint as a bigot just got the highest rating from the American Bar Association on a unanimous vote:

Supreme Court nominee John Roberts earned a "well qualified" rating from the American Bar Association on Wednesday, clearing one hurdle in his path to joining the high court.

The rating by unanimous vote of an ABA committee was disclosed as the Senate Judiciary Committee announced plans for the start of confirmation hearings on Sept. 6. Roberts will face almost an hour of questioning from each of the 18 senators on the committee. ...

This is the fourth time the ABA has rated Roberts. He was designated as well qualified in 2001 when he was nominated for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. He earned the same rating in 2003 when he was nominated again for the appeals courts and then confirmed. He was rated as qualified as an appeals court nominee in 1992, but the Senate never took up that nomination.

Perhaps the AP should stick to reporting news instead of cooking up scurrilous smear jobs as a cover for the Democratic Party. Tom Coyne, Ashley Heher, and their editor owe the AP readers and John Roberts an apology, if not their resignations.

UPDATE: Radioblogger takes a closer look at Coyne and Heher.

Germans Uncovered Iraqi Spy Ring During 9/11 Planning (Updates & Bump)

The Daily Standard has just published my latest column, which reveals to those who missed my earlier post on the arrests of two Iraqi spies in Heidelberg during February 2001. The discovery of these agents, especially given the time frame, should set off warning bells about potentially devastating connections to the 9/11 plot:

In the years following the 9/11 attacks, there has been much argument about the nature of Saddam Hussein's connections to terror. How could the U.S. government and the 9/11 Commission fail to consider this, given the other activity occurring in Germany during this period:

* Mohammed Atta and Ramzi Binalshibh meet in Berlin in January 2001 for a progress meeting, around the same time German counterintelligence claimed that they picked up the Iraqi trail.

* Ziad Jarrah, another of the crucial al Qaeda pilots, transits between Beirut and Florida through Germany twice during the 2000-2001 holiday season, flying back to the United States at the end of February.

* Marwan al-Shehhi disappears in Casablanca, then constructs a cover story about living in Hamburg.

In fact, the Commission report notes that three of the four al Qaeda team leaders (excepting Hani Hanjour, who had at that time just begun his pilot training) interrupted their planning to take foreign trips (page 244). Why would these men interrupt their preparations in this manner? Traveling in and out of the United States presented a risk--a manageable risk, as events proved--but having three of the four team leaders outside of their established cells at the same time looks unnecessarily foolhardy from al Qaeda's point of view. It also appears to be the only time after their first entry into the United States that this travel occurred. All three had some German connection to their trips. In fact, Jarrah left Germany the same week that the Germans captured the Iraqi agents.

The 9/11 Commission never mentions these arrests, nor the discovery of an Iraqi espionage operation involving several German cities during the same weeks that most of the 9/11 plotters traveled into or through Germany. In fact, no one has followed up on the arrests at all.

For a commission that chided two administrations about failing to connect dots, the Omission Commission appears to have left more than a few dots off the map. We need to find out whether the CIA and/or the FBI knew about this, as reported by al-Watan al-Arabi later in March, whether they gave that information to the Commission -- and if they did, why they never mention it once in their report. At best, it leaves the final report with yet another crippling gap in its credibility. At worst, it looks like someone has something to hide.

BUMP: To top, 7:30 am.

UPDATE: Austin Bay wants a presidential statement, hopefully announcing a White House inquiry into Able Danger. I agree; it would help to have George Bush in front of this issue, since I doubt Congress will do it unless forced into it.

UPDATE II: CQ reader Murph notes another point that got left out of the Commission report, this one from a book by a former CIA officer:

In a book called The CIA At War, Inside the Secret Campaign Against Terror, by Ronald Kessler, on page 257 it says: "A 1998 report about a plot to crash a bomb laden plane into the World Trade Center originated with a police chief in the Caribbean. The chief said he had heard from Islamic militants in his country that Libyan officials were planning to attack on behalf of Iraq. The CIA considered such an attacked highly unlikely but distrubuted the report anyway." Captain Ed, In the 9/11 commission report, in chapter 11, it mentions in a sentence about this report but leaves out the part about Iraq. Why did they leave out "on behalf of Iraq"? Did they do anymore reseach on this report? If they did not think it was credible why did they mention it and leave out, on behalf of Iraq?

Murph also finds a couple of hijackings in the Middle East in October 2000 and January 2001 interesting for their omission from the report. Both tried to reach Baghdad with the planes. The first hijacking successfully took a pair of Saudi hijackers to Baghdad, where Saddam Hussein refused to release them.

The second seems more interesting to me than the first, an aborted hijacking that Yemeni officals stopped. The US envoy to Yemen, Barbara Bodine, coincidentally happened to be on board -- during the time when the USS Cole bombing still was being investigated. Did the Commission not know about this, or just assume it had no significance? I don't think it would connect to the above, but it seems to me that a terrorist act involving a US diplomat might rate a mention, even just a footnote, in the report.

Air America: Shell Game Implodes

Brian Maloney and Michelle Malkin have covered the sordid mess between Air America and Gloria Wise Boys and Girls Club, in which $875,000 in government grants wound up in AAR's coffers during a period of extreme financial instability. While taking earmarked grant money from poor kids and Alzheimer's patients provides enough embarrassment for any company, the excuses given by AAR parent Piquant Media that claimed the responsibility for that transaction belonged with the original ownership of AAR caused a number of bloggers to look into the unusual sale of Progress Media to Piquant. Unusual it was indeed, since most of the owners of Progress wound up owning Piquant as well.

Now Brian and Michelle have spent the last couple of weeks doing the kind of journalistic research that has eluded the New York Times to discover that the sale has been determined by at least one New York court to be a "fraudulent conveyance" and that Gloria Wise is not the only creditor nipping at Piquant's heels. In Part 1 of Inside Air America: An Investigative Blog Report, the pair expose Air America as teetering on the edge of financial ruin and legal collapse:

It's not just the Gloria Wise Boys & Girls that's knocking on Air America Radio's door looking for lost money. According to court records obtained by Radio Equalizer/MichelleMalkin.com, another major creditor has been demanding that Air America pay up. The liberal radio network has refused to do so, despite a court order and scathing words from a New York judge overseeing the case. Now, the creditor--Multicultural Radio Broadcasting Inc.--has filed a new complaint, accusing Air America and Piquant LLC (Air America's current owners) of engaging in a "sham transaction" and "fraudulent conveyance" of assets in order to avoid paying its debts. ...

In addition to its obligations to Multicultural Radio, the complaint alleges that Air America owed more than $2 million in accounts payable and had no means to repay its obligations. Multicultural Radio further alleges that Cohen and Sorensen made a deal with Piquant promising never to sue, retaining an ownership interest in Piquant, and all agreeing to "idemnify and hold harmless" one another "with respect to claims for any breach or default or failure to perform any undertakings pursuant to their agreement.

Read the entire article, and check in later tonight for the second part of the series. Perhaps Eliot Spitzer might want to check in for a little look of his own.

Delving Into CQ's Secrets!

Two intrepid bloggers delve deeply into the murky depths of Captain's Quarters today. Trey Jackson has a ten-minute video interview with Joe Carter of Evangelical Outpost and myself that he conducted during Justice Sunday II. Trey doesn't appear on camera, but that's only in deference to Joe and I, as his matinee-idol good looks would prove too distracting for female viewers. The volume may sound a bit low, so be sure to turn it up a bit when you play it.

Speaking of Joe Carter, he conducted a little investigative blogging and discovered the secret of my prolific output. Fortunately, he only has documentary evidence of my evil lackey, Lance McMurray from Red State Rant, for such shameful labor practices. And I don't drink strawberry dacquiris, either -- that was a straight-up double of Tennessee's finest whiskey, pal. Er, if I had been drinking, which I fully deny ...

Able Danger: CNN And Shaffer

CNN conducted an interview with Col. Tony Shaffer, the DIA liaison officer to the Able Danger operation who has gone public to tell what he knows about the identification of Mohammed Atta as an al-Qaeda terrorist more than a year before 9/11. TKS points out the transcript and some interesting parts of the interview. Shaffer again drives home the point, this time explicitly, that the Commission's response to the story on August 12th was at least wrong, and probably untruthful:

S. O'BRIEN: And his [Atta] name pops up?

SHAFFER: Well, yes, because terrorists live in the real world. As we recognize from the London bombings, there's a picture of the terrorist in a whitewater rafting trip. They live in the real world just like we do. They plan in the real world. ...

S. O'BRIEN: The 9/11 commissioners says they don't recall Mohamed [sic] Atta's name coming up in their discussion. They also say that his name does not appear in any of the briefings they had before they filed their report.

SHAFFER: Right.

S. O'BRIEN: Are they -- are they -- you say you've talked to them specifically with that name. Are they lying?

SHAFFER: I can't -- I can't answer that question. What I know is that their statement on the 12th of August is wrong.

I never mentioned anything about a human asset network being turned off by the (INAUDIBLE). That's one of their statements that they claim I made. I never said that.

And the other thing they say that I said was that I talked about Able Danger being a project in Afghanistan. I never said that.

So if they got those two points wrong, I don't know what else they got wrong. The only thing they got right, basically, was that -- that there was information about this network that related to the fact that they were interested in it. And they -- Mr. Zelicow's (ph) own admission, the next paragraph of their 12 August statement, says they called back immediately after talking to me, which would mean they heard something that I said which resonated.

The other thing is Mr. Zelicow (ph) himself gave me his card and asked me to contact him upon my return from the deployment. And I did contact him in January of '04. That's where I was essentially blown off.

I called him. They said they wanted to talk to me. I waited a week, called him back. And they said, "No, we don't need to talk to you now."

Shaffer also said that the Commission followed up with the wrong agency, which could explain why they never got the data or documentation Shaffer thought they would receive. The DIA did not run Able Danger directly. Shaffer provided liaison to the project, but it ran under a different command structure. Instead of the cartons of documentation they should have received, the Commission only got two briefcase-sized boxes, which Shaffer estimates amounted to less than 5% of the overall data produced by Able Danger.

Soledad O'Brien asked one other interesting question of Shaffer -- why it took him a year to come forward on Able Danger. The Commission report came out just over a year ago and clearly did not include the information he knew he provided to the staffers. Why wait?

To be totally honest with you, we believed that there may have been a classified annex [to the report]. Not being on the commission, not being -- not working at that level, I had no way of knowing. I had to believe that there must have been some reason that that information was not provided to the public, either by follow-on information -- operations of some sort that related to this or something else.

In other words, Shaffer expected that a secret codicil had been published for high-ranking government officials explaining what he had told the Commission, and presumably other sensitive data as well. It took him a while to determine that never happened, and that the final report had been considered definitive.

Clearly this leaves very little wiggle room now. We have two sources, one public and one anonymous, that both say they told Commission on two occasions about identifying Mohammed Atta as a potential AQ terrorist in the US long before 9/11. Either they lied then, are lying now, or the Commission and their staff have lied. Shaffer's determination to go public and essentially end his career in intelligence ops to tell this story at least strongly indicates a high degree of credibility on his part. The Commission's constantly changing story over the last seven days after the revelation of Able Danger demonstrates the opposite about their credibility.

UPDATE: John Podhoretz' sources vouch for Shaffer's credibility.

UPDATE II: Voice of the Taciturn knows Shaffer and also endorses his credibility:

This story about State’s late-90s assessment about al-Qaida and LTC Shaffer's revelations have knocked the lid off of a long-simmering pot of disdain I have had for people who don't have the stones to bring up issues when they have a chance to do something about it. Instead they stall and cover and obfuscate and otherwise come up with excusive not to act and nip things in the bud. Boy, wouldn't a strategy to contain or otherwise negate the efforts of UBL in the late 90s been a neat thing to have? ...

Guys like Tony Shaffer (who I am proud to say was a colleague of mine for a time) are NOT the focus of my vitriol. He did what he could without becoming a martyr for a cause no one would have heard of. Truth be told (and few shoot straighter than Tony - don't just take my word for it) he's been suffering for his acts of "near insubordination" for some time. We should all hope that if he falls on his sword now, it won't be in vain.

I have also heard from an inside source that Shaffer has worked in regular intelligence assignments for the DIA (not just liaison) and fully understands the information he tried to bring to the Commission. He's trustworthy and knowledgeable, which so far beats anything the Commission has going for it.

The Second White Memo

Deborah Orin and the New York Post have the second memo from Mary Jo White to the Department of Justice, urging them to reconsider the policies put in place by Janet Reno and her deputy Jamie S. Gorelick that effectively barred law enforcement and intelligence operations from sharing data and analyses. White's second missive strongly warned of dire consequences if the US blocked cooperation on national-security issues, a subject with which White had some expertise:

PRESIDENT Bill Clinton's team ignored dire warnings that its approach to terrorism was "very dangerous" and could have "deadly results," according to a blistering memo just obtained by The Post. ...

"This is not an area where it is safe or prudent to build unnecessary walls or to compartmentalize our knowledge of any possible players, plans or activities," wrote White, herself a Clinton appointee.

"The single biggest mistake we can make in attempting to combat terrorism is to insulate the criminal side of the house from the intelligence side of the house, unless such insulation is absolutely necessary. Excessive conservatism . . . can have deadly results."

She added: "We must face the reality that the way we are proceeding now is inherently and in actuality very dangerous."

Tragically, events proved White correct. As the 9/11 Commission pointed out both in its report and in repeated assertions during the public hearings, US intelligence and law-enforcement agencies failed to "connect the dots" and find the terrorist conspiracy. The report itself only mentions the wall a few times, mostly to underscore how "misunderstood" it was (page 271):

“Jane” sent an email to the Cole case agent explaining that according to the NSLU, the case could be opened only as an intelligence matter, and that if Mihdhar was found, only designated intelligence agents could conduct or even be present at any interview. She appears to have misunderstood the complex rules that could apply to this situation.

The FBI agent angrily responded:

Whatever has happened to this—someday someone will die—and wall or not—the public will not understand why we were not more effective
and throwing every resource we had at certain “problems.” Let’s hope the National Security Law Unit will stand behind their decisions then, especially since the biggest threat to us now, UBL, is getting
the most “protection.”

“Jane” replied that she was not making up the rules; she claimed that they were in the relevant manual and “ordered by the [FISA] Court and every office of the FBI is required to follow them including FBI NY.”

It is now clear that everyone involved was confused about the rules governing the sharing and use of information gathered in intelligence channels.

Two issues are apparent in this passage. First, not everyone was "confused"; Mary Jo White had a good understanding of the consequences of the 1995 policy change. She predicted this outcome five years before it happened. Second, if the policy was indeed misunderstood, who had responsibility for implementing it correctly and ensuring that the FBI understood it properly? The Department of Justice, of which the FBI is a part, and its leadership -- Janet Reno and Jamie S. Gorelick.

Instead, Gorelick sat on the Commission and said nothing about the second White memo. Like so much other evidence -- Able Danger, the Heidelberg arrests of two Iraqi spies, the 1996 State Department warnings -- the second White memo appears nowhere in the Commission's final report. One cannot help but draw the conclusion, especially in this case, that the Commission deliberately excluded it from their report. Gorelick, at least, had firsthand knowledge of it.

Once again, the 9/11 Commission gets exposed as a dangerous cover-your-ass effort by bureaucrats who made national security an almost impossible task for operational units. Again, we ask: what else got left out of the report? And again, we expect to see another answer tomorrow, if not sooner.

Two Minnesota Politicians Flock To Sheehan's Side

Two Minnesota politicians have announced that they will travel to Crawford to join Cindy Sheehan and join the media circus surrounding her protest. State Senator Becky Lourey joins FBI whistle-blower and Congressional candidate Coleen Rowley to garner some publicity and to take part in Sheehan's grandstanding:

Rowley, now a Democratic candidate for Congress, and Sen. Becky Lourey will join a protest initiated by Cindy Sheehan, whose son Casey died in Iraq last year. Sheehan started the vigil Aug. 6, coinciding with Bush's summer vacation. She has said she won't leave until the president meets with her.

Rowley said Tuesday that she and Lourey would leave Thursday and stay at least through Sunday, sleeping in a tent at the site. They are paying their own way, she said.

Lourey's son died in Iraq three months ago in an attack on his helicopter. The theme of the protest does make a certain amount of sense for Lourey and the loss to her family, especially as she has been a vocal critic of the war even before losing her son. However, the idea to participate in the event did not originate with Lourey but with Rowley, who suggested that they both go to Texas to make their presence known:

Rowley met Sheehan earlier this month at a Veterans for Peace convention in Dallas, where both women spoke. At that meeting, Sheehan shared her plans to stake out Bush's ranch.

A few days later, Rowley said, she called Lourey — whom she'd never met — and suggested a trip to Crawford to lend support to Sheehan. Rowley said Lourey had already considered making the trip.

Rowley said she wants to "stay in the background" and offer moral support to Lourey, especially since the vigil has drawn critics and counter-demonstrations in recent days.

The two Minnesota politicians won't stand alone with Sheehan, of course. Among the people who have come out in support of Sheehan recently have been luminaries such as white-supremacist David Duke and Michael Moore, an odd pairing indeed. Sheehan's rhetoric created the opportunity to bring this Odd Couple together:

Sheehan continued, “9/11 was Pearl Harbor for the neo-conservatives’ agenda” and declared the U.S. government a “morally repugnant system.” Then she raged:

"We have no Constitution. We’re the only country with no checks and balances. We want our country back if we have to impeach George Bush down to the person who picks up the dog sh-t in Washington! Let George Bush send his two little party animals to die in Iraq. It’s OK for Israel to have nuclear weapons but we are waging nuclear war in Iraq, we have contaminated the entire country. It’s not OK for Syria to be in Lebanon. Hypocrites! But Israel can occupy Palestine? Stop the slaughter!" ...

"America has been killing people on this continent since it was started. This country is not worth dying for..."

Or this:

"The other thing I want him to tell me is 'just what was the noble cause Casey died for?' Was it freedom and democracy? Bull---t! He died for oil. He died to make your friends richer. He died to expand American imperialism in the Middle East. We're not freer here, thanks to your PATRIOT Act. Iraq is not free. You get America out of Iraq and Israel out of Palestine and you'll stop the terrorism," she says."There, I used the 'I' word -- imperialism," the 48 year-old mother quipped. "And now I'm going to use another 'I' word impeachment because we cannot have these people pardoned. They need to be tried on war crimes and go to jail. I am not paying my taxes for 2004. You killed my son, George Bush, and I don't owe you a penny . . . you give my son back and I'll pay my taxes. Come after me for back taxes and we'll put this war on trial."

Except for refusing to pay taxes, Sheehan has every right to protest in this manner. My reason for quoting her so extensively is to ask Coleen Rowley -- who will run against Congressman John Kline in my district -- exactly how she supports these contentions. This rhetoric is what Rowley and Lourey have flown to Texas to support and amplify on Sheehan's behalf. Will Rowley issue a joint statement of support for these arguments with David Duke and Michael Moore? Will she also stand with Sheehan to promote the notion that this country deserves no sacrifice and stands for nothing but killing?

Sheehan lost her son and appears to have gone seriously off-balance with grief. Lourey has also lost a son. Rowley has no excuse, and Minnesotans will demand to know why she went out of her way to leech off of Sheehan's publicity to align herself with the most virulent band of America-haters seen since the last election. She must really miss the media attention she got from her 15 minutes of fame for pointing out that the FBI ignored Zacarias Moussaoui, in part because of tenderness over his Arabic ethnicity.

Minnesota went blue in the last election, but they didn't go ultraviolet. Minnesotans will want an accounting from both politicians as to their support for the vile rhetoric coming from Camp Casey in the next election cycle. Rowley will soon learn that in politics, not all publicity is helpful.

UPDATE: Rowley should address her support of statements like this as well:

“Cindy, I was reading some of the essays that you’ve been writing about the war over the last couple of months,” Cooper began. “In one you say the war is blatant genocide and you go on to say, and I quote, ‘Casey was killed in the global war of terrorism waged on the world and its own citizen by the biggest terrorist outfit in the world, George and his destructive neocon cabal.’ Do you really believe the president of the United States is the biggest terrorist in the world?”

The answer was yes. “I believe that he’s responsible for the needless and senseless deaths of more people than any other organization right now,” Sheehan said. ...

Last week, Sheehan took part in a conference call with antiwar bloggers. She thanked them for their support and added, “Thank God for the Internet, or we wouldn’t know anything, and we would already be a fascist state.”

One party controls the government, Sheehan continued, “and the mainstream media is a propaganda tool for the government.”

That's what Coleen Rowley will travel to Texas this week to support. The voters in my district should demand to know why Rowley has gone a thousand miles to support this kind of rhetoric. If that's what she believes about this country and her government, then former Marine and current Congressman John Kline will certainly have no problem convincing voters in our district that Rowley has no business serving in the government in any capacity.

Air America: Show Al The Money

Michelle Malkin wants to help Al Franken in her new column this week. He recently talked about the revelations of financial malfeasance at his employer, but found it difficult to maintain any interest in the fact that they took money from poor kids and Alzheimer's patients in order to pay his talent fees:

The Bronx-based Gloria Wise Boys & Girls Club has been duped out of a reported $875,000 meant for poor children and elderly Alzheimer's patients. Evan Montvel-Cohen, the former chairman of the much-hyped liberal radio network Air America, is at the center of the erupting scandal. Air America radio host Al Franken, punctuating his discussion with nervous laughter, called Cohen a "crook" on his show last week and confessed to his left-wing audience that "I think he was robbing Peter to pay Paul." ...

Curiously, Air America has shown little interest in urging law enforcement officials to track down Cohen and hold him accountable for "robbing",Al's word, not minean inner-city charity in the network's name. Why is that? Franken says the subject of massive theft from one of the largest non-profit charities for underprivileged residents in New York City is "boring."

Yes. "Boring."

Even O.J. Simpson still fakes occasional interest in finding his wife's killer between his rounds of golf. Franken and Air America management, by contrast, seem unusually eager to sweep the entire financial scandal under the rug. Meanwhile, the Boys & Girls Club hasn't seen a dime of the bilked money repaid. Hearts aren't the only things that seem to be bleeding at Air America.

That's where Michelle wants to step in and help Al find the swindler. She's volunteering her readers to do some sleuthing work to track down Evan Montvel Cohen, the former Air America and Gloria Wise executive who helped transfer almost $900,000 from the latter to the former just before Progress Media discovered that he had run through all the money in June 2004. She even offers clues that she has already gleaned from readers and published reports.

See if you can't help out as well. After all, until they catch Cohen and get the full story from him, Al will continue to experience this boredom while Eliot Spitzer and possibly other agencies investigate the misappropriation of government grant money by his employer. Once Cohen turns up, things are bound to get more interesting for everyone at Air America ...

NYT: State Warned Clinton In '96 To Stop Bin Laden

The New York Times leads again with another revelation from secret government files about al-Qaeda and the American response to its development into a worldwide organization of terror. In response to a FOIA request, the State Department has declassified internal documents showing that it warned President Bill Clinton to stop Osama bin Laden from relocating to Afghanistan, presciently predicting dire consequences if al-Qaeda established bases among the battle-hardened mujahedin:

State Department analysts warned the Clinton administration in July 1996 that Osama bin Laden's move to Afghanistan would give him an even more dangerous haven as he sought to expand radical Islam "well beyond the Middle East," but the government chose not to deter the move, newly declassified documents show.

In what would prove a prescient warning, the State Department intelligence analysts said in a top-secret assessment on Mr. bin Laden that summer that "his prolonged stay in Afghanistan - where hundreds of 'Arab mujahedeen' receive terrorist training and key extremist leaders often congregate - could prove more dangerous to U.S. interests in the long run than his three-year liaison with Khartoum," in Sudan.

The declassified documents, obtained by the conservative legal advocacy group Judicial Watch as part of a Freedom of Information Act request and provided to The New York Times, shed light on a murky and controversial chapter in Mr. bin Laden's history: his relocation from Sudan to Afghanistan as the Clinton administration was striving to understand the threat he posed and explore ways of confronting him.

Before 1996, Mr. bin Laden was regarded more as a financier of terrorism than a mastermind. But the State Department assessment, which came a year before he publicly urged Muslims to attack the United States, indicated that officials suspected he was taking a more active role, including in the bombings in June 1996 that killed 19 members American soldiers at the Khobar Towers in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia.

Would this be the same Bill Clinton who sobbed to New York Magazine this week that he wished that the FBI could have told him for sure that Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda attacked the USS Cole in 2000? Well, the State Department certainly told him that Osama likely masterminded Khobar Towers, and told him to stop bin Laden from digging into some of the most difficult terrain in which to get him later. Let's also not forget that the FBI told him that bin Laden backed the dual bombings of our African embassies in 1998. What stopped him from going after bin Laden then, except by shooting a few missiles at a training camp?

And one more point needs to be made about these new documents. They do not appear anywhere in the 9/11 report -- not in the voluminous and supposedly definitive history of the American response to al-Qaeda. We have plenty of descriptions about how concerned Clinton was with bin Laden, as well as how inept American intelligence was about collecting data on AQ capabilities and intentions. These documents show exactly the opposite: the State Department had analyzed the situation correctly, and Clinton did nothing about it.

We keep seeing more and more holes in this 9/11 Commission report. I wonder what else we might see tomorrow (besides my column), and the day after that. By this time next week, the narrative of this report will demonstrate nothing but an attempt by the bureaucrats to hang the blame on the operatives that actually had it right all along. It isn't about Democrats vs Republicans; it's about turf protection for civil servants and their masters.

Addendum: What's missing in the Times' timeline from this paragraph?

Two years after the State Department's warning, with Mr. bin Laden firmly entrenched in Afghanistan and overseeing terrorist training and financing operations, Al Qaeda struck two American embassies in East Africa, leading to failed military attempts by the Clinton administration to capture or kill him in Afghanistan. Three years later, on Sept. 11, 2001, Al Qaeda struck the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in an operation overseen from the base in Afghanistan.

How about the attack on the USS Cole?

Here's what the 9/11 Commission has to say about Clinton in 1996 and his concern about bin Laden:

President Clinton issued a classified directive in June 1995, Presidential Decision Directive 39, which said that the United States should “deter, defeat and respond vigorously to all terrorist attacks on our territory and against our citizens.”The directive called terrorism both a matter of national security and a crime, and it assigned responsibilities to various agencies.Alarmed by the incident in Tokyo, President Clinton made it the very highest priority for his own staff and for all agencies to prepare to detect and respond to terrorism that involved chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons.

During 1995 and 1996, President Clinton devoted considerable time to
seeking cooperation from other nations in denying sanctuary to terrorists. He proposed significantly larger budgets for the FBI, with much of the increase designated for counterterrorism. For the CIA, he essentially stopped cutting allocations and supported requests for supplemental funds for counterterrorism. When announcing his new national security team after being reelected in 1996, President Clinton mentioned terrorism first in a list of several challenges facing the country.

In 1998, after Bin Ladin’s fatwa and other alarms, President Clinton accepted a proposal from his national security advisor, Samuel “Sandy” Berger, and gave Clarke a new position as national coordinator for security, infrastructure protection, and counterterrorism. He issued two Presidential Decision Directives, numbers 62 and 63, that built on the assignments to agencies that had been made in Presidential Decision Directive 39; laid out ten program areas for counterterrorism; and enhanced, at least on paper, Clarke’s authority to police these assignments.

The report provides not a single mention of the State Department warning, nor does the Commission record any action Clinton took as a result of it. His deep concern reflected only in getting Richard Clarke a position in the White House in charge of counterterrorism -- two years later.

UPDATE: Tigerhawk notes that Richard Clarke's credibility takes a big hit with this release as well.

Dafydd: Bride of Imminent Domain

Sometimes, you almost have to laugh. But it's a nervous sort of laugh, like when your next-door neighbor launches into a tirade about the interstellar aliens who have taken over all the PTAs in the county.

It seems... well, I'll let Jonathan O'Connell of the Fairfield County Weekly have the floor:

The U.S. Supreme Court recently found that the [City of New London's] original seizure of private property was constitutional under the principal of eminent domain, and now New London is claiming that the affected homeowners were living on city land for the duration of the lawsuit and owe back rent. It's a new definition of chutzpah: Confiscate land and charge back rent for the years the owners fought confiscation.

Not only that, but according to O'Connell, the New London Development Corporation (NLDC) is offering compensation for homeowners at the real-estate appraisals of the year 2000! Since there has been a considerable rise in the value of real estate in the last five years, this means that the residents will not only lose their homes, not only be charged rent for the time they were fighting this bizarre interpretation of the Takings clause (now embraced by a slim majority of the Court), but they will probably be paid less in compensation than they are assessed in rent... and far too little to buy a new house to replace the one seized.

Oh, did I remember to mention that the article claims that the NLDC also insists that all rent collected from tennants of the people who thought they were the owners of their own property actually belongs to the City of New London, and must also be forked over, forthwith? This, too, could amount to tens of thousands of dollars that the hapless home(less)owners now owe the city... for having had the temerity to object to being treated like Mediaeval serfs, ousted at will by the local lord.

These erstwhile owners are in the process of having their lives utterly destroyed by the city in which most were born.

And thank God for Anthony Kennedy! If it weren't for him, these poor saps might have had to shuffle on through life laden down with all these, you know, dwelling places and such.

I'm not exaggerating about the devastation, by the way. One defendant, Matt Dery, owes the NLDC, according to its own estimate, $6100 per month, or $73,200 per year that he dared to try to hang onto the house he lived in and the house his mother was born in and lived in all of her life. It comes to over $300,000. He lost his home, his mother's home and two other buildings; and he may well end up owing the city a fortune, rather than the other way around.

I actually hope it will turn out this is all a mistake (perhaps a nightmare), that O'Connell just misunderstood. I have seen this in several blogs; but so far, it has not been picked up by any MSM outlet (the source I use appears to be an activist webzine that localizes for different areas). I'm not sure if that means it isn't true... or if it's just one of those stories that breaks first somewhere other than the New York Times or the Washington Post.

If it turns out not to be true, I will be happier to correct a post than I ever have been before (which would actually be easy, since I normally hate having to correct a mistake!) Barring that, I hope the NLDC comes to its senses and realizes that a city (or even it's quasi-public strongarm corporation) should not be in the business of bulldozing its citizens for a purpose so ignoble: simple unbridled greed.

But until one of these two saving graces eventuates, I would have to agree with O'Connell's conclusion:

Susette Kelo, who owns a single-family house with her husband, learned she would owe in the ballpark of 57 grand. "I'd leave here broke," says Kelo. "I wouldn't have a home or any money to get one. I could probably get a large-size refrigerator box and live under the bridge."

States cannot outlaw this barbaric and despicable abuse of power soon enough. Faster, please.

UPDATE 16:35 17 August 2005: USA Today now carries an editorial supporting the O'Connell story; but it clearly uses O'Connell as its main source, and I don't see any corroborative reporting other than that. (The quotation from Connecticut Gov. M. Jodi Rell does not specifically refer to the rent issue but only the eviction itself.) So I still want to see independent corroboration. Anybody out there find any independent reporting on this issue in the MSM? (Hat Tip: Patterico's Pontifications, which mentioned the USA Today editorial in an update to a post from yesterday; also, SpaceNeedleBoy posted a comment here noting the editorial around the same time I posted this update.)

Able Danger: Tony Schaffer Speaks

The New York Times has a late report tonight on the Able Danger story, as one of Rep. Curt Weldon's sources went public in order to testify to the public about the program. Colonel Tony Shaffer tells Philip Shenon that Able Danger did indeed identify Mohammed Atta as a possible member of an al-Qaeda terrorist cell by mid-2000:

Colonel Shaffer said in an interview that the small, highly classified intelligence program known as Able Danger had identified by name the terrorist ringleader, Mohammed Atta, as well three of the other future hijackers by mid-2000, and had tried to arrange a meeting that summer with agents of the F.B.I.'s Washington field office to share the information.

But he said military lawyers forced members of the intelligence program to cancel three scheduled meetings with the F.B.I. at the last minute, which left the bureau without information that Colonel Shaffer said might have led to Mr. Atta and the other terrorists while the Sept. 11 plot was still being planned.

"I was at the point of near insubordination over the fact that this was something important, that this was something that should have been pursued," Colonel Shaffer said of his efforts to get the evidence from the intelligence program to the F.B.I. in 2000 and early 2001.

He said he learned later that lawyers associated with the Defense Department's Special Operations Command had canceled the F.B.I. meetings because they feared controversy if Able Danger was portrayed as a military operation that had violated the privacy of civilians who were legally in the United States. "It was because of the chain of command saying we're not going to pass on information - if something goes wrong, we'll get blamed," he said.

Not only did Shaffer get stiffed on informing the FBI, it appears that the 9/11 Commission had less than a fully enthusiastic response to his information. He insists that he told Commission staffers about the identification of Atta when he briefed them in October 2003, despite the counterclaims of the Commission staff. In fact, Shaffer says he risked his current security clearance to go public after Lee Hamilton and Thomas Kean released their last statement on Friday in order to counter the frustration their latest story change caused him.

At least we know that Rep. Curt Weldon didn't make up the whole story. The DoD has not responded to Shaffer's revelations, preferring to wait until it performs an internal investigation into Able Danger. The Times also reports that Shaffer is not the same officer who attempted to brief the Commission in July 2004, which establishes two separate sources for the Atta identification prior to 9/11.

Now we need to hear what the 9/11 Commission has to say next. The Times quotes Commissioner Richard Ben Veniste, easily one of the most partisan of the players, as blaming the Pentagon for not giving them the information:

A Democratic member of the commission, Richard Ben Veniste, the former Watergate prosecutor, said in an interview today that while he could not judge the credibility of the information from Colonel Shaffer and others, the Pentagon needed to "provide a clear and comprehensive explanation regarding what information it had in its possession regarding Mr. Atta."

"And if these assertions are credible," he continued, "the Pentagon would need to explain why it was that the 9/11 commissioners were not provided this information despite request for all information regarding to Able Danger."

No, Mr. Ben Veniste, the Commission owes us an explanation for why two different sources with the same information about Mohammed Atta's identification got ignored by the panel. Why didn't the Commission follow up on this? Were they so married to the Atta timeline that they could not bear to rethink it? If so, why? Blaming the Pentagon for ignoring Colonel Shaffer and the Navy captain sounds a lot like the blame-shifting for which the Commission piously blasted the Bush administration during the ridiculously political public hearings in 2004.

The Commission has a big problem now. As long as Weldon's sources remained anonymous, they could easily dismiss them as a figment of Weldon's imagination or worse, phantoms created to help him sell a book. Now we have at least one American officer risking his career to tell the public what we should have already known about 9/11, and what the Commission failed to tell us.

My Weekly Standard column will be out tomorrow. It will discuss another development that never made it into the 9/11 Commission report.

UPDATE: Junkyard Blog has some interesting and detailed thoughts on Shaffer's career-threatening revelations.

Dafydd: Jews As Canaries In the Coal Mine

Hugh Hewitt had a surprise "guest" on his show today. He got to talking about Cuban cigars, decided to get Dennis Prager on the phone... and then the conversation turned from tobacco to something of more moment -- in fact, to something quite profound.

Hugh asked Prager where he thought antisemitism had originated and where it was worst. After responding (a long answer not easily summarized), Dennis said something that truly resonated with me as a secular Jew. This is as near a quotation as I can paraphrase; when the transcript is available, I'll come back here and replace my words with Dennis's.

The curse of the Jews, Dennis said, is to be hated by the most evil men of every generation. The Jews are a barometer of hatred, canaries in a coal mine: to find the greatest evil, find the greatest haters of Jews.

When the Nazis were the greatest evil on the planet, they were also the most insane and "exterminationist" Jew haters. Now that the militant Islamists are the greatest evil (though not necessarily the greatest danger to America; North Korea and China are still out there), they are also the most unhinged Jew haters -- and they, too, are exterminationist, wanting not just to disassociate from Jews but to expunge them from the world.

In between, the Soviet Union was clearly the greatest evil in the world; and sure enough, during that period, they were also the world's greatest Jew haters. Of course, the Soviets were not exterminationist; they didn't implement a "final solution to the Jewish question." Recently, I've seen some evidence that Stalin was indeed working on just such a plan when he died; but even if this is true, it had not been put into action. But even so, under Stalin, they turned with a great deal of inexplicable ferocity on the Jews within their borders.

I'm not sure how far back this can be extended; is it merely a twentieth-century phenomenon? Dennis believes it is "God's plan," presumably the downside of being the "chosen people." But as a secularist, I don't buy arguments merely from Biblical authority.

I would love to see a historian do a study of the most evil regimes in human history prior to the twentieth century, when such can be identified, and see whether they also hated Jews. Certainly the Inquisition hated Jews with a passion; but there's a pretty big historical gap between Tomàs de Torquemada and Josef Stalin (and an even larger gap between Torquemada and Tiberius, Emperor of Rome!) I don't know enough history to fill those gaps; but at least in the last century, Prager's observation seems both profound and true.

He closed with another point, this time specifically about Israel's withdrawl from Gaza (and eventually from the West Bank too, everyone expects). He believes, as do I, that Hamas will move into power and the Palestinians will pretend that Israel was driven out by their brave "resistance." But he also believes, as also do I, that it is ultimately necessary. Alas -- for me, at least -- he phrased it much better than I have (and again, this is my best paraphrase from memory):

Israelis have decided to completely separate from those who want to exterminate them.

That's as succinct an explanation as I think anyone could make.

The Able Danger Fox Trot

A lot of fancy stepping has occurred in the week since the first revelations of the Able Danger data-mining program at the Pentagon. After Douglas Jehl first broke the story in the mainstream media, the Commission first denied ever hearing about anything that identified Atta as an al-Qaeda operative and the existence of Able Danger. They then acknoweledged hearing about Able Danger but nothing about any identification of Atta, with specific denials coming from co-chairs Lee Hamilton and Thomas Kean. Within hours, that changed to recognition of the Atta identification coming up in a July 2004 briefing that occurred as the report was being finalized, giving them little opportunity to check out the data. Finally, the Commission generated a breathtakingly detailed rebuttal for a subject on which they had attempted to deny any foreknowledge only days earlier.

The 9/11 Commission didn't come alone to the dance, either. Curt Weldon, whose speech kicked off this headspinning story, backtracked himself on some key details. That led pundits like John Podhoretz and Jim Geraghty to engage in some highly-understandable walkback, reverse walkback, and re-walkback as the media played ping-pong on which sources suffered the most damage to credibility.

Today the Washington Times adds itself to the dance card, finding another Pentagon source for Able Danger which corroborates Jehl and Weldon on their initial story (via Andy McCarthy at The Corner):

Pentagon lawyers, fearing a public-relations "blow back," blocked a military intelligence unit from sharing information with the FBI that four suspected al Qaeda terrorists were in the country prior to the September 11 attacks, after determining they were here legally, a former Defense Department intelligence official says.

Members of an intelligence unit known as Able Danger were shut out of the September 11 commission investigation and final report, the official said, despite briefing commission staff members on two occasions about the Mohamed Atta-led terrorist cell and telling them of a lockdown of information between the Defense Department and the FBI.

The intelligence official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said Pentagon lawyers "were afraid of a blow back" -- similar to the public's response to the FBI-led assault on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, which left more than 70 people dead -- and decided to withhold the information from the FBI.

This source also took part in the October 2003 briefing but not the July 2004 attempt by another naval officer attached to the DoD at the time. The source who spoke to Audrey Hudson for this article also attempted to rebrief the Commission in January 2004, according to Hudson, but they refused to meet with him. Staff members told the intelligence agent, "We don't need to meet with you."

McCarthy notes something else interesting about the Times article. Hudson reports that the Pentagon's official response to Able Danger says that they can find no reference in their files to an Atta-led terrorist cell in the US before 9/11 -- other than a few intelligence analyses that mention his name. Really? Which intelligence analyses would those be, and where did they originate and when? Most of all, why aren't they part of the final report from the 9/11 Commission?

This story has not yet run its course, not by a long shot. Something strange has been going on with Able Danger. Either it did a much better job identifying terrorists than anyone wants to acknoweledge, or it uncovered something else that no one wants to release. Either way, Congress needs to start hauling people into the open and start asking for sworn testimony on this program and exactly how much the Commission knew about it.

UPDATE: CQ reader Lauri S. tells me that the Fox Report will feature an interview with an Able Danger officer tonight at 6 pm CT. Catherine Herridge will speak with a Lt. Col. named "Tony", a 22-year veteran. If I get more on this, I'll post it here.

UPDATE II: Laura Rozen reveals that "Tony" is Lt. Col. Tony Shaffer:

He served in a liaison capacity between Able Danger and the Special Operations Command (SOCOM) in Tampa, Florida, and he flew into Afghanistan with special ops in a boots on the ground capacity. ... It's still a bit vague as to what exactly on Atta and the "Brooklyn cell" the Able Danger team came up with, but Shaffer did tell Spencer that the Able Danger team briefed then Special Ops commander, now Army Chief of Staff Pete Schoomaker on their findings. Shaffer also told Spencer that he had met with Pentagon intel czar Stephen Cambone in the E-ring today about the Able Danger issue, so clearly the Pentagon is paying attention.

Weldon's sources are moving into the open on their own. That sounds like a positive development, but we'll know more about it after the interview tonight. (via John Podhoretz, who is no wimp, folks -- just a guy who feels justifiably irritated when sources start waffling.)

Defending Michelle

This week, we have seen one of the biggest blogosphere meltdowns in recent days over the criticism of Cindy Sheehan. I have studiously avoided this topic, because as I advised another blogger (who didn't take my advice), I felt that this was one story where no one could possibly win a debate. I still feel that way.

One of the first bloggers to criticize Cindy Sheehan was Michelle Malkin. Michelle provides fearless commentary on any number of topics, and she can get it wrong sometimes; her fearlessness makes her more vulnerable for criticism, since it usually puts her out in front of everyone else. Michelle has long experience with hostility and criticism and has one of the thickest skins in the blogosphere, so she doesn't necessarily need anyone jumping to her defense, but in this case, people have lost their minds.

Cindy Sheehan has every right to protest George Bush or anyone else. She hasn't broken any laws, nor has she encouraged others to do so. When she does so, especially when generating so much publicity for herself and her own radical statements, she has lost any claim as a private citizen -- and that means people like Michelle have every right to criticize her. In fact, when Sheehan makes statements that brings Michael Moore and David Duke together, it doesn't take a genius to figure out that Sheehan has opened herself to well-deserved rebuttals and criticisms, as have the leeches like Randi Rhodes who have flocked to Texas to glean the leavings of the media spotlight for their own commercial purposes.

Michelle isn't immune from criticism, either, as she would be the first to tell you. However, the name-calling and personal attacks coming from the blogosphere reflect very little on her and a hell of a lot more on those who spout it. It started before she linked to Sheehan's divorce papers -- a decision I think was poor, but one which hardly was unique. Almost every news service has done the same, including this CBS story which uses it to generate sympathy for Sheehan. It has become exponentially worse since then, and from people who should know better. And no, it isn't the same thing as digging into sealed adoption records, because (a) divorce filings are public, (b) the Sheehans are both adults, and (c) Cindy Sheehan has repeatedly invoked her family in support of her cause, especially and obviously Casey ... who, by the way, made an adult decision to enlist and re-enlist in the service.

For those inclined to criticize Michelle, go back and actually read what she's written about Sheehan. You'll find it critical but not personal, and that Michelle has tried to temper that criticism of Sheehan with some understanding of her grief. She has saved her most potent criticism for those who have exploited her grief and anger, not for Sheehan herself. People need to quit treating Sheehan like some porcelain doll. If she doesn't want to get criticism, she should stop conducting her ludicrous publicity stunt in Crawford. However, neither she nor Michelle deserve sexist and racist namecalling for exercising their right to free speech.

One last point: We did not elect George Bush our mourner-in-chief. No president has ever been held to a standard that he has to meet with every Gold Star mother who wants an audience even once, let alone unlimited access as the media and half the blogosphere demands with Bush. I don't recall seeing media demands for Jack Kennedy to meet with every family that had a family member killed or captured in the Bay of Pigs fiasco, nor did LBJ and Nixon have people wondering how often they met with KIA/MIA families during Viet Nam. It's an insipid standard made even more pointless by the fact that Bush has already met with Sheehan. If she was left dissatisfied with the meeting, it's a shame, but we elected Bush to run the country and not to serve at Cindy Sheehan's beck and call.

UPDATE: Patterico gets results, John Cole gets classy; let's hope this sets a trend.

John Roberts To Michael Jackson: Beat It

Hugh Hewitt points out this hilarious Dana Milbank article in today's Washington Post which may have played a part in the Democratic decision to moonwalk away from obstructionism on John Roberts. Papers uncovered from the Reagan administration shows that Roberts repeatedly advised the White House to keep their distance from the now-disgraced pop star, avoiding historical embarrassments:

Tucked in the thousands of pages of documents released yesterday from Roberts's time in the Reagan White House is a collection of memos by the young lawyer about efforts by Michael Jackson's publicists to get presidential flattery for the Gloved One. Without exception, future judge Roberts voted to overturn.

"The office of presidential correspondence is not yet an adjunct of Michael Jackson's PR firm," Roberts wrote in a memo to his boss on June 22, 1984, opposing a request by the singer's publicist for a presidential letter praising the star's work against drunken driving.

In opposing the wishes of Jackson, Roberts acknowledged that he was a voice in the wilderness -- but being a future Supreme Court nominee, he used the Latin. "I recognize that I am something of a vox clamans in terris in this area," he wrote, "but enough is enough."

Apparently Roberts underestimated his own abilities to influence White House staff through argument. Rather than a vox clamans in terris, he successfully turned back two attempts by the administration to latch onto the enormous popularity of Jackson. Roberts argued that such endorsements might never stop and that selecting the proper recipients would create more and more grief. Roberts even predicted that Twin Cities music legend and notoriously odd Prince would one day eclipse Jackson in popularity -- and that the Gipper probably would not much care to associate himself with the funk superstar.

John Roberts, cultural sage?

Of course, no one could predict that Jackson would one day face child molestation charges, at least not in 1984 before his full weirdness became public. (Roberts also preferred to use Latin phrases for his argument instead of snippets of Jackson's lyrics, a decision that Milbank would have done well to follow.) His clear and common-sense reasoning shows a flexibility for cautious reasoning and a clear sense of the administration's mission even when some of its staff didn't. And anyone who had the foresight to warn politicians off of Michael Jackson at the height of his popularity and the will to convince them of his foresight probably will easily make mincemeat of the puny and superficial attacks offered thus far to his confirmation.

Martin Named Secessionist To Governor-General Post

Canadian PM Paul Martin faces a daunting polling gap in Quebec, where the popular Giles Duceppe and the Bloc Quebecois not only control a majority of seats but also align themselves with Martin's nemesis, Conservative Stephen Harper. In an attempt to split Quebeckers, Martin named Michaëlle Jean to the mostly ceremonial role of Governor-General last month, despite questions about her dual citizenship with France. The move proved popular in Quebec and saw an improvement in the Liberal position. However, whispers that Jean not only has split loyalty but has endorsed the breakup of Canada will soon have Martin tapdancing across the rest of the provinces:

Hard-line separatists in Quebec have unearthed quotations by Ms. Jean and Mr. Lafond from a book he wrote in 1993. His statements make clear his unequivocal support for a sovereign Quebec.

Ms. Jean's statements are more ambiguous but suggest that she, too, favours the province's independence.

"Independence isn't given away, it's taken," she said to a group of high-profile Quebec nationalists, including former leader of the Front de libération du Québec Pierre Vallières, former PQ cabinet minister Gérald Godin, and Yves Préfontaine, a founder of the Rassemblement pour l'independance nationale, a separatist group that was the forerunner to both the FLQ and the Parti Québécois. ...

The quotations were gleaned from Mr. Lafond's book, La manière nègre. It is a companion piece to his 1991 documentary of the same name, which examines independence struggles in Quebec and various Caribbean nations such as Martinique and Haiti.

In the book, Ms. Jean is also featured joining in a toast to "independence." She says, "C'est fini, les petis peuples!" (Which translates roughly as, "No more, dominated people!") She also notes that there are "three choices for independence." She says that in Haiti, the country of her birth, the choice was "painful." In Martinque, it is that of "compromise" and in Quebec it is "on hold."

Says Mr. Lafond: "So, a sovereign Quebec? An independent Quebec? Yes, and I applaud with both hands and I promise to be at all St. Jean [Baptiste] parades."

Perhaps the PM has a different view of filling government appointments, but I suspect most Canadians would prefer to see those positions filled by candidates with more enthusiasm for the nation which they propose to serve. These quotes go back fourteen years, so Jean and Lafond can claim that their positions have evolved -- and that may prove correct. Still, the notion that the Liberals think the best person for a position which represents its national interests and sovereignty is someone who once offered toasts to its dissolution sounds delusional at best.

This may develop into a major embarrassment for Martin and the Liberals, a rare misstep during a period when even one faux pas would have meant losing power entirely. When Parliament reconvenes, expect the Tories and BQ to hammer Martin on his commitment to a unified Canada. The Liberals had no problem dragging out the loyalty argument against them last spring, and now they will undoubtedly experience a rare moment of self-inflicted karma.

Martin may have singlehandedly coughed up one of the primary "hidden agenda" darts which his party has successfully landed on Harper's skin this year -- and one of the reasons why the Gomery Inquiry has failed to do lasting damage to their electoral chances. If so, it will provide irony after irony. Adscam showed the Liberals robbing the programs designed to mollify separatists, and Martin ducked the damage by painting Harper as soft on separatism. If Martin falls because he and his staff couldn't research Michaëlle Jean thoroughly, the separatists will have given him the self-inflicted defeat that Harper and Gomery could not.

Barbara Boxer Takes Big Money From Fed-Targeted Law Firm

The law blog Independent Sources notes that Barbara Boxer has taken a lot of money from one of the nation's most notorious class-action law firms -- a firm that currently finds itself the target of a federal bribery and corruption probe. Milberg Weiss donated more than $30,000 to her 2004 campaign and over $44,000 in her first Senate campaign -- enough to make Milberg Weiss her fourth-largest contributor for her entire Senate career.

Who is Milberg Weiss? Currently one of its former partners is testifying to just that question to a federal grand jury:

U.S. prosecutors have stepped up their criminal probe of law firm Milberg Weiss, a specialist in class-action cases, and have given immunity to two former partners at the firm, The Wall Street Journal reported on Monday.

The newspaper, citing unspecified lawyers close to the case, said a grand jury in Los Angeles heard secret testimony three weeks ago from Alan Schulman, one of the former partners who was granted immunity.

Milberg Weiss was implicated in a federal indictment unsealed in June against a client of the firm who allegedly accepted secret kickbacks to act as a plaintiff in more than 50 securities class-action suits. The law firm contends the payments were referral fees to other law firms that had been disclosed on tax documents.

I first covered this story about Milberg Weiss in June, when the indictments were unsealed. Independent Sources has done a great job of tracking the political connections of Milberg Weiss that may have allowed them to fly under the radar as long as possible. It notes the efforts by Boxer to undermine a voter referendum intended on tightening controls on class-action lawsuits, as well as her overall support for trial attorneys in general. It calls for Boxer to return these funds now that Milberg Weiss has been indicted, although it expresses pessimism whether that call will get any answer.

Be sure to read all of the Independent Sources' information, especially for California voters.

Schroeder Gives Anti-Americanism Another Try

Embattled German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder faces political ruin in the upcoming national elections. His political capital has dissipated in a failed economic reform that Germany desperately needs to transform its sagging socialism, as well as his inept diplomacy with the US and Iran on the non-proliferation pact. With a significant polling deficit looming as the elections near, Schroeder has reached for the one political weapon that saved him in the past -- anti-Americanism:

Chancellor Gerhard Schröder used an old theme over the weekend to give a new twist to the current German election campaign, saying he would refuse under any circumstances to allow German troops to be used in any military campaign against Iran.

But as several commentators and opposition figures argued Monday, if his abrupt introduction of Iran into the campaign is similar to the tactic he used three years ago in connection with Iraq, the current situation is strikingly different. No country, including the United States, is making serious military threats against Iran.

Still, Mr. Schröder's strategy seemed clear. In elections three years ago, faced with an uphill struggle to retain the chancellorship, he categorically rejected the use of force against Iraq, which infuriated the United States but helped, probably decisively, in his come-from-behind victory. ...

"Let's take the military options off the table," he said Saturday in an election rally in Hanover, an allusion to a comment President Bush made last week to the Israeli radio that "all options are on the table" in connection with Iran.

In an interview published Sunday in the daily Bild Zeitung, the chancellor said, "I consider the military option to be extremely dangerous, so I can with certainty exclude any participation by the German government under my direction."

The comments took diplomats here by surprise, and seemed almost certain to introduce new tensions into the trans-Atlantic relationship.

It not only took diplomats by surprise, but anyone who has followed the American efforts to allow the EU-3 to continue in the lead with Iranian negotiations despite their universal failure to accomplish anything in the last two years. Bush went out of his way earlier this summer to re-emphasize his support for the British, French, and German efforts to rein in the Iranian nuclear threat, even publicly offering to be bound by an eventual agreement achieved by the EU-3. If anything, Bush has committed the fault of not publicly pushing the EU-3 hard enough to get tough on Iran.

Not only did Schroeder mislead on the American position, he made a stupid strategic error. Why would Schroeder take the only stick off the table he had with Iran during these negotiations? Now the Iranians have a categorical statement from their negotiating partner that force will not be used, at least on Germany's behalf, regardless of how the talks turn out. In doing so, he not only insulted the American administration that has shown great (and undue) deference to Germany on this issue, but has more or less stabbed Britain and France in the back as well. The Iranians have to have pinched themselves to keep from laughing themselves silly when they read this.

If Schroeder expected to at least score a few points with the notoriously pacifist domestic press, he miscalculated there as well:

Most of the commentary in the German press was critical of Mr. Schröder's weekend comments.

"Schröder knows that a strike against Iran is not on the agenda and that the U.S.A. is politically and militarily incapable of carrying one out," the German business daily Handelsblatt said in an editorial on Monday. "And yet he misuses Bush's remarks in order to score points in the election campaign. In doing so, he endangers the crucial solidarity of the West."

The daily Die Welt said, "The chancellor should be ashamed."

He won't be ashamed, of course. On the bright side, he won't be chancellor, either. Expect this to essentially sink his candidacy, a victim of his own success who reached for the old weapons once too often.

Those Who Fight And Run Away ...

The Democrats have decided that discretion truly is the better part of valor. Faced with a bulletproof candidate and reeling from the fallout of the disgraced smear campaign from one of their most important allies, Senate Democrats plan to offer no more than token oppostion to the confirmation of John Roberts as the next Supreme Court justice:

In a series of interviews in recent days, more than a dozen Democratic senators and aides who are intimately involved in deliberations about strategy said that they see no evidence that most Democratic senators are prepared to expend political capital in what is widely seen as a futile effort to derail the nomination.

Although they expect to subject President Bush's nominee to tough questioning at confirmation hearings next month, members of the minority party said they do not plan to marshal any concerted campaign against Roberts because they have concluded that he is likely to get at least 70 votes -- enough to overrule parliamentary tactics such as a filibuster that could block the nominee.

"No one's planning all-out warfare," said a Senate Democratic aide closely involved in caucus strategy on Roberts. For now, the aide said, Democratic strategy is to make it clear Roberts is subject to fair scrutiny while avoiding a pointless conflagration that could backfire on the party. "We're going to come out of this looking dignified and will show we took the constitutional process seriously," the aide said.

"This was a smart political choice from the White House," said one prominent Democratic lawmaker, who like several others interviewed for this article requested anonymity because they were departing from the Democrats' public position. "I don't think people see a close vote here."

It looks like even Estradification has been taken off the table. They plan on highlighting the Bush administration's refusal to grant access to documents from Roberts' work in the Solicitor General's office, but won't filibuster the confirmation on that basis. The aborted ad campaign from NARAL forced too many of the Democrats to come to Roberts' defense, especially when Factcheck.org explicitly called the ad false and misleading.

This will drive their activist base mad, of course. They will face remonstrations about caving in to the Republican majority and carry twisted hangers in front of Democratic offices instead of GOP, for a change. This might prove rather instructive for the Democratsm if they can manage to keep this in perspective. The amount of protest differs from the level of invective, a lesson that they have not yet understood. The majority of Democrat voters in this country already understand that elections have consequences and fully expect Bush to nominate conservative judges and the Republican majority to confirm them. They want to create an environment where the opposite is true, but through the ballot box, not through self-defeating and mindless obstructionism.

In other words, they want Democrats to start winning elections and quit acting like petulant children who don't know how to do that. Acknowledging political reality might be the first step in that direction.

Bill Clinton Rewrites History On Al-Qaeda

Bill Clinton tells New York magazine that he desperately wishes that the FBI had been able to "prove" that Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda had masterminded the bombing of the USS Cole in October 2000 so that he could have attacked Afghanistan instead of George Bush (Newsmax also reports this here):

"I desperately wish that I had been president when the FBI and CIA finally confirmed, officially, that bin Laden was responsible for the attack on the U.S.S. Cole," Clinton tells New York magazine this week. "Then we could have launched an attack on Afghanistan early."

"I don’t know if it would have prevented 9/11," he added. "But it certainly would have complicated it.” ...

"I always thought that bin Laden was a bigger threat than the Bush administration did."

Clinton has tried on more than one occasion to adapt history to make his eight-year turn in the White House something more than a paean to lost time while Islamofascists gained ground. This particular effort fails miserably, mostly due to the efforts of the 9/11 Commission, which detailed exactly when the FBI and CIA made their determination that al-Qaeda had executed the attack on the Cole. On pages 192-3, the report shows that Clinton still had two months left in his presidency when that determination was made:

On November 11, the Yemenis provided the FBI with new information from the interrogations of Badawi and Quso, including descriptions of individuals from whom the detainees had received operational direction. One of them was Khallad, who was described as having lost his leg. The detainees said that Khallad helped direct the Cole operation from Afghanistan or Pakistan. The Yemenis (correctly) judged that the man described as Khallad was Tawfiq bin Attash.

An FBI special agent recognized the name Khallad and connected this news with information from an important al Qaeda source who had been meeting regularly with CIA and FBI officers.The source had called Khallad Bin Ladin’s “run boy,” and described him as having lost one leg in an explosives accident at a training camp a few years earlier.To confirm the identification, the FBI agent asked the Yemenis for their photo of Khallad.The Yemenis provided the photo on November 22, reaffirming their view that Khallad had been an intermediary between the plotters and Bin Ladin. (In a meeting with U.S. officials a few weeks later, on December 16, the source identified Khallad from the Yemeni photograph.)

Clinton's insistence on "proof" refers to a legal certainty that demonstrates his continuing fecklessness on the war that Islamists had declared on the West years earlier. In fact, he already had "proof" that al-Qaeda and bin Laden had masterminded earlier attacks on US interests, especially the twin Embassy bombings in Africa in 1998. One reason that the FBI knew of Khallad was because they had established Khallad as one of the terrorists who helped plan and execute those attacks.

Besides, take a second look at the wording used by the consummate lawyer in his assertion to Jennifer Senior. He would have "launched an attack". That is what he did after the embassy bombings; in the words of his successor, Clinton launched a two-million dollar missile at a ten-dollar tent and hit a camel in the butt. Did it disrupt anything else that al-Qaeda had planned? Not at all.

The long record of gross ineffectiveness based on the faulty premise that terrorism required indictments and civil trials created the Clinton legacy on al-Qaeda, not a lack of opportunities. Clinton's whine about "proof" demonstrates that very clearly. He had all the "proof" he needed to order military action in November 2000 to retaliate against bin Laden and the Taliban for sheltering him and chose not to do so. His attempt now to recast himself as a terrorism hawk who had the misfortune of bad timing makes him even more pathetic than ever.

How Many Bronx Kids Pay For A Private Jet?

The ongoing financing scandal at Air America took a cynical twist in the last twenty-four hours. Brian Maloney, who broke the original story to the blogosphere, now reports that an internal memo from AAR host Randi Rhodes proposes using a private corporate jet to take her and her show to Crawford, Texas -- so that she can take advantage of all the publicity surrounding Cindy Sheehan:

Also, transporation is an issue, because it will take me a whole day to travel. I don't want to miss a day on the air, and lose momentum. Flight to Dallas, on to Waco and then to Craford by car. So I was hoping that someone in the company would let me use their jet? I could take Steve with me and leave after Thursday's show.

Perhaps I missed something, but Air America and Piquant Media has a debt of almost a million dollars that originated from misappropriated government grants intended to support poor kids and Alzheimer's patients in the Bronx. Piquant Media promised to pay the money back -- but without interest and only over two years. They defied the Department of Investigation's recommendations and put their first payment in an escrow account they themselves control, which amounts to paying the money from one AAR account to another AAR account.

In the meantime, while Gloria Wise awaits the reimbursement due them, the radio netlet spends money on private corporate jets? Money is no object to Randi, especially when she has the opportunity to leech onto someone else's national publicity. Unfortunately for the children of the Bronx, AAR doesn't have the same regard for the victims of their own financial shenanigans. (via Michelle Malkin)

Harper Shakes Up The Office

Stephen Harper has apparently decided that the status quo has got to go -- along with a few members of his staff. The manager of his political office, chief of staff Phil Murphy, got his walking papers today:

Stephen Harper's chief of staff Phil Murphy has been given his walking papers, the latest in a series of aides to resign or be forced out of the troubled office of the Conservative party leader. ...

It was officially termed a resignation, but party insiders who spoke on condition of anonymity said Harper made it clear to Murphy that his time was up as right-hand man.

"He booted him," said one well-placed source. "And there are going to be more of these changes in the next little while."

The Canadian Press story analyzes that the departure of Murphy came for two main reasons: a failure to think strategically and personality conflicts within the party. The lack of strategic thinking made itself clear this past May, when the leading Liberals ran circles around the Tories despite the devastating revelations of the Gomery Inquiry. The latter reason might show itself less publicly, but the sudden and devastating defection of Belinda Stronach might also have something to do with Murphy's fall from grace.

Ultimately, though, the reasons for the shake-up would probably be analogous to any sports team that doesn't meet expectations. The coach gets pressured to perform, and he changes the staff around him to improve the performance. Harper has had trouble connecting with the Canadian people, and he needs to rethink his strategy for making himself and his platform resonate with the electorate. No politician does that all by himself, and Harper will need a staff with the appropriate strengths to assist him in succeeding. No staff however talented ever fully compensates for a mediocre politician either, despite the tired plot lines of Hollywood and the clichéd fantasies of the American Left.

Whether the fault for his lack of progress on those goals lies with Harper himself or a staff that lacked the capacity to deliver, we shall see soon enough. If the fall comes and goes with the poll numbers remaining as static as they have through the spring and summer, even with the worst poltical corruption case hanging over the heads of Paul Martin and his Liberal cronies, then we will know that the Tory staff didn't hold Harper back. At that point, the Conservatives may need to regroup and talk about the future of the coach himself.

Iraqis Extend The Constitutional Deadline

The Iraqi National Assembly has extended the deadline for the constitution for a week, creating a window for further negotiation but possibly setting precedent for ignoring whatever the committee produces:

Iraqi leaders failed to meet a key deadline Monday to finish a new constitution, stalling over the same fundamental issues of power-sharing — including federalism, oil wealth and Islam's impact on women — that have bedeviled the country since Saddam Hussein's ouster.

Just 20 minutes before midnight, parliament voted to give negotiators another seven days, until Aug. 22, to try to draft the charter. The delay was a strong rebuff of the Bush administration's insistence that the deadline be met, even if some issues were unresolved, to maintain political momentum and blunt Iraq's deadly insurgency.

"We should not be hasty regarding the issues and the constitution should not be born crippled," said Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari, a Shiite, after the parliament session, which lasted a bare 15 minutes. "We are keen to have an early constitution, but the constitution should be completed in all of its items."

Jaafari has it wrong. One can build a constitution in blocks, and the American Constitution provides the best example. The effort should have focused on producing a document that delineated all of the structural points on which there was agreement, and then later work on amendments for the other issues -- which the Assembly as a whole could do. Instead, they want to wait for perfection. Had that been the goal in 1789, we would still await our founding document for the American republic.

Worse yet, the Assembly's action contradicts their current legal code. The prevailing document under which they operate specifically declares that this government had to produce a Constitution or face new elections by August 15th. That deadline had meaning, not so much for its fixed point in time but for the nature of the interim government. The only formal task that this session had was to produce a permanent legal framework for the rule of law in Iraq. It doesn't help in that effort if they had to break their interim constitution to achieve that goal.

If they can get an agreement in the next week, then the damage should be minimal. However, Sunni instransigence might not play itself out in seven days -- and then what happens? Does this Assembly keep extending its own stay in power, instead of simply asking for whatever agreement that does exist be brought to them for ratification? The Bush administration may have limits to its influence on this effort, and for good reasons, but we must let Jaafari know that our patience also has its limits. We expect the rule of law to prevail, even when it proves inconvenient.

JSII: Belated Thanks

I forgot in my posts about Justice Sunday II to thank the people who put the event together for a job well done, especially in the way they took care of the bloggers. Amber, our primary contact on site with the organizers, went the extra mile to make sure we had power, connectivity, and comfort while we blogged away.

Charmaine Yoest graciously liaised between the JSII production and the bloggers, and we all enjoyed spending time with her and her wonderful husband, Jack, and their three children. Charmaine, you did a great job and you were a big part of the reason we all enjoyed ourselves so tremendously during our short period there.

What could be better than getting together with fellow bloggers? Especially when those bloggers include Joe Carter from Evangelical Outpost, Trey Jackson, Lance McMurray from Red State Rant, Leon at Redstate, Beth Woodfin at Yeah Right Whatever, local blogging legend Bill Hobbs, Jackson Miller (who gave us the unfortunately lone liberal viewpoint), and Karol Sheinin from Alarming News. Seeing Karol was a particular treat -- she and I first met at the Republican National Convention almost a year ago, and she's a great person to hang out with, let alone blog around.

Thanks, everyone, for a memorable time. And when I say 'memorable', I mean you should forget all of those secrets you discovered about me during the stay. Er, what? Someone took pictures? ... Oh, my ....

Addendum: I'm a bit quiet today on the blog -- catching up at work and taking a breath. I'll have more later on.

Saddam Treated Women Better: Howard Dean

Howard Dean gave his opponents another reason to look forward to his television appearances and his supporters another cringe-worthy moment in his interview on Face the Nation yesterday. Dean told CBS viewers that a genocidal Saddam provided a better environment than what he expects will come from a democratic Iraq:

Howard Dean, the Democratic National Committee chairman who was the hero of his party's anti-war wing before his gaffe-prone 2004 presidential candidacy crashed and burned in Iowa, still doesn't think the Iraqis are better off with dictator Saddam Hussein out of power and in prison.

Appearing on CBS' "Face the Nation" yesterday, the fiery former Vermont governor said, "It looks like today, and this could change, as of today it looks like women will be worse off in Iraq than they were when Saddam Hussein was president of Iraq."

Of course, those mass graves certainly show plenty of evidence that Saddam Hussein considered himself an equal-opportunity genocidist. Under Saddam, women had all the same opportunities as men -- to get tortured, raped, falsely imprisoned, starved off their land, and to serve as test subjects for his chemical-weapons programs, as in Halabja.

Mad How strikes again. How many strikes does he get before the DNC finally calls him out?

Obstructionism Blocking Reform Of FBI

The New York Times reports on an increasing tension between Congress and the FBI, souring relations between an otherwise well-regarded Robert Mueller and key decisionmakers. Congress blames Mueller and the FBI bureaucracy for slowing the pace of reforms, but neglects to mention that they have blocked the nominee for a key reform post for the past four months:

Disputes between the Justice Department and some of its Congressional allies over the Federal Bureau of Investigation's performance, leadership vacancies and management issues are spurring tensions at a time when the department is seeking to remake its antiterrorism operations.

Senator Arlen Specter, Republican of Pennsylvania, the influential chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said in an interview on Friday that he was deeply dissatisfied with the pace of reforms at the F.B.I. and that he hoped the national intelligence director's new role in overseeing its terrorism operations would spur greater accountability at the Justice Department.

"Bringing in the director of national intelligence is a firm statement of dissatisfaction with the performance of the bureau and the director," Robert S. Mueller III, Mr. Specter said.

"When you have all these issues where the F.B.I. has not performed, there's no doubt that the director is on the spot," he said in perhaps his harshest criticism to date of Mr. Mueller's performance. "He's not responsible for 9/11 - the problems came before his watch - but that was four years ago, and we've expected a lot of things to happen since then that have not happened."

One has to cast that statement in its proper context. First, the attacks came four years ago. However, Congress in its wisdom passed its oversight on 9/11 off to an "independent" commission instead of immediately investigating it on their own. That resulted in a three-year delay before any recommendations for change came to the FBI -- which then had to wait for a national election and all of the attendant security needs it brought.

Next, and more important, the Bush administration nominated Alice Fisher for the open post of the head of the Depart of Justice's criminal division, a key slot for coordination with intelligence. Since that has been identified as the key problem for prevention of terrorist attacks -- especially since the revelations of Able Danger -- that post should have been quickly considered and a vote taken in the Senate.

However, several Senators have apparently placed holds on Alice Fisher, allowing the post to remain dormant for over four months. Why has the Senate stalled the nomination? They claim that Fisher took part in meetings with the FBI in her prior position as the number-two person at the criminal division about detentions at Guantanamo. Senators use the e-mail that prompted Dick Durbin to declare that Gitmo was no different than Nazi deathcamps as proof of this issue, but the FBI says the agent who wrote the memo later said that Fisher never attended those meetings at all.

Senator Spector sounds a bit disingenuous with his outrage. One cannot expect people to act for reform without knowing the will of Congress, and it has been less than a year since Congress gave approval for the 9/11 Commission reform recommendations. Further, if Congress insists on blocking nominees from key posts in implementing that reform, then they need to take responsibility for the delays involved.

Move the nomination of Alice Fisher, Senator, and then you'll have something to complain about. Quit providing cover for the obstructionists who continue to use Gitmo for cheap partisan political points and make them justify themselves. As we saw earlier with Dick Durbin, they do nothing but embarrass themselves whenever they do it. Their obstructionism threatens the security of the US and it needs to stop immediately.

Iraqi Constitution May Proceed Without Unanimity

The AP reports this morning that Sunni intransigence may result yet again in political irrelevancy for their constituency, at least at the moment. The failure of the expanded Sunni contingent of the committee drafting the new Iraqi constitution to compromise on federalism and other issues has forced the Shi'ite and Kurdish committee members to threaten to send their draft to the National Assembly on a two-thirds vote rather than the unanimous consent that everyone wants:

With the deadline for the new constitution just hours away, Shiite and Kurdish leaders signaled they were prepared to submit the draft to parliament Monday — even over Sunni Arab objections.

Shiite lawmaker Hassan al-Sunnaid said there were "no deadlocks" and that the draft would be submitted to the National Assembly by the evening deadline. After al-Sunnaid spoke, however, Sunni Arab members Kamal Hamdoun and Haseeb Aref said there was no agreement on federalism and other divisive issues that have blocked an agreement for weeks.

No one wanted to see this as an outcome. The process certainly qualifies as democratic, but the Americans and British as well as the Shi'ites and Kurds want a result that the Sunnis can at least grudgingly support as the best possible result they can win through negotiation. However, the Sunnis have made it almost impossible to do that, at first by boycotting the elections to such a degree that they wound up with little representation in their parliament, and then to stall agreement for days and weeks by grandstanding for more and more concessions in the constitutional process.

No one has much sympathy for the Sunnis. They have acted, at best, as petulant children after finding themselves grounded. Their privileged status within Iraq has ended and they now face the future as a minority group within the country they ruthlessly dominated for decades. Now they come to the bargaining table demanding power outstripping their representation in Iraq and doing the best they can to politically kneecap the same populations that they recently used to literally kneecap, and worse. The irony is that the Sunnis reject the federalism that will allow them to have political control over those provinces where they comprise a majority. Instead, they want to continue their hegemony over the entire country and now hold the constitution hostage to get it.

Their unsympathetic status aside, the Shi'ites and the Kurds need the Sunnis to participate in the creation of the new constitution and to support it, especially in the National Assembly. Issuing a diktat to central Iraq guarantees a season of violence that will engulf the capital and the surrounding regions and bring the extremists out from all sides. The Shi'ites and Kurds can easily send the draft to the Assembly, but the result will fall short of the real goal of getting the Sunni population in harness with the rest of Iraq and averting sectarian war. Hopefully, this is more of a bluff than a reality.

JSII: The Press Coverage, Round 1

We just wrapped up Judicial Sunday II, and already the reviews have come in. In fact, one review apparently had already been written by Reuters, seeing as how it got posted at 6:48 PM CT, when we had just about hit the half-way mark of the event. The reporter doesn't offer anythihg terribly substantial, except to note that no one specifically endorsed John Roberts -- which was incorrect:

Christian conservative leaders used a "Justice Sunday" rally on Sunday to criticize activist judges but chose not to endorse U.S. President George W. Bush's nominee for the Supreme Court, John Roberts.

Organizers of the rally, which was co-sponsored by the prominent Christian conservative groups Family Research Center and Focus on the Family, denounced "judicial tyranny" and said they hoped to use the gathering as a "launching pad" to mobilize Christians against judges they say are overriding the Constitution with their decisions.

One of the leaders, Cathy Cleaver Ruse of the Family Research Center, called for emphasis on three issues -- a procedure that its critics call "partial-birth" abortion, abortion in general and euthanasia.

Actually, John Roberts got prominent mention during the actual event, but the Reuters reporter probably didn't hang around long enough to know that. Roberts may or may not have received a specific endorsement, but his picture got displayed while more than one speaker talked about the need to support judicial conservatives like Roberts. James Dobson told the audience that Roberts is a judicial conservative and originalist. He didn't literally say, "I endorse him", but the meaning was clear to everyone but Reuters.

Actually, we saw the Reuters reporter. She got testy when Tom DeLay didn't make it in time for the press conference before the event, and I suspect she left before seeing any of the actual speeches. This article reads as though she took the information from the press conference, even though the article gives the impression that she wrote it from the event itself.

UPDATE: It was James Dobson, not Chuck Colson, who mentioned Roberts so prominently. The other bloggers had better notes on the subject.

UPDATE II: Here's Reuters' second stab at it, filed at 10:21 PM:

Christian conservative leaders and U.S. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay rallied on Sunday to condemn activist judges and heap praise on U.S. President George W. Bush's nominee for the Supreme Court, John Roberts.

This reporter must have graduated from the John Kerry School of Journalism. The JSII failed to endorse John Roberts before they heaped praise on him. That's what having all those levels of editors will do for you...

JSII Live Blog

6:02 - The program kicks off with Dr. Jerry Sutton, who enthusiastically and a bit breathlessly introduces Tony Perkins. "God save the United States and this Honorable Court." Perkins starts by expounding on this traditional opening blessing from the Supreme Court, which then "kicked away" at religious liberties. He also talks about the imposition of a "radical social agenda". None of this sounds very surprising.

6:05 - "We do not claim the right to speak for every American. But we do claim the right to speak."

6:08 - Jim Daly says the ACLU would have protested against the notion of God-given rights had it existed in 1776. Well ...

6:09 - Dr. James Dobson appears on tape -- because he's in France? Hmmm. He speaks about judicial tyranny and how it opposes Lincoln's view of government of the people, by the people, and for the people. His two big complaints about the Supreme Court involve the ruling that barred the Ten Commandments display from government property and the Kelo case. This is a much better case to make -- it doesn't carry any religious weight and it has much more resonance among homeowners.

6:12 - He speaks about influence on the court from Western European opinion -- while he's in France. I just find that humorous. Maybe it's just me.

6:15 - Who gets to define marriage -- society through its legislature, or five people in robes? It's a good argument. Why not leave policy to the people, and where does one draw the line if we do otherwise?

6:18 - Tony Perkins loses Blogger Row on the baseball analogy.

6:20 - Tom DeLay comes to the podium, to a standing ovation. A momentary technical problem kept him from starting, but he gets another microphone and gets under way.

6:23 - If we see any protest inside the church, this is where it will come.

6:25 - "We've heard the arguments for partial-birth abortion and gay marriage ... we just disagree." Activist courts impose these on society without passing a single bill -- which DeLay calls "judicial supremacy". "The Constitution is not a vehicle for the manipulation of the public will."

6:27 - DeLay says that JSII isn't a protest against anything, but that's a little hard to swallow. It's obviously a protest against judicial activism, or "supremacy", if you will. It's a silly notion to argue otherwise. Someone must have said, You have to keep this positive.

6:29 - Judge Bork gets some air time by video, with a one-minute blurb.

6:31 - Chuck Colson says that this isn't a special-interest group; "we care about what is good for our society ... because that is what God wants us to do." He speaks about his prison ministry and speaks from the Bible to underscore his point -- and notes that Martin Luther King read the same verses from the Book of Amos during his protests.

6:34 - "We are not imposing -- we are proposing a better way to live." He reminds the audience to give up anger against their opponents but to understand that they just do not see.

6:35 - Tony Perkins pushing the "Save The Court" kit. He wants people to hold small meetings in their homes to play the DVD of this program. It's free, I think. They're also promoting Ten Commandment bookk covers for school textbooks. It sounds clever, but can you imagine going to a public school and having your parents make you use them? You'd need body armor to get through the day.

6:38 - We have another reference to a 'right' to homosexual sodomy. I'm no fan of the Lawrence decision, but why pick on 'homosexual' sodomy? It sounds like sodomy doesn't bother them at all, just the homosexuals. Can we just drop the footstamping about homosexuality?

6:41 - Bishop Harry Jackson is the best speaker so far. He points out that justice unfortunately knows color, gender, and so on. He wants judicial activism stopped so that the whims of five people cannot reinterpret the Constitution to harm them.

6:46 - Going to get a few pics, back in a few ...

6:56 - Bill Donahue of the Catholic League turned in a good stemwinder of a speech. He noted that Catholics and evangelicals had rarely worked together, but that the people should "get used to it" in the future. He picked out Mario Cuomo, John Kerry, and Ted Kennedy for particular criticism for their pro-abortion stands and votes, and told the people gathered here that he had more in common with the people here than with those Catholics.

6:58 - Zell Miller, for once, got a chance to sound calmer than the act he preceded. He gave a good speech, exhorting the audience to be "doers of the Word" and not just listeners. Very impressive.

7:03 - Jett Williams cut her song a bit short; according to the schedule we have, the program may be running a couple of minutes long. Now we have Phyllis Schlafly speaking, talking about judicial supremacy. She talks about the "heresy" of the notion that the Supreme Court decisions are the supreme law of the land. "Heresy", I think, is a particularly bad choice of words here.

7:08 - Phyllis does better with her baseball analogy than Tony Perkins did with his. She pointed out that umpires can't change the rules by, say, calling batters out with only two strikes. I said "better", not "great".

7:10 - Jordan Lawrence gets about a minute to make his point on video, and he gets right to the point. He notes that in a contract dispute, judges look at the literal language of the contract to make a decision about the intent of the parties involved. That, he says, is how the Constitution should be applied, instead of adapting it to situations that clearly it doesn't address.

7:15 - Cathy Cleaver Ruse also notes that courts have "enshrined homosexual activity" as a Constitutional right. I know I'm puzzled; is she arguing that we should outlaw homosexuality? If so, that's pretty darned dumb. I understand about controlling the definition of marriage, even if I disagree with her, but this just won't fly. Again, I don't think that Lawrence v Texas should have ever come to the Supreme Court, but I also think it was a stupid law that Texas should have repealed decades ago. Footstomping over what two consenting unrelated adults do in a bedroom in terms of its legality plays into the worst stereotypes of this kind of rally. Stick to the legal basics.

7:21 - Rev. Ted Haggard says that Christians are citizens with all the same rights as anyone else, and that their voices belong in the policy debate. The nation, he says, was not designed for atheists to exclsuively control public policy.

7:24 - Dr. Jerry Sutton: The most religious nation in the world is India; the most irreligious is Sweden. We are a nation of Indians, he says, ruled by Swedes. That was funny; his suggestion that Terri Schiavo was murdered by her adulterous husband was not. I missed the exact quote, but that may crank up the crowd here but will result in a terrific backlash later on. (Trust me, I remember my comments section, and I can see it coming.)

7:26 - Rebecca St. James wraps it up. The Australian singer performs her Christian easy-rock music as a cap to the Justice Sunday II program. I've never heard her before. She's got a nice voice, and during the press conference she showed some personality.

First impressions: All in all, the program surprised me in its professionalism. This was not a rally with some inconsequential media component. It showed superb planning and production values and a very clear and consistent message.

However sympathetic I am to the main message, I have some reservations about the secondary messages. As a Christian, I also have some reservations about staging this in a church. Bearing in mind that I am a guest here, it still occurs to me that putting this kind of show on here would discourage others who disagree with the politics to come to worship here. I think churches need to ask themselves which message takes priority in the sanctuary -- politics or Christ? It is a concern that some of the other bloggers shared during the program.

We also need to see more clarity on the message of judicial restraint instead of the complaints about public policy, especially homosexuality. That will exist regardless of the status of the courts, and I feel strongly that the role of public policy should not extend to personal relationships between consenting adults. Focusing as much attention on homosexuality makes the message sound a lot more like they want to target gays rather than the much more realistic and desirable goal of rolling back judicial supremacy.

JSII: The Protestors

No political event can consider itself significant without drawing at least a smattering of protestors. Justice Sunday II drew about twenty of them, mostly quietly marching across the street from the venue. This captured most of them about an hour before the broadcast:

There didn't seem to be much enthusiasm for making noise, at least not until we came out with cameras. When I attempted to wish them well and that the heat and humidity wouldn't bother them too much, they responded by yelling, "It's not as hot here in Baghdad, with not enough body armor on!! BRING OUR BOYS HOME!!"

No, I'm not kidding.

Our hands-down favorite sign on Protest Row showed some hostility towards men with certain health-care issues:

Apparently, women can have a choice to have a baby or not, but men can't choose to have an erection. It seems to me that this argument can't stand on its own. All kidding aside, what the heck does Viagra have to do with the court system, or even abortion? It just shows how silly protestors get when they want to draw attention to themselves, a bit of human nature that is unfortunately bipartisan.

Able Danger: More From Other Sources

Jim Geraghty has more information on Able Danger, apart from Curt Weldon, whose own credibility appears to have suddenly started listing to starboard. Mike Kelly from the Bergen Record got to Weldon's source and started asking questions directly to one of the Able Danger team:

A former member of the military intelligence team told me in an interview that it had enough data to raise suspicions. "But we were blocked from passing it to the FBI."

The connect-the-dots tracking by the team was so good that it even knew Atta conducted meetings with the three future hijackers. One of those meetings took place at the Wayne Inn. That's how close all this was - to us and to being solved, if only the information had been passed up the line to FBI agents or even to local cops. ...

The Able Danger sleuth, whose interview with me was arranged by the staff of Rep. Curt Weldon, R-Pa., asked that his name not be revealed so he could maintain his top-secret counter-terror role. He emerged from the shadows of spying and intelligence analysis last week because he wanted to set the record straight.

One of his targets is the 9/11 commission. The commission's staff, he says, ignored him when he approached them on two occasions to spell out Able Danger's work.

Another target are Pentagon lawyers. The sleuth says he and other Able Danger team members became so concerned during the summer of 2000 that they asked their superiors in the Pentagon's special operations command for permission to approach the FBI. Their superiors approached Pentagon legal experts. Those experts turned down the request.

If the Commission's response had its virtue in its details, then Kelly's scoop in the Bergen Record matches it. The obvious conclusion -- someone is lying, either the Commission or the intelligence source for Kelly and Weldon, or possibly everyone. The Commission and Weldon appear to have enough problems with credibility, especially the former after the denials and evasions they released all week long. Congress has to step in and find out what really happened with Able Danger.

JSII Press Conference

3:03 PM CT - We're waiting to get the press conference started -- it should have started a couple of moments ago, but we have had a couple of technical difficulties ...

3:07 - The local Fox affiliate is interviewing Joe Carter while we wait for the press conference to start.

3:12 - Tony Perkins from the FRC opens with his statement and introductions. Rebecca St. James and Chuck Colson are probably the two most well-known names here ...

3:14 - Chuck Colson says he can't understand why the New York Times considers this so controversial. All they want to see is justice, not money or power. The message of justice has always been central to Christianity. He said he thanks God that Martin Luther King fought for justice 40 years ago ...

3:17 - Ted Haggard: When churches stop adhering to the Bible and instead rely on individual interpretations, then they lose their foundation of truth and float along on personalities instead. The same is true with judges who don't stick to the literal and limited words of the Constitution. He argues, he says, for the rule of law instead of personalities.

3:19 - Jim Daly, Focus on the Family: We will spare no funding to push for conservative judges. He points out the overwhelming rejection of gay marriage in every election where voters had the option to choose.

3:21 - Bishop Harry Jackson of Washington DC wants to give the view of the African-American community. "If justice matters to anyone in America, it matters to minorities..." They don't want maverick judges changing the law at the last minute. He uses a sports analogy to illuminate that. He wants justice based on the Bible -- that to me crosses a line. I want justice based on the Constitution. Otherwise, good strong speech.

3:25 - Cathy Cleaver Ruse talks about the enshrinement of pornographers as Constitutional heroes and abortionists as a Constitutionally endorsed vocation. She is one of the few Catholics on the panel, by the way ...

3:27 - Rebecca St. James, an Australian Grammy-winning Christian singer, speaks with some passion about talking to young people and teaching them right from wrong, the consequences of sin, and her efforts to teach that through her music.

3:29 - First question from a filmmaker putting together a documentary about trying to find God. He asked about mixing faith and the political system. Tony Perkins notes that they do not claim to speak for everyone, only for themselves, and they have no desire to impose but just to participate. The rebuttal question asked about the "tyranny of the majority", but Chuck Colson notes that democracy means that everyone participates. He says that evangelicals sometimes talk "triumphalistically", a sin from which they should repent.

3:35 - Reuters wants to know if Tom DeLay is ducking the press (he's not here yet). One of the panelists says "he's delayed".

3:38 - Bill Frist was not uninvited -- they wanted a Congressman this time after having a Senator the last time. They say that Frist's position on stem cells have no bearing on the issue of justices.

3:40 - Q: What would happen to abortion and homosexuality without activist judges? A: It will move the issues to the legislatures where they belong. You never reach consensus or agreement without the participation of the people.

3:43 - Bishop Jackson notes the difference between the Constitutional process (amendment) and interpretation - and that the best protection that minorities can have is to insist on the process rather than individual interpretation. Ruse: No one benefits when judges act as a superlegislature. Women's rights and civil rights actually come from the process and not interpretation. [CE: Plessy v Ferguson gives a great example of how interpretation hobbled minorities in the past.]

Recap: The press appears skeptical, at best, of the idea that JSII is all about simply participating in the political process. One of the concerns brought up (by the first questioner) is the affect on the church of diluting the word of God by using the pulpit for temporal politics. That, of course, is a question that has afflicted just about every world religion of any heft across the millenia. We aren't likely to answer it here, but it is an interesting question to ponder.

I wanted to ask how Ted Haggard and Bishop Jackson could reconcile their differing statemens about basing the judiciary on the Constitution and the Bible, but I couldn't get their attention during the Q&A.

UPDATE: I got a chance to pose my question to Rev. Haggard afterwards:

Rev. Haggard: Just as churches get order from the Bible, justices get order from the laws ... [Bishop Jackson] was saying that there was a process to amend [the Constitution]. If "living Constitution" means a Constitution that can be amended and changed, then we embrace that. If "living Constitution" means that words don't mean today what they meant when they were written, so that we can add meaning to the words or change the meaning of words, then we're not for that. He was advocating that justices, rather than add their own meaning, to change the Constitution. What we say is that there are two ways to change the Constitution. One is two-thirds of the House, two-thirds of the Senate, two thirds of the states, and the President's signature -- or -- five Supreme Court justices.

CQ: And that's the part you want to get rid of.

Rev. Haggard: [laughs] Well, obviously. It's easiest to change it by persuading five Supreme Court justices. So that the foundation of our system is based on judicial restraint. If a case comes before the judges that shouldn't be in the judiciary, that they throw it back into the legislature. That has been what the current court has been unwilling to do.

Justice Sunday II: More Disclosure ...

In the interest of full disclosure, Lance from Red State Rant picked up the check for lunch before the event today ...

Trey Jackson, Joe Carter, and I enjoyed the lunch with Lance from Red State Rant. Lance from Red State Rant assured us that he expects nothing in return for his graciousness and hospitality. I should also mention that Lance from Red State Rant has provided us with transportation while we stay here, and Lance from Red State Rant is one heck of a good host. One has to travel quite a bit before finding folk as terrific as Lance from Red State Rant. So you may hear me mention Lance from Red State Rant often during the live blog, but it isn't because Lance from Red State Rant insisted on it.

Trust me.

Able Danger: Commission Response Doesn't Add Up

Tom Maguire and Jim Geraghty have done a fine job this morning dissecting the latest official, four-page response from the 9/11 Commission about the Able Danger program and its supposed identification of Mohammed Atta as an al-Qaeda operative a year before the attacks. Both Tom and Jim believe this response puts the onus back on Curt Weldon and his sources to provide more evidence that refutes Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton.

In one sense, that's correct; in fact, I'd say that the onus has never really left Weldon in that he needs to get as much of the facts in the open now as possible. However, I remain deeply skeptical of this latest response, as much for the detail it provides as anything else:

On July 12, 2004, as the drafting and editing process for the Report was coming to an end (the Report was released on July 22, and editing continued to occur through July 17), a senior staff member, Dieter Snell, accompanied by another staff member, met with the officer at one of the Commission’s Washington, D.C. offices. A representative of the DOD also attended the interview. According to the memorandum for the record on this meeting, prepared the next day by Mr. Snell, the officer said that ABLE DANGER included work on “link analysis,” mapping links among various people involved in terrorist networks. According to this record, the officer recalled seeing the name and photo of Mohamed Atta on an “analyst notebook chart” assembled by another officer (who he said had retired and was now working as a DOD contractor). The officer being interviewed said he saw this material only briefly, that the relevant material dated from February through April 2000, and that it showed Mohamed Atta to be a member of an al Qaeda cell located in Brooklyn. The officer complained that this information and information about other alleged members of a Brooklyn cell had been soon afterward deleted from the document (“redacted”) because DOD lawyers were concerned about the propriety of DOD intelligence efforts that might be focused inside the United States. The officer referred to these as “posse comitatus” restrictions. Believing the law was being wrongly interpreted, he said he had complained about these restrictions up his chain of command in the U.S. Special Operations Command, to no avail.

And that's just in reference to the July 2004 interview. For the October 2003 briefing, the Commission response runs two pages, describing in detail how the Commission requested and received documentation from the DoD and other sources. They claim that their staff carefully analyzed it then, and this week reviewed all of it a second time to see if they missed the name Mohammed Atta. They claim that it does not appear anywhere in their records.

That describes an amazing amount of activity for a program and topic which no one recalled at all just five days ago:

Lee Hamilton, Aug 8: "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."

Commissioner John Lehman, Aug 8: "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?"

The New York Times on Al Felzenberg, Aug 9: 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.

Clearly the Commission has little credibility left. Five days ago, no one could remember the July 2004 briefing, and the Commission only admitted to it when pressed by the New York Times. Four days later, they have a prepared rebuttal with everything but pictures showing how they gave the allegations serious consideration but ultimately rejected it. Why? As I posted yesterday, the naval officer did not have any documentation with him -- which would, incidentally, have landed him in Leavenworth for life -- and the time frame didn't match up with the Commission's understanding of when Atta entered the US.

Color me unimpressed. If the Commission had this level of understanding about Able Danger and the July 2004 briefing, why did it deny knowledge of the program and the subsequent briefing that named Atta? The statement itself shows the absurdity of taking Hamilton, Kean, and the Commission at face value.

Tom Maguire notes another potential conflict of interest at work as well. Philip Zelikow, the Commission staffer who wrote the report, has some interest in the amount of credibility that data-mining receives in the intelligence community:

Before joining the 9/11 Commission Mr. Zelikow was "the Executive Director of the Markle Foundation Task Force on National Security in the Information Age (2002-2003). This task force investigated ways of developing an information network to prevent terrorism while protecting citizens' civil liberties."

How about that? The fellow who led the first Able Danger de-briefing was also an expert in terrorism and information management. Did he, or the Markle Foundation, have thoughts about data-mining? Indeed they did - we take this from their press release:

As the recent controversies surrounding DARPA's Terrorist Information Awareness program and an Army contractor's use of Jet Blue passenger data demonstrate, government access to, and use of, privately held data remains a vexing problem. In its report, the Task Force notes that the government should effectively utilize the valuable information that is held in private hands, but only within a system of rules and guidelines designed to protect civil liberties. Since it is not possible for the nation to harden all potential targets against terrorist attack, the Task Force concludes that the government must rely on information to detect, prevent, and effectively respond to attacks. The travel, hotel, financial, immigration, health, or educational records of a person suspected by the government to be a terrorist may hold information that is vital to unveiling both his intentions and those of other terrorists.

However, the Task Force also concludes that the government should not have routine access to personally identifying information even if it is widely available to the public. If government is to sustain public support for its efforts, it must demonstrate that the information it seeks to acquire is genuinely important to the security mission and is obtained and used in a way that minimizes its impact on privacy and civil liberties.

Does this mean that Mr. Zelikow would prefer to quash news of "Able Danger", if it really had been a successful data-mining program? Who knows?

Now we have Jamie Gorelick, whose actions in promoting a policy preventing collaboration between intelligence and law enforcement in the Clinton administration contributed greatly to our failure to 'connect the dots' prior to 9/11, joined by Philip Zelikow among the Commission staff with axes to grind in this effort. Both, coincidentally, have specific conflicts with the manner in which intelligence gets collected and coordinated. Given that the Commission had been specifically tasked to investigate these exact kinds of questions, how did they wind up in these critical positions?

As I have posted earlier, Congress has to step in and get to the bottom of these questions. Obviously the model that created this Commission does not work; it allows for zero accountability and rampant conflict of interest. Elected officials at least have accountability for their actions, and it is far past time for them to take primary responsibility for the 9/11 investigation.

UPDATE: John Podhoretz finds this convincing, and he's a pretty bright guy. I'd say this falls short of a credible explanation, for all the reasons I put above, but even if the Able Danger story got exaggerated by Weldon, we had at least one naval officer attached to a datamining program that claimed we had knowledge of Atta. Why didn't the final report mention that? Again, they recommend not only increased datamining in the report, but a more coordinated effort to provide it (see pages 388-9 of the report), without ever explaining why. Was there other datamining projects that came up with even better intelligence, and why aren't they mentioned in the report?

It may turn out that Weldon is all wet, but from the terrible performance coming from the Commission this week on their first serious challenge, full of falsehoods and walkbacks, no one owes them an apology.

Also, Mark Steyn has thoughts on relying on INS records to categorically state when Atta first came to the US and how.

UPDATE II: John Podhoretz notes this passage from Time Magazine:

In a particularly dramatic scene in Weldon’s book, Countdown to Terror, the Pennsylvania Republican described personally handing to then-Deputy National Security Adviser Steve Hadley, just after Sept. 11, an Able Danger chart produced in 1999 identifying Atta. But Weldon told TIME he’s no longer certain Atta’s name was on that original document. The congressman says he handed Hadley his only copy. Still, last week he referred reporters to a recently reconstructed version of the chart in his office where, among dozens of names and photos of terrorists from around the world, there was a color mug shot of Mohammad Atta, circled in black marker.

That's pretty damned lame, Rep. Weldon. It doesn't add anything to your credibility, either.

Winning Wars That Lose Battles

The people of Kyrgyzstan have successfully and formally completed their first clean democratic election, confirming interim president Kurmanbek Bakiev as their new leader after a popular revolt drove off the autocratic Askar Akayev out of office. The creation of a true democracy in the former Soviet Central Asia republics serves as yet another victory for democratization, but it may come with a price for the Bush administration:

Kurmanbek Bakiev has been officially inaugurated as president of Kyrgyzstan, a month after winning the Central Asian state's elections. ...

Mr Bakiev, 55, who praised the conduct of the July elections, has said his main goal is to eradicate corruption.

He took the oath of office on the country's constitution in front of dignitaries in Bishkek's central square, following a military parade.

Mr Bakiev has said he will expect professionalism from members of his government, who he says will serve on the basis of merit rather than connections.

For his forward-looking inaugural address, Bakiev noted the need to grow the economy for the Kyrgyz in order to create jobs and raise the standard of living. He wants to focus on energy production and tourism to pull one of the most poverty-stricken populations into a more prosperous and stable state. It's a smart approach, and one suited best to democracy; people who see their economic situations improving will have little incentive to oppose the new political system, leading to a more stable environment for capital investment and job creation.

The United States will no doubt want to help Bakiev achieve those goals, as another stable democracy on China's doorstep (along with India and several other former Soviet republics leaning that way) will foster an example of how people can live and prosper under their own leadership, rather than an imposition of power by autocrats and worse.

However, we may have to pay for that win with yet another base closure in Central Asia. Bakiev spoke about asking the Americans to close our Bishkek base, which supports our operations in Afghanistan, in his first major speech after the election. He has not spoken of it since, but the expectation has been set. With luck and some hard work at State and Defense, we may change his mind or at least get a lengthy delay.

Even if we cannot prevent the closure, it still represents a good trade in the long term strategic goal of democratization. After all, if we can transform that region through democracy, we will find that we have little need to stage military bases there at all. It is a small battle to lose when the overall war has been won.

Starring Kofi Annan As Archie Bunker

The Oil-For-Food scandal at the UN has begun to resemble a hilarious reconception of All In The Family, with yet another nepotistic element of UN corruption. First, OFF gave us the Kofi Annan-Kojo Annan connection to the major OFF contractor Cotecna. Next we found the Alexander Yakovlev connection to his son Dmitry, who got paid big bucks while his dad granted Dmitry's employer large UN contracts. (Alexander also got some cash himself, as he admitted when he pled guilty last week to bribery and corruption charges.)

Now the London Times tells us that another Annan has popped up in the Volcker Inquiry's investigation. Investigators have discovered financial connections between Kobina, Kofi's brother, and one of the central OFF figures at the heart of the corruption scandal:

THE official investigation into corruption in the £20 billion United Nations oil for food programme is now looking at the brother of Kofi Annan, the UN secretary-general.

Kobina Annan, the Ghanaian ambassador to Morocco, is said by investigators to be “connected” to an African businessman at the centre of the scandal. ...

Inquiries into Kobina are at an early stage and he has not been interviewed.

However, investigators are understood to suspect that Michael Wilson, an African businessman, and Kobina had a business relationship at the time of the scandal.

A source close to the investigation said: “We believe Kobina Annan may be involved with Michael Wilson and Kojo Annan. We know there is a connection between Kobina and Wilson.”

Michael Wilson's name last appeared in CQ exactly two months ago, when two memos from Wilson specifically connected Kofi to the award of the Cotecna contract. At the time, The Guardian (UK) provided the background which showed Wilson's long and personal relationship to Kojo Annan and his father Kofi, whom he called "uncle":

The document is a memo from Michael Wilson, the vice-president of Cotecna Inspection SA, which employed Mr Annan's son Kojo. ... The Associated Press last night reported that a second memo from Mr Wilson had come to light expressing his confidence Cotecna would get the bid because of "effective but quiet lobbying" in New York diplomatic circles.

Mr Wilson is a childhood friend of Kojo Annan's and reportedly refers to Kofi Annan as "uncle". His memo was dated December 4 1998. A week later the company won the contract.

New links to Kofi's brother (Kojo's uncle) will make that Cotecna award look even more suspicious. The question that Volcker will undoubtedly need to ask will be whether the financial ties between Kobina and Wilson came before or after the Cotecna contract. Either answer will devastate Cotecna and the Annans, of course, but if they came after the contract, it will demonstrate a payoff to the Annan family for the award.

The Annan family should select a memorable place for their annual reunion this year, if they have inclination to hold those kinds of events. Next year, they may find themselves booked ... in all senses of the word.

Former Taliban Reconcile Themselves To Democracy

The Washington Post reports that the amnesty program in Afghanistan continues to show success. Not only have large numbers of former Taliban supporters surrendered themselves to the new, democratic Karzai government, a few of them have reassimilated to the point where they have declared themselves as candidates for elections. The reconstructed former Islamists have had to understand that Afghanis do not want a return to the seventh century as a prerequisite to serious candidacy:

"The Taliban are like a medicine for Afghanistan that has expired," said Khaksar, 42, a white-bearded religious scholar who is running in parliamentary elections scheduled for September. "They want people to live like in the time of our Holy Prophet. I am in favor of how he lived, too. But it's impossible to bring that time back. The people of Afghanistan need something new."

It was a surprising assessment from a man who was once a senior official of the Taliban government -- an Islamic group so extreme that it outlawed television. Hundreds of Taliban fighters continue to wage a guerrilla war against the Afghan government nearly four years after the group was ousted.

But Khaksar's candidacy also points to a central paradox of the Taliban insurgency. While the extremist militia is mounting an unprecedented wave of attacks, apparently aimed at sabotaging the elections, several hundred former Taliban members have returned from exile in Pakistan to join a government reconciliation program. A handful of well-known Taliban figures have even decided to run for parliament.

The stepped-up attacks from the remnants of the Taliban regime -- comprising the hardliner core around Mullah Omar -- intend on disrupting elections and undermining confidence in the democratic process. However, the reappearance of so many figures from the old regime like Khaksar lends a legitimacy that Omaar's rockets and sniper attacks only reaffirms. The hundreds of former regime elements coming home and endorsing democracy, and in some cases participating publicly and enthusiastically in it, exposes Omar and his dwindling band as terrorists interested only in reimposing tyranny and the Islamist Dark Age which Afghanistan only recently escaped.

As the Post points out, the utter lack of an Islamist party with Taliban-like policies gives another hopeful sign of the allure of freedom. Even the former Taliban functionaries show little support for the former regime's policies. Khaksar says the holy-war ideology holds no appeal to himself or anyone else. Other candidates also find it necessary to distance themselves from policies such as the banning of music; one former Taliban candidate says he doesn't like music, but whether a ban is necessary is a question for the courts. A few deny they ever supported the Taliban at all, although from interviews done by N.C. Aizenman, that strategy appears unlikely to fool many of the voters.

The speed and relative ease of transition for this reconstruction gives some promise for the future of Afghanistan's democracy. Even though Omar's remnants still take potshots from the mountains, the Afghanistan people have mostly turned to face the future. They want an end to civil war and oppression, and for the first time in ages (perhaps ever), they see it in front of them. The amnesty gives everyone a chance to set old bitterness aside and come together not under one ironclad rule that brooks no dissent, but under a shared sense of self-government and a new sense that the people of Afghanistan can create the future they want for themselves.

Dafydd: Contiguationness

I think I think too much.

Or maybe everyone else thinks too little. For instance, John "Hindrocket" Hinderaker of Power Line (and the new news and blogs blog Power Line News -- check it out!) added a codicil to a post by Scott "Big Trunk" Johnson (or is that Scott "Big Johnson" Trunk?). The post was about the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) voting to condemn the Israeli security fence, presumably on the grounds that it might give Israel some security. John added more information which included the following statement from the ELCA:

This Churchwide Strategy for ELCA Engagement in Israel and Palestine... describes the fragile hope for a just and peaceful solution that is growing in the region following the recent Palestinian elections. It also expresses a sense of urgency, calling for strong and concerted action so that: 1) the possibility of secure, contiguous, and viable Israeli and Palestinian states is not eroded by the placement of the separation wall and Israeli settlements in the occupied territories....

Contiguous?

I have been hearing for years now the demand by Palestinians and their buddies in America and Europe that the Palestinian land be "contiguous." Contiguous, of course, means "connecting without a break," as in the contiguous forty-eight states of the continental United States.

What the Palestinians mean by a "contiguous" state of Palestine is that they want to be able to walk from Ramallah in the West Bank to the beach in Gaza City without ever having to set foot inside the hated Zionist Entity.

But nearly everyone -- even the Lutherans -- agrees that Israel needs contiguity as well, so that Ariel Sharon can waddle from Nazareth in the north to the Negev Desert in the south without ever having to learn Arabic to order some matzoh ball soup.

Here is where I'm having a difficult time. Take a look at this map of Israel and the territories. What is wrong with this picture?

The most obvious problem is that the West Bank and the Gaza Strip are inconveniently in two lumps, east and west, separated by Israel. But the only way to make Gaza and the West Bank contiguous would be to add a Palestinian corridor connecting the two... say, from Gaza City to Hebron. And of course, if you do that, then Israel is sliced in two, north and south, losing all that great contiguity stuff.

Thinking topologically, the problem is solvable. For example, Israel could create a V-shaped corridor that rolls down the southwestern border between Israel and Egypt (from Gaza to Elat), then bends sharply upward past En Yavah and Hazeva (can you tell I'm just reading off the map?) to the Dead Sea, then bending around the western shore to just touch the West Bank at En Gedi. It could be about ten feet wide, which wouldn't take too much land from the Israelis but would still leave plenty of room for columns of trekking Palestinians to pass each other, provided they all marched in single file.

But I'm not exactly sure that the Egyptians would appreciate seeing their border with the Palestinians increase from about forty feet, or however wide the Gaza Strip is, to a solid 140 miles; the Egyptians don't tend to like the Palestinians very much, which is why Egypt refused to take back Gaza when Israel tried to practically give it away (such a deal!) And the Jordanians, despite being mostly Palestinian themselves, as far as the British were concerned, don't want such a large border with the West-Bank Palestinians either... the East-Bank Palestinians having always looked down upon the West-Bank Palestinians as country bumpkins who don't even know how to throw a good gunfire-in-the-air celebration.

The alternative route to connect the West Bank and Gaza, up north past Syria and down south past Lebanon, is right out: Hezbollah has already staked out that territory, and they wouldn't cotton to any rival gangs horning in on their racket. Besides, the Golan Heights would require significant hiking skills, unless they built a chair-lift.

Of course, we live in a three-dimensional world, not on a 2-D map. Let's not forget the possibility of a really, really long bridge arching up from the West Bank, rising gently to a thousand feet or so (escalators can relieve the Palestinians of the necessity of learning how to mount that chair-lift) then drifting back down to ground level inside Gaza. But here, the Israelis would surely object, worrying that fun-loving Palestinian youths might lean over the railing and drop brickabats or burning bags of doggie-dirt on the heads of unsuspecting tourists.

The penultimate possibility is a tunnel underneath Israel, connecting the two pieces of the new state of Palestine. The Palestinians have much recent experience with tunnels, having dug one from Gaza into Egypt not too long ago. But the danger is that, in their excitement at contiguizing their new state, they may overshoot the Gaza Strip, which is quite narrow, and tunnel all the way into the Mediterranean Sea. The resulting gush of water could turn the Jordan River into the Jordan Swamp, and the Palestinians would lose a fortune on all the sand-colored camouflage they've prepared (for hunting purposes only, of course).

This leaves only one solution that would be acceptable to Israeli and Palestinian alike; it involves remembering that we not only live in 3-D but in particular on the surface of a sphere: the Palestinians could build a land bridge east from the West Bank all the way around the Earth to Gaza. But as this is the only option -- the final solution, one might say, to the contiguity problem -- then they had better get cracking: at that latitude, and deducting the 70 miles or so from the west edge of Gaza to the east border of the West Bank, they still have another 21,496 miles to go... and they haven't even poured the first hundred yards of concrete yet.

I hope you see my point: with just a little bit of thought and creativity, even such a seemingly impossible condition as mutual contiguity can be solved. At least in theory; the rest is just engineering details.