Able Danger: Trouble In River City

Earlier this evening, I did a quick post on a passage in Kenneth Timmerman's new book Countdown to Crisis that matches up to the timeframe when Captain Scott Phillpott went to the 9/11 Commission to insist that his secret datamining unit had identified Mohammed Atta as a potential al-Qaeda terrorist in early 2000. Timmerman, whose book came out prior to the Able Danger revelations, notes that 9/11 Commission report author and staff director Philip Zelikow called his subordinates in for a meeting at that same point in time to review explosive new information that tied Iran to al-Qaeda.

In my last post, the analyst who first reviewed the documents reacted by saying, "There's trouble in River City," a line from the musical The Music Man, a story about a lovable con artist who delivers in the end. Reading further into Timmerman's Chapter 24 will give the impression that the reference might apply well to the Commission and its report. The story of these documents highlight the manner in which the Commission acted to protect predetermined narratives, even in the face of overwhelming contradictory evidence, for motives which appear at best murky and at worst partisan to their core.

Timmerman writes that the CIA had communicated repeatedly to the Commission what he calls The Concept: Iran had nothing to do with al-Qaeda, and especially 9/11. Nothing would shake them from that belief, not evidence nor intelligence, both of which turned up in spades. It sounds quite familiar to the same meme about al-Qaeda and Iraq; despite the numerous connections between Saddam and al-Qaeda, the official line remained that AQ conducted the attacks entirely on their own, without Iraqi assistance. Any evidence or intel to the contrary got dismissed or completely ignored.

So it was with the fresh documents discovered by Zelikow's team at the time Phillpott told them about Able Danger. Their team leader on intel, an old CIA hand, spent his Sunday reviewing these explosive documents:

What the team leader found that Sunday morning was nothing less than a complete documented record of operational ties between Iran and al-Qaeda for the critical months just prior to September 11. "The documents showed Iran was facilitating the travel of al-Qaeda operatives, ordering Iranian border inspectors not to put telltale stamps on their passports, thus keeping their travel documents clean," the team leader told me. "The Iranians were fully aware that they were helping operatives who were part of an organization preparing attacks against the United States." ...

Most troubling among the seventy-five documents the team read that Sunday morning in July were masses of reports on Iranian intelligence operative Imad Mugniyeh, who is described in the 9/11 Commission Report as "a senior Hezbollah operative." The raw reporting showed that well before 9/11, the United States had hard intelligence that the Tehran regime had appointed Mugniyeh as the point man for operational contacts with Bin Laden's men. That coincided with the information Zakeri brought to the CIA in Baku four months before the attack.

If anyone had been on the radar screen of U.S. intelligence collectors, it was Imad Mugniyeh. Before 9/11, he had killed more Americans than any other terrorist. Putting Mugniyeh together with bin Laden was like throwing a match onto a pile of oil-soaked rags. And yet no alarm bells seemed to have gone off. Mugniyeh is not even named in he final commission report.

In fact, not much of this material makes it into the report at all. Mugniyeh didn't make the cut, despite evidence that he facilitated more than half of the muscle hijackers' entry during the late spring of 2001 into the United States for their 9/11 attacks. This, the CIA rationalized, only proved that the hijackers traveled through Iran, and not to Iran. However, that still leaves an open question about why their passports did not reflect those visits -- a question that the Commission never bothers to bring up, let alone answer.

Nor does the Commission bring up another story that Timmerman reveals in his book (pages 7-9). On July 26, 2001, an Iranian intelligence agent walked into the American embassy in Baku, Azerbaijan, and asked to see the CIA chief. He finally talks to two CIA functionaries: "Joan", who assesses his story and decides it needs further review, and "George", a CIA case handler who laughs Zakeri out of the embassy. The story?

There's going to be a big attack on America on the twentieth of Shahrivar, Zakeri insisted. That's the date my boss told us to be ready. Six people who have been trained as pilots have just left Iran.

George consulted a calendar that gave the corresponding Western dates. So we're talking about September 10, right? I'll mark my date book, he added sarcastically. He paid Zakeri a few hundred dollars for his time and sent him away.

July 26 came just two weeks after Mohammed Atta met with Ramzi Binalshibh in Madrid to finalize the date for the 9/11 attacks. At that meeting, Binalshibh pressed Atta to pick a date, as Osama bin Laden needed to send the information through the network in time for everyone to prepare for the operation. Atta said he needed five or six weeks before he could coordinate well enough for a particular date, and only promised a week's notice -- or so Binalshibh told the FBI (Commission report, page 244):

Binalshibh says he told Atta that Bin Ladin wanted the attacks carried out as soon as possible. Bin Ladin, Binalshibh conveyed, was worried about having so many operatives in the United States.Atta replied that he could not yet provide a date because he was too busy organizing the arriving hijackers and still needed to coordinate the timing of the flights so that the crashes would occur simultaneously. Atta said he required about five to six weeks before he could provide an attack date. Binalshibh advised Atta that Bin Ladin had directed that the other operatives not be informed of the date until the last minute.Atta was to provide Binalshibh with advance notice of at least a week or two so that Binalshibh could travel to Afghanistan and report the date personally to Bin Ladin.

However, two weeks later Zakeri had the date for the attacks and a good description of the method to be used. The CIA handler misinterpreted 20 Shahrivar; in fact, that date came out to 11 September. None of this gets any mention in the 9/11 Commission report either, despite the testimony from Zakeri being read out in a German court in January 2004. When Timmerman checked out Zakeri's stories against known data, it came up correct. However, when Timmerman contacted the CIA about Zakeri, they reacted uncharacteristically hostile to Zakeri -- but they refused to answer when asked about the July 26, 2001 meeting.

So what did the Commission finally report about the wealth of evidence about Iranian involvement in the 9/11 plot? Nothing, or close enough to it. In the end, it covered less than a page of the 500+ pages of the report, and concluded thus:

In sum, there is strong evidence that Iran facilitated the transit of al Qaeda members into and out of Afghanistan before 9/11, and that some of these were future 9/11 hijackers.There also is circumstantial evidence that senior Hezbollah operatives were closely tracking the travel of some of these future muscle hijackers into Iran in November 2000. However,we cannot rule out the possibility of a remarkable coincidence—that is, that Hezbollah was actually focusing on some other group of individuals traveling from Saudi Arabia during this same time frame, rather than the future hijackers.

We have found no evidence that Iran or Hezbollah was aware of the planning for what later became the 9/11 attack.At the time of their travel through Iran, the al Qaeda operatives themselves were probably not aware of the specific details of their future operation.

Like the Atta visit to Prague, for which the Czech government provided intelligence which they insist to this day is accurate, the Commission chose to minimize or ignore evidence and intelligence that would lead Americans to believe that any state had a role in facilitating al-Qaeda in its attack on 9/11. They went out of their way to reach a conclusion that would encourage the US to discount the role of state sponsorship of terrorism, rather than point out that more than one state had some operational ties to the 9/11 conspiracy.

Whether or not Able Danger provided these records to the Commission staffers will probably remain a mystery. Certainly no other intelligence officials have come forward to claim that they delivered seventy-five documents detailing the connections between the hijackers and Iranian intelligence and government officials, and those types of connections might well have been part of the information that a data-mining project like Able Danger would dig up. Captain Phillpott's visit might have provoked a suddenly worried Zelikow to revisit the Pentagon materials sent over after his first Able Danger request, which may have resulted in the discovery of these assessments "buried at the bottom of a huge stack of highly classified documents on other subjects".

We do know one thing after almost three weeks of Able Danger revelations -- the Commission report has no credibility as a truthful analysis of the forces behind 9/11 and our information prior to the attacks.

UPDATE: It turns out that I'm not the first to note Chapter 24 of Timmerman's book. Dafydd ab Hugh noted this all the way back on July 5th ... uh ... at Captain's Quarters. In an e-mail to me reminding me of my own blog, Dafydd suggests a new slogan for CQ: "Captain's Quarters is so dad-burned fast, we even scoop ourselves!"

Able Danger: Are We Looking In The Right Direction?

CQ reader Ginetta sent me a message earlier today regarding some further Able Danger dots that she had connected. She read Countdown to Crisis by Kenneth Timmerman (a book which I have but have not yet read), a book which focuses on the nascent nuclear threat from Iran. However, after reading about Able Danger here at CQ and the numerous questions it raises about our understanding of al-Qaeda, Ginetta noticed that a passage at the beginning of Chapter 24 might connect Able Danger not just to al-Qaeda but to Iran as well.

Recall that Captain Scott Phillpott went to the 9/11 Commission about a week before Philip Zelikow wrote the report to again inform the staffers about the identification of Mohammed Atta in early 2000, and being turned away. In what seems to be a strange coincidence, Kenneth Timmerman describes a commotion among the Commission staff at exactly the same time. First comes this passage in the prologue:

A treasure trove of documents that 9/11 Commission staffers discovery by chance just one week before the commission report was scheduled for printing in July 2004 bears out the stories I had been hearing from multiple defectors. The clue to the existence of those documents, produced by the CIA and the National Security Agency, was contained in a single dense report, buried beneath a mountain of highly classified intelligence data, where Agency officials obviously hoped it would never be found. The report summarized what the US intelligence community knew about Iran's pre-9/11 connection to Osama bin Laden and is disclosed for the first time in chapter 24 of this book. Because of the arrogance and willful blindness of our nation's top intelligence officers, America's leaders were misled about the threat from Iran before it was too late.

At the beginning of Chapter 24 (page 268), Timmerman paints the picture more clearly:

One week before the 9/11 Commission was scheduled to send its final report to the printers in July 2004, Philip D. Zelikow, the Commission's staff director, gathered members together for an unusual briefing.

Commission staff members had discovered a document from a U.S. intelligence agency that described in detail Iran's ties to al-Qaeda, he said. It had been buried at the bottom of a huge stack of highly classified documents on other subjects that had been delivered to a special high-security reading room in an undisclosed location in Washington, DC.

The document was a summary of raw intelligence reports gathered through intercepts and other means, and was uncovered when staff readers -- on detail from different intelligence agencies -- were turning over rocks before the report went to the printer, just to make sure no worm crawled out. When the chief analyst scanned through the references at the end, he whistled quietly. "There's trouble in River City," he recalls thinking. It footnoted seventy-five distinct source documents, labeled from capital A to sss.

More to come later as I continue to check this out. I have the book open now and will continue to check out this rather unsettling coincidence of timing.

Ellsworth Saved, Thune Ascendant

Success has many fathers, while failure is an orphan. That proverb sounded particularly inapt in South Dakota yesterday when the Base Re-Alignment and Closure Commission announced that Ellsworth Air Force Base would be removed from the list of military facilities facing closure or significant reductions. Everyone knew that in this case, success and failure only had one father -- the man who unseated the Senate's Democratic leader on the promise to keep it open:

Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.) sat tense, crouched and glowering as the base-closing commission delivered its verdict about Ellsworth Air Force Base in the ballroom of a Crystal City hotel yesterday, then leapt up gleefully when the bomber base's death sentence was commuted.

The 44-year-old's political career may have been spared as well.

Last fall, Thune unseated Senate Minority Leader Thomas A. Daschle (D-S.D.) in part by claiming that a Republican tight with the White House would have a better chance of saving the perennially impaired Ellsworth, a Cold War arsenal in the middle of the prairie. So it was potentially calamitous for Thune back home in May when the Pentagon put Ellsworth on the list of closure recommendations for the independent Base Realignment and Closure commission.

Thune, a former House member whose status as the Daschle slayer has made him a popular speaker before GOP groups, had long told the White House that losing Ellsworth -- South Dakota's largest employer after the state government -- was the one issue that could make him a one-term senator.

Part of the political issue facing Thune came from the efforts by both men in the Senate campaign to cast themselves as the Savior of Ellsworth. Certainly some politics have gone into these BRAC decisions, but not to the extent that most people feared. To the extent politics plays, both men would have had influence, Thune as a politician close to Bush, and Daschle as a politician with plenty of clout in his role as Minority Leader. The final vote, however, provided a bit of irony for both men -- at 8-1, the decision had less to do with partisanship than with the objective facts regarding the value of Ellsworth, both to the nation and to South Dakota.

The result for this exercise, however, will be nothing less than a political bonanza for Thune. He barely edged Daschle in a state that saw Bush thump Kerry by 21 points. That reflected South Dakota's reluctance to change horses at any time, midstream or on either bank, especially given Daschle's considerable influence on behalf of their state. Now that he has delivered on Ellsworth, he will command a much higher standing in future elections; in fact, he should bury the next challenger the Democrats put up against him. The GOP may also now blow out Tim Johnson in 2008, who barely squeaked by Thune in 2002 with Daschle's help.

Thune may well have cut himself some national chops as well. He went toe-to-toe with the White House over Ellsworth, positioning himself to the right on other issues to threaten the White House agenda if Ellsworth closed. Most notoriously, he withdrew his support of John Bolton, but considering his staunch support of judicial nominees and his reliable conservativism, his independence might get him some thought for a national role in 2012 if he wins re-election in the preceding cycle.

The Democrats in South Dakota, however, have to know that they just lost their last fulcrum on statewide power. The Ellsworth closing would have provided their only rescue in the deeply conservative Plains state. That 21-point Bush win will begin to show up in House and Senate races for the foreseeable future. Does Thune get the credit for all of that as well? Perhaps he shouldn't, but half of politics is just being there when good things happen.

Able Danger: Mixed Wires And Chinese Fried Rice

As people often say, you just can't make this stuff up. A couple of revelations today on Able Danger not only give more background on the secret data-mining project and the failure to use its information to stop Mohammed Atta a year before 9/11, they also tend to confirm that it indeed qualified as a government-run program. First, AJ Strata points readers to the Norristown Times-Herald, where Shaffer vents a bit of frustration at the Senate Judiciary Committee:

Though the original chart has not been unearthed, several other facsimiles have been recreated showing the terrorist links. Shaffer said about 20 boxes full of documents existed on "Able Danger" when he was involved. The Pentagon's Office of General Counsel is ultimately responsible for legal decisions, he said, and he believes getting hold of the legal papers on "Able Danger" is paramount to resolving the controversy.

"If I could have one (set of) documents, I would ask for the lawyers' notes," he said.

In Specter's letter to the FBI director, the chairman requested Mangum's correspondence with Shaffer, who attempted to arrange meetings at the FBI, according to the letter. The document request asks for "e-mail communication, notes, phone message slips, memos or any other supporting documentation" relevant to "Able Danger." The letter also requested an interview with Mangum.

In June, Shaffer said he tried to "broker" a working arrangement between Special Operations and the FBI for the operation, but the effort failed. After reading the letter Thursday, Shaffer said the text was at odds with what he told the committee.

"They got it wrong," he said.

Shaffer claimed he directed the committee to ask for information from an agency other than the FBI, which he refused to identify for The Times Herald."This (request) isn't going to get (the committee) the information they're looking for," he said.

Tom Maguire believes that this points to a credibility problem for Shaffer, arguing that this means a second government committee misunderstood Shaffer and that the pattern reveals more about Shaffer than government committees. He wonders if Shaffer made himself clear in either briefing, a good point when dealing with people who work in intel and have to speak carefully but precisely about their information.

However, I think Tom misses the point, and so did the committee; the problem in cancelling the meeting came from the General Counsel of the Pentagon, not the FBI. If Judiciary wants to talk to Xanthig Mangum at the FBI to confirm Shaffer's assertions that he tried to connect with them, as a means to test Shaffer's credibility, that sounds like a good idea. If they want to call Mangum to find out why the FBI failed to meet with the Able Danger team, then they're way off base. Shaffer has made it clear since the beginning that the Pentagon refused to allow him to meet with the FBI, not that the FBI refused to meet with him. My guess is that the "other agency" he suggested for legal papers is the Pentagon legal staff, and possibly the OIPR, which gives legal advice to the Pentagon on intel sharing.

The Times-Herald also reports that Able Danger worked at Fort Belvoir at the Land Information Warfare Asssistance Center, where half the staff remained unaware of Able Danger's mission. Only a dozen people knew of the Able Danger mission to identify potential terrorists through open-source datamining. So far, three of those twelve have stepped forward publicly to confirm that Able Danger ID'd Atta -- a pretty healthy percentage. The third source, however, has even more information about the Army's datamining in today's New York Post reagrding another effort to identify potential espionage agents from the same data sources -- and how it caused Able Danger to come to a screeching halt (via the excellent John Podhoretz):

Cyber-sleuths working for a Pentagon intelligence unit that reportedly identified some of the 9/11 hijackers before the attack were fired by military officials, after they mistakenly pinpointed Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and other prominent Americans as potential security risks, The Post has learned. ...

Sources said the private contractors, using sophisticated computer software that sifts through massive amounts of raw data to establish patterns, came up with a chart of Chinese strategic and business connections in the U.S.

The program wrongly tagged Rice, who at the time was an adviser to then-candidate George W. Bush, and former Defense Secretary William Perry by linking their associations at Stanford, along with their contacts with Chinese leaders, sources said.

The program also spat out scores of names of other former government officials with legitimate ties to China, as well as prominent American businessmen. There was no suggestion that Rice or any of the others had done anything wrong.

And here we have the dark side of data mining, of course; it comes up with connections free of any context, which investigators must apply themselves in each case. When these names poppep up on a chart, the Clinton appointees must have choked on their beverages, especially given the generally hostile attitude towards intel work that pervaded the administration. Their experimental project had just produced documentation that, if leaked, strongly suggested that the administration had started spying on their political opponents using military resources to smear them.

With visions of Watergate dancing in their heads, they followed their first instincts -- fire everyone involved and pretend the program never existed. When J.D. Smith got the axe, the colonel who fired him let him know that Smith's charts had effectively ended the colonel's military career.

This would also explain why the data and documentation no longer exists at the Pentagon, and why the military has shown such reluctance to make definitive statements about the program. It might also explain why the lawyers at the Pentagon refused to allow any use of the material. The attorneys might have been afraid that if Able Danger material had to be used in court (that *$&%^# law-enforcement approach to terrorism!), the Pentagon might have had to disclose the rest of the connections made through these efforts -- which would not just embarrass the Clinton Administration, but would also certainly destroy Al Gore's presidential campaign if it came out before the election.

How would the Republicans have reacted to this news, after all? Would we have welcomed this as a positive development in identifying terrorists prior to 9/11 -- or a Big Brotheresque gross infringement on personal privacy despite its open sourcing? I can guarantee anyone that had the Rice/Perry points been disclosed, the howls of "Watergate!" ("Datagate"?) would have made the impeachment of Clinton look like a subcommittee hearing on agricultural subsidies. Only the context of 9/11 makes that understandable at all.

The more details that come out about Able Danger, the more solid it begins to look. Now we even have the normal government FUBARs and resultant CYAs to accompany it. All that's missing are the $8,000 mousepads.

UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers, and happy birthday to Glenn! For those of you who haven't followed much of the Able Danger story to this point, select the '9/11 Commission' category or click here for all my posts on the subject.

Ruffini Calls Me Out

Patrick Ruffini has wrapped up his highly successful and intriguing presidential straw poll, designed to not only determine the front-running Republicans in the blogosphere but to break down the demographics in several categories. Readers can see the results at this post, and use the drop-down boxes to see the breakdowns. Patrick even compares the results based on blogger endorsements, noting that I had withheld mine and asking me for it now.

The win for Rudy Giuliani surprised me, given the less-than-centrist nature of the blogosphere. I love Rudy; he showed the world in the hours, days, and weeks after 9/11 that Americans would not allow themselves to be defeated. His grit, determination, and courage inspired all of us. He's great on the stump, too, one of the best speakers we have in politics on either side. But that's the problem with Rudy -- he's on either side in too many categories. For a party already grumbling about the lack of conservatism from the current GOP president, the pro-choice, pro-gay rights, Rockefeller-Republican Giuliani doesn't make much sense. He could win handily in the general election, but he'd never get there.

In his way, Giuliani would be the Joe Lieberman of the GOP: the guy who could have won if his party had nominated him. The key is that the GOP have other great candidates on the bench.

CQ readers and the overall vote selected my early choice for the nomination as the #2 man. George Allen has sterling conservative credentials, and has served as both a Senator and a Governor, giving him a broad resume. He also has good rapport with an audience and a bit more amiability than Giuliani, who can come across as cold and angry at times. Allen also has good name recognition. Allen makes the best case for the top slot, including his status as a Southerner. Mike Huckabee would also be a good selection, although his name recognition doesn't come close to Allen's.

I wasn't disappointed at all in John McCain's showing. At one time, the Arizona "maverick" might have captured the imagination of the GOP base, but not after his series of defections. His two accomplishments, the BCRA and the Memorandum that stopped the filibuster fight, did not endear him at all to the base -- and this poll reflects that very well.

Be sure to check out all of Patrick's fine work. I especially liked the "fantasy" candidates idea, and the numbers there prove especially intriguing.

Able Danger: Third Source Steps Up, Gives Even More Details

The third source to go public from the Able Danger team confirms that the secret Army datamining project identified Mohammed Atta as a potential al-Qaeda terrorist in early 2000. J.D. Smith also corroborates Col. Tony Shaffer's account that they told 9/11 Commission staffers about the Atta identification, and fulfilled blogger AJStrata's prediction that the connection came through Omar Abdel Rahman (via Tom Maguire):

J.D. Smith, a defense contractor who claims he worked on the technical side of the unit, code-named "Able Danger", told reporters Friday that he helped gather open-source information (search), reported on government spending and helped generate charts associated with the unit's work. Able Danger was set up in the 1990s to track Al Qaeda activity worldwide.

"I am absolutely positive that he [Atta] was on our chart among other pictures and ties that we were doing mainly based upon [terror] cells in New York City," Smith said. ...

During Friday's roundtable with Smith, he was asked by reporters about Atta, who was using another name during 1999-2000. Smith said the charts Able Danger was using had identified him through a number of name variations, one being "Atta."

Two sources familiar with Able Danger told FOX News that part of its investigative work focused on mosques and the religious ties between known terrorist operatives such as Omar Abdul Rahman (search), who was part of the first World Trade Center bombing plot in 1993.

An independent terrorism analyst pointed out to FOX News that German intelligence had no record of Atta before the Sept. 11 attack; that's significant because Atta headed up the Sept. 11 Al Qaeda cell in Hamburg. The analyst also questioned how Atta could be connected to Rahman, who was in prison by the mid-1990s.

Smith claims that one way the unit came to know Atta was through Rahman. Smith said Able Danger used data mining techniques — publicly available information — to look at mosques and religious ties and it was, in part, through the investigation of Rahman that Atta's name surfaced.

This further confirmation puts more pressure on the Pentagon to either come up with specific data that discounts this testimony or a better explanation for the disappearance of Able Danger's data. It also ups the ante for the 9/11 Commission staffers, such as Philip Zelikow, to either explain why they didn't pass this information to the Commission itself -- or to publicly identify which Commissioners knew of it and decided not to pursue it.

This doesn't tell us much more than we already knew earlier this week, with the exception of how Atta's name came up in their investigation. This, however, leaves even more questions on the table for the FBI and the Department of Justice. If the Army could go through open-source data and draw lines from the Blind Sheikh to other terrorists, especially in the US, why didn't the FBI try that? After all, Rahman had already been convicted of terrorism, allowing law enforcement and/or intelligence to investigate Rahman to their heart's content. Did the FBI, either in its law enforcement or counterintelligence units, ever try to follow up on Rahman's other contacts after the successful prosecution by Mary Jo White's team? If not, why not?

Here's another point of contact between Rahman and the 9/11 terrorists: Rahman knew Khallad's father (Commission report, page 155); Khallad would later help bomb the USS Cole. The US found out about plots to hijack airlines to force Rahman's release in late 1998 (page 361). Why didn't they check out Rahman's connections then? The report shows that the concern over various plots to free Rahman from US custody continued to at least the end of the Clinton administration -- and yet neither the FBI nor any other agency except Able Danger apparently ever attempted to give serious investigation into Rahman's connections after his prosecution.

The more we find out about Able Danger, the more questions about almost everything we have been told about 9/11 it produces. Clearly this failure ran much deeper than we have been told, and the dismissal of Able Danger from the Commission's narrative looks more and more suspect.

The Mom-He-Hit-Me-Back Accusation

Mahmoud Abbas accused Israel of destabilizing the shaky cease-fire that has more or less accompanied the withdrawal from the Gaza Strip with a strike against a leader of Islamic Jihad, the New York Times reports. Oddly, Abbas fails to mention that the strike followed rocket attacks on Israel in both the north and the south:

The Palestinian leader, Mahmoud Abbas, accused Israel on Thursday of undermining peace efforts with an undercover military raid in the West Bank city of Tulkarm in which five Palestinians were killed.

Israel said all five were "armed wanted terrorists," including an Islamic Jihad leader who had orchestrated two suicide bombings, but Palestinians said three of the dead were unarmed teenagers.

Israel's evacuation of Jewish settlers from the Gaza Strip and part of the West Bank improved the atmosphere recently, but a series of violent incidents has prompted renewed recriminations. On Wednesday night a 21-year-old Jewish seminary student from Britain, Shmuel Matt, was stabbed to death in Old City of Jerusalem, while on Thursday rocket fire hit northern and southern Israel.

Mr. Abbas used unusually sharp language in describing Israel's incursion into Tulkarm shortly before midnight on Wednesday.

"At a time when the Palestinian Authority is trying to maintain calm, this murder intentionally seeks to renew the vicious cycle of violence," he said in a statement. But he also urged Palestinians "not to respond to provocations by Israel, so as not to give it a pretext to escalate its aggression."

As I predicted before the Gaza withdrawal, the supposed cease-fire gave Abbas and the other terrorists in the West Bank and Gaza the opportunity to run the triangle offense. Two of the three major terrorist groups -- in this case, Fatah and Hamas -- agree to a cease fire with Israel with much public fanfare. The third, Islamic Jihad here, continues to stage attacks until Israel gets fed up and finally responds. Then everyone, and I mean everyone, gets to blame the Israelis for breaking the cease-fire.

This pattern is as foolish as it is predictable. The Palestinians in their current organization will never partner for any kind of peace with Israel, except the peace they want that would come from watching the Jews drown in the Mediterranean. Pretending that Abbas represents any other effort only enables the further entrenchment of the terrorist impulse in the West Bank and Gaza. The Palestinians want total war to claim all of the territory between the Jordan and the Mediterranean for themselves, and they have given no indication that they will settle for anything less.

What Day Will The Washington Post Announce Its Opposition?

The Washington Post resumes its double-barrelled shotgun approach to the nomination of John Roberts on page A02 of the paper today, running two reports critical of the Supreme Court nominee. The first, by Jim VandeHei, notes that the gay community has shrugged off the pro bono work done by Roberts to announce their opposition to his confirmation. The announcement comes with the hysteria thus far associated with almost all of the opposition to Roberts (emphases mine):

"For his entire adult life, John Roberts has been a disciple of and promoted a political and legal ideology that is antithetical to an America that embraces all, including lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people," Matt Foreman, executive director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, said in a statement. "I have no doubt he's an accomplished lawyer and an affable dinner companion, but that doesn't make him any less a mortal danger to equal rights for gay people, reproductive freedom and affirmative action."

Wow. I didn't realize that one could be an affable dinner companion while spending every moment of one's adult life as a mortal danger. No sooner than Foreman passed judgment on the entirety of Roberts' adult life than he backpedaled, giving Roberts credit for a few hours of adult life spent volunteering for the community for which he presents a mortal danger:

"We are mindful that Judge Roberts provided a few hours of pro bono help to the attorneys in Romer v. Evans -- a landmark case for our community," the organizations said. "Some have said that this work -- which consisted mostly of playing the role of a conservative justice -- demonstrates that Roberts is not personally anti-gay. This theory is not relevant to the important issue for our community: how Roberts would vote as a Supreme Court justice."

I agree with Foreman that this assistance to Romer did not add substantially to their effort and does not presage how he will vote on issues involving the gay agenda. However, his voluntary work to assist their preparation certainly demonstrates a lack of ill will towards their community and hardly paints a picture of the "mortal danger" over which Foreman hyperventilates. Frankly, I'm still not convinced that Roberts won't turn out to be so reliant on stare decisis that all of this wailing and gnashing of teeth will wind up being for nothing.

Despite the absolutely unsurprising development of gay-rights groups opposing Roberts, the Post puts this story on the second page. No one doubts that the announcement deserves a mention, but the prominence of its placement seems rather strange. At least VandeHei lets the story speak for itself without injecting his own analysis into its reporting. The same cannot be said for the companion report selected by the Post's editors to run on page A02 along with VandeHei's, this one from Jo Becker that slyly attempts to paint John Roberts as a Confederate-loving redneck based on a single literary reference:

A fastidious editor of other people's copy as well as his own, Roberts began with the words "Until about the time of the Civil War." Then, the Indiana native scratched out the words "Civil War" and replaced them with "War Between the States."

The handwritten document is one of tens of thousands of pages of Roberts files released over the past several weeks from his 1982-1986 tenure as an associate counsel to the president.

While it is true that the Civil War is also known as the War Between the States, the Encyclopedia Americana notes that the term is used mainly by southerners. Sam McSeveney, a history professor emeritus at Vanderbilt University who specialized in the Civil War, said that Roberts's choice of words was significant.

"Many people who are sympathetic to the Confederate position are more comfortable with the idea of a 'War Between the States,' " McSeveney explained. "People opposed to the civil rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s would undoubtedly be more comfortable with the words he chose."

As a "fastidious editor", I often look for different phrasing and formulations to express myself and to avoid repetition in my writing. I use nicknames and synonyms to keep the prose interesting and also to familiarize myself and my audience to alternative terms. The phrase "The War Between The States" has never held any negative connotation in my experience. The phrase most often associated with Southern sympathies, again in my experience, has been "The War of Northern Aggression".

This piece reeks of bias. Becker and the Post want to paint Roberts as a racist without having the guts or the evidence to do so, and instead takes a single flourish of rhetoric -- out of 18,000 pages of documents! -- and instantly transforms him into a Confederate sympathizer. Becker's hit piece has absolutely no news value whatsoever, not only unqualified for page A02 of the Post but page ZZ100 of any local free weekly. If this demonstrates the editorial and reporting quality of the Washington Post, then the paper has hit harder times in the past month than anyone could have predicted.

White House spokesman Steve Schmidt responded to the Foreman announcement that liberal groups had long ago decided to oppose anyone that Bush nominated to the Supreme Court, and the only open question was the timing of the announcements. We wonder when the Post will start acting honestly and deliver their open announcement of opposition instead of issuing weak and despicable pieces like today's "news" from Jo Becker.

Project Valour IT

You'll notice that today's Day By Day cartoon, besides its normal humor, promotes an effort to provide voice-command laptop computers to service members injured in the war. Project Valour IT is run by Soldier's Angels, a fine organization that adopts soldiers and Marines on the front lines to make sure each of our fighting men and women have someone back home supporting them. You can find out more about Project Valour IT there, or at the following blogs:

Blackfive
Dean's World
Fuzzilicious

And here at From My Position, meet the soldier that inspired Project Valour IT.

UN: You-Know-Who Hindering Hariri Investigation

The United Nations team investigating the assassination of Rafik Hariri issued a statement that reveals Syrian interference and lack of cooperation to the UN Security Council. Assad's regime in Damascus has blocked access to witnesses and failed to release documents that relate to the murder which eventually led to the collapse of Syria's position in Lebanon. However, the UNSC failed to directly criticize the Assad government, thanks to their Russian sponsors:

Syria is not co-operating with an international investigation into the death of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, a UN official has said.

Damascus has yet to give investigators access to key witnesses and documents, the UN's Under Secretary General said.

The UN Security Council later passed a motion urging "all parties" to aid the investigation, while the US' UN envoy called Syria's stance "unacceptable". ...

Syria has failed to respond to a request from the investigators to provide key documents and five witnesses for interview, the UN Under Secretary General Ibrahim Gambari said.

"No reply has been received," he said.

He noted that Syria had offered to discuss the investigators' demands - but he said this was no substitute for co-operation.

John Bolton once again proved why George Bush insisted on his selection as UN ambassador. He not only specified the Syrians for their "unacceptable" lack of cooperation, he also scolded the UN Security Council for its weak-kneed response. Russia, as it turns out, would not allow a statement to be issued that named Syria for criticism for its foot-dragging. Instead, the UNSC issued a call for all member-states to fully cooperate with the investigation -- which would mean something if all member-states had assassinated Hariri in the first place. Syria alone has that dubious honor, which is why they won't cooperate.

Even the UN investigation into Hariri's murder has no point; everyone understands who did it and why. At least the investigators have the will to name those who impede them. That exceeds the courage the UNSC showed in supporting the investigation.

This process shows why the UN has disintegrated into farce from tragedy. Thirty years ago, such gamesmanship replaced real warfare between the two superpowers of the US and the Soviet Union, and therefore may have had some value -- perhaps. Even then, it mostly served as a continuous convention for anti-democratic demonstrations and anti-Semitic speechmaking from the kleptocrats of the day. Now we still have all of that, plus rampant corruption and an unwillingness to affect the status quo in any way, shape, or form.

John Bolton got to Turtle Bay not a moment too soon, and thanks to Democrats in the Senate, later than he should have been. Either the UN needs to start getting serious about accountability for both its member-states and itself, or we should pull the plug on the entire mess.

And He Squeezes The Charmin, Too

I must say that, unlike my friend Hugh Hewitt, I must agree with Jihad el Khazen's assessment of John Hinderaker in the Lebanon-based Islamist news outlet Dar al-Hayat. Khazen, or Crazy Ji as we call him around the watercooler, gets to the essence of John's insolence:

John H. Hinderaker is even more insolent that the former, for he published an article in the Weekly Standard which is a magazine speaking on behalf of the neo-cons, under the title: “Fences and a Just Peace.” The subtitle of the article reads: “The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America makes a stand against Israel’s security fence and in favor of a ‘just peace’.” (Never mind Palestinian terrorism.)

Sharon is the father and mother of Israeli terrorism. He who cover up for him is his alike. Many American Churches took the decision of putting an end to their investments in Israel. The new Pope reprimanded Israel lately. Then comes this applaud [sic] to protest.

John's insolence has been a long-held secret around the Northern Alliance, of course, but now that the Ji-man has blown the lid off, we may as well come clean. John almost always shows up to our radio shows prepared -- with facts!! -- to debate and opine on the topics of the day. He has the audacity to write well and speak his own mind. John even believes (I swear, he actually told me this) that people should choose their own government and that women and children should be able to go to pizzerias and ride buses without having lunatics blow them to pieces.

The nerve of that insolent SOB! And on top of all that, he has the unmitigated gall to be a great guy with a terrific sense of humor.

Anyway, Jihad ol' buddy, I just want you to know that I have your back on this one. At least, I'm assuming that wide expanse we see exposed in your column is your back.

French Intelligence: Asia Next Big AQ Target

France's counterintelligence chief told the Financial Times that al-Qaeda's next attack against Western interests will likely fall on Asia, probably in Japan, Singapore, or even Sydney, Australia. A serious attack could destabilize the Far East economy, sending ripples throughout the global markets and creating the fear and withdrawal that Osama bin Laden wants to produce:

In an interview with the Financial Times newspaper Friday, Jean-Louis Bruguiere added that several Asian countries are less prepared than Britain or the United States for such an attack.

"We have elements of information that make us think that countries in this region, especially Japan, could have been targeted" by the Al-Qaeda network, the investigating magistrate said.

"Any attack on a financial market like Japan would mechanically have an important economic impact on the confidence of investors. Other countries in this region, such as Singapore and Australia, are also potential targets."

Despite the threat, he added, "we are somewhat neglecting the capacity or desire of the Al-Qaeda organisation to destabilise" the region.

Bruguiere has some extensive experience in the field. He predicted the kind of commercial-airline attacks on Western interests that wound up as the 9/11 attacks after stopping a similar plan against the Eiffel Tower in 1994. He has worked against Islamist terror for at least two decades, thanks to France's war against Algerian separatists, and believes that the Asian targets present too easy an opportunity for AQ to dismiss.

Japan and Australia have both provided military and political support to the United States in our prosecution of the war after 9/11. Undoubtedly, bin Laden would love a chance to undermine those alliances by striking at both the economies and the symbols of freedom in either or both countries. As Bruguiere notes, symbols play a large part in AQ attacks. The World Trade Center as a symbol held such significance for bin Laden that he attacked it twice (1993 and 2001), as well as going after the Pentagon and probably either the White House or Capitol Hill. The London attacks targeted the Tube, the subway system that allows for free movement throughout the British capital.

Bruguiere claims that none of these potential targets have sufficiently prepared to defend against such an attack. One could question whether a free society could ever meet that standard, but in the case of Australia, such a diagnosis surprises. Australians lost scores of its own citizens in the Bali attack, and they understand clearly that their staunch defense of liberty and freedom makes them a target. Japan may have more illusions; they seemed genuinely shocked when their aid workers got kidnapped in Iraq. If so, they need to shed those illusions quickly. Being nice to terrorists wins nothing but disdain from Islamofascists, as they repeatedly demonstrate.

We need to strip ourselves of any illusions about this as well. A successful attack on any of these economic powerhouses will have a serious impact on our own economy. The West needs to band together to protect our combined assets and present a united defense against AQ lunatics. Given our relationship with Japan and Australia, it should be a far easier task there than in Europe.

Dafydd: Tales of the North Pacific

Hawaii has evidently decided that capitalism, while an interesting theory, doesn't really work. As Adam Savage says every week on Mythbusters, "I reject your reality and substitute my own!" (They have also decided that the whole "Constitution" thingie was a bust and are beavering away to institute Bantustans across the state; but that's a subject for a different post.)

Four years ago, the Democratic Hawaii state legislature and Democratic Governor Benjamin Cayetano bowed to the high priests of fundamenalist liberalism and enacted Act 77, which set a "maximum pre-tax wholesale price of gasoline" in the islands, as well as capping the retail price. This applies both to gasoline from Hawaii's two refineries and also gasoline imported directly. (A 2004 amendment, Senate Bill 3193, removed the price controls from the retail side.)

Evidently not wanting Gov. Cayetano to suffer the likely consequences of such price controls, the legislature delayed the original Act 77 going into effect until July 2004; it was subsequently delayed another year by the amendment process and is now slated to take effect a week from today, September 1st, 2005.

After enactment, Cayetano commissioned an independent study of the probable effects. The study was duly prepared by the State of Hawaii Department of Business, Economic Development, and Tourism (DBEDT), and it concluded that not only will the pending price controls not reduce the pump price of gasoline, they will also likely cause significant gasoline shortages (like, duh).

Both the Federal Trade Commission and Stillwater Associates analyzed Act 77 at the request of Cayatano.

Stillwater found that:

An analysis of gasoline price caps in general, and those enacted in certain parts of Canada in particular, shows that these measures generally are ineffective, risky, costly, open to manipulation, and complicated to administer. It is likely that likewise the caps in Act 77 would fail to achieve their objective of protecting the interests of gasoline consumers. Analysis of historical data shows that the statewide average prices for Hawaii gasoline consumers would have been higher with caps than without. Moreover, the current price cap formula would introduce California’s price volatility and seasonality into Hawaii’s gasoline prices.

The FTC studied the American gasoline shortages of 1973, which they concluded were in fact caused to a large extent by Richard Nixon's price controls (enacted as part of his anticapitalist nationwide wage- and price-controls that year). The FTC notes:

Customers queued up at gasoline stations are perhaps the most visible example of the inefficiencies resulting from the shortages created by gasoline price controls, but myriad other examples actually occurred during this period: limited station hours, Sunday station closures, "odd-even" purchasing restrictions based on license plate numbers, and restrictions on the number of gallons the customer could purchase in a single trip to the gasoline station. Also noteworthy are the secondary effects of such inconveniences, which included efforts to hoard gasoline and, in some instances, an increased hazard of car fires because people began storing additional gasoline in containers in their trunks. Some research even shows that the inconvenience and other inefficiencies associated with gasoline station lines cost consumers more than they saved as a result of regulated gas prices.

[Emphasis added in both quotations.]

The relationship between price controls and shortages is clear, at least to everyone except Democrats (who study economics at the feet of that well-known free-marketeer, Paul Krugman). Suppose you're a gasoline wholesaler. You have a choice: either sell your gasoline to another retailer (any other retailer), who will pay you market price for it... or sell it to a retailer in Hawaii, who will only pay the maximum the law allows -- which is distinctly less than the market price.

Given the voracious, even insatiable demand for gasoline everywhere in the world, you will not have trouble finding other buyers. So why would anyone be willing to supply gasoline to gas stations in Hawaii at a deep, government-mandated discount?

Even the refineries in Hawaii will be battered by the same relentless laws of logic: if they can only sell their refined product at price X, less than the normal market price of wholesale gasoline, then they have three choices:

► Buy raw, sweet crude at normal prices, lose money on each transaction, and go out of business;

► Refuse to buy at market prices, and find no sellers;

► Or buy lower quality crude and sell it for whatever they can get under the law.

Sweet dilemma. Crude manipulation by the state. And a raw deal for everyone.

When the law goes into effect, we'll see whether the government actually enforces it. If they do -- and I'm rather hoping so -- then we'll get a chance to test this whole capitalism thing out. If Hawaiians wind up with a solid supply of low-cost gasoline, then I reckon we can conclude that Adam Smith's theory was wrong all along.

But if what we see in Hawaii is either a "book law" that nobody dares enforce, or a real-world, enforced law that leads to massive shortages, economic disruptions, and higher prices in the long run... well, perhaps we ought to consider giving that whole "free market" idea a shot.

AP: CIA Reports Wants Heads To Roll

According to confidential sources with access to the secret CIA inspector-general's report, the classified document just released to Congress calls for disciplinary action against senior CIA officials. The new CIA director, Porter Goss, must weigh those recommendations against the disruption that a series of disciplinary reviews would cause in the middle of a war:

The CIA's independent watchdog has recommended disciplinary reviews for current and former officials who were involved in failed intelligence efforts before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, The Associated Press has learned. ...

The proceedings, formally called an accountability board, were recommended by the CIA inspector general, John Helgerson. It remains unclear which people are identified for the accountability boards in the highly classified report spanning hundreds of pages. The report was delivered to Congress Tuesday night.

Following a two-year review into what went wrong before the suicide hijackings, people familiar with the report say Helgerson harshly criticizes a number of the agency's most senior officials. Among them are former CIA Director George Tenet, former clandestine service chief Jim Pavitt and former counterterrorism center head Cofer Black. The former officials are likely candidates for proceedings before an accountability board.

The boards could take a number of actions, including letters of reprimand or dismissal. They could also clear them of wrongdoing.

Holding disciplinary hearings for those officials who have already retired from the agency would still cause massive headaches. The American public would demand some portions of those hearings to be held publicly, especially the overall review of the IG's report. Active agents and case leaders would have to interrupt their work, even if the review board just needed them as witnesses for others. The disruption could cause some of the same problems that the report likely will fault the agency for committing -- lack of coordination, a paucity of resources, and faulty and incomplete analysis.

That should not keep Goss from taking action, however. He will need to choose his battles carefully and apply discipline fairly, but we have larger issues on which the CIA should focus its attention. Public acknowledgement of the personal failures that the report establishes (if it does, in fact, establish them with substantive evidence) might suffice as a career-ending event, as well as reassignment to undesirable programs, which will make the point without disrupting the serious business of intelligence operations.

We will need the public hearings and at least an executive summary of the failings that led to 9/11. As the 9/11 Commission proved through its ineptness and political grandstanding, the business of protecting America is far too important to let the bureaucrats handle it themselves.

UPDATE: Ann wonders in the comments whether anyone from the WMD section will get selected for disciplinary action. It's a good question, especially regarding the people who decided to send Joe Wilson on a trip to Niger, only to have him leak a false version of his report all over the place. Think we'll hear about that if the report addresses it?

Air America: The Sheldon Drobny Chronicles

Michelle Malkin and Brian Maloney have posted their latest installment of their blog investigation into the Air America financial scandal, this time training a magnifying glass at the strange characters at the center of Piquant Media and the shell games surrounding AAR's ownership changes, Sheldon and Anita Drobny. The Drobnys started Air America but quickly faded into the background, allowing Evan Cohen and others to make themselves the public faces of the liberal radio netlet while the couple continued to pull all the strings almost anonymously:

Drobny, a deep-pocketed, self-described venture capitalist from Chicago, is a strange duck who deserves much more media scrutiny than he's getting. In October 2003, NRO's Byron York explored his moonbat writings for a fringe website called Make Them Accountable here. York noted Drobny's Lyndon LaRouche connections and wrote:

In the 1990s, conservatives came under heavy criticism for relying on funding from the foundation run by Richard Mellon Scaife. Liberal commentators routinely portrayed Scaife as a right-wing zillionaire who harbored dark visions about the evil nature of his political adversaries. Now, it is a zillionaire on the left-the guiding force behind liberalism's premier outreach effort-who harbors dark visions about the evil nature of his political adversaries. And that is the face of liberal talk radio.

Since then, however, neither the New York Times nor any other major MSM outlet has had anything more to say about the checkered past of Drobny and his wife, Anita, their apparent shell game habits, or their latest efforts to drum up new cash for the Air America money pit through the dubious "Nova M" business plan, which we first exposed here.

Read both halves of this latest installment. The Drobnys need much more exposure as the true owners of Air America and the engineers of the shell game that attempted to dodge a fortune in unpaid debts run up by AAR in their eighteen months on the air.

Michael Yon's Must-Read

Many people have wondered what happened to war reporting. We had a glimpse of it during the actual invasion of Iraq, when over 700 journalists imbedded themselves in the fighting units and gave straight reporting on the action they witnessed. After the fall of Saddam, however, "embeds" found themselves viewed with disfavor, supposedly biased towards the troops, and the number of reporters attached to fighting units dropped to less than three dozen.

One of those who remained is free-lancer Michael Yon, who publishes his work in blog form at Michael Yon: Online Magazine. A Special Forces veteran, Yon brings unique perspective about the war in Iraq through his words and pictures. What's so unique? His objectivity and immediacy. Try reading his latest article, "Gates of Fire", and find out why Yon may emerge as the best reporter of the war.

Tom Elia at The New Editor notes a passage that also caught my ear when I heard Hugh Hewitt read it on the air this evening. The terrorist who wounded the unit commander had been captured before by American forces in Iraq -- but got released after the US turned him over to the Iraqis:

The terrorist turned out to be one Khalid Jasim Nohe, who had first been captured by US forces (2-8 FA) on 21 December, the same day a large bomb exploded in the dining facility on this base and killed 22 people.

That December day, Khalid Jasim Nohe and two compatriots tried to evade US soldiers from 2-8 FA, but the soldiers managed to stop the fleeing car. Then one of the suspects tried to wrestle a weapon from a soldier before all three were detained. They were armed with a sniper rifle, an AK, pistols, a silencer, explosives and other weapons, and had in their possession photographs of US bases, including a map of this base.

That was in December.

About two weeks ago, word came that Nohe's case had been dismissed by a judge on 7 August. The Coalition was livid. According to American officers, solid cases are continually dismissed without apparent cause. Whatever the reason, the result was that less than two weeks after his release from Abu Ghraib, Nohe was back in Mosul shooting at American soldiers.

LTC Kurilla repeatedly told me of--and I repeatedly wrote about--terrorists who get released only to cause more trouble. Kurilla talked about it almost daily. Apparently, the vigor of his protests had made him an opponent of some in the Army's Detention Facilities chain of command, but had otherwise not changed the policy. And now Kurilla lay shot and in surgery in the same operating room with one of the catch-and-release-terrorists he and other soldiers had been warning everyone about.

Does this demonstrate why we need detention facilities like Guantanamo Bay and should remain firm that terrorists don't get released -- ever? Unlawful combatants need to remain imprisoned for life. Otherwise, we wind up fighting them again, and even worse, they wound and kill America's finest as soon as they get free. Patton once said that he didn't like tactical withdrawals because he didn't like paying for the same real estate twice. We need to change our way of thinking to a war footing and understand that when we let these lunatics go free, we're paying for the same real estate twice or more, and the price we pay are commanders like Lt. Col. Kurilla.

Able Danger: Congress Takes Charge (Update)

Senator Arlen Specter has announced that the Senate Judiciary Committee will hold hearings on the revelations surrounding Able Danger and plans to cover wider-ranging issues on intelligence and information sharing:

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter, R-Pa., plans to hold a hearing on the "Able Danger" allegations and the larger issue of information-sharing between the Pentagon and the FBI, FOX News has confirmed. ...

One of the central Able Danger claims — that military lawyers blocked the sharing of the Atta information from the FBI in the late summer and early fall of 2000 — will be a priority of the committee's probe, FOX News has confirmed.

Some analysts involved with Able Danger have recently gone public with their findings, saying they were discouraged from looking further into Atta, and their attempts to share their information with the FBI were thwarted, because Atta was a legal foreign visitor at the time.

Not only is this news overdue, the use of the Judiciary Committee seems rather extraordinary. Issues surrounding intelligence and military matters would normally get hearings before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence or the Armed Services Committee, not Judiciary. It makes some sense in this case, as the issue of coordination with law enforcement prior to 9/11 will undoubtedly -- and finally -- come back to the actions of the Clinton Administration and the Department of Justice in 1995 to make that coordination much more difficult.

Curt Weldon says that he has five people connected to the Able Danger project willing to testify under oath about data-mining, the identification of Atta, and their efforts to pass the information to the FBI. If Weldon delivers and the testimony remains consistent with what we have already heard, the 9/11 Commission will find itself in full retreat, its findings discredited and its members marginalized. But it won't just be them with questions to answer, nor the Clinton Administration; the Bush administration will also come back under scrutiny, especially in the Pentagon, which has yet to make any definitive statement regarding Able Danger.

These hearings should take place in full public view, with only the testimony regarding specific methodology taking place in closed session. Four years after the worst attacks on American soil since the Civil War, we deserve answers as to all of the parties behind those attacks, how we failed to prevent them, and now how we failed to investigate the terrorist attacks properly the first time around. Specter's hearings provide a good start for Congress. We need to make sure they also finish the job right this time.

UPDATE: I understand everyone's reservations about Senator Specter, but Kathryn Jean Lopez at the Corner has this memo which makes it sound like Specter takes this seriously. It also has more information about his efforts to involve the FBI regarding Atta and the terrorist cell before 9/11:

Honorable Robert Mueller Director Federal Bureau of Investigation 935 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW Washington, D. C. 20535-0001

Dear Director Mueller,

It has been reported in the news media and directly to my staff that Army Lt. Colonel Anthony Shaffer was the operations officer for a secret military program referred to as Able Danger. The mission of Able Danger was to use a sophisticated data mining program in conjunction with more traditional military intelligence methods to identify and track al Qaida terrorists oversees.

In connection with this mission, Shaffer reports that he and his associates discovered the names and U.S. locations of three of the four 9-11 pilots a year prior to 9-11. Because the suspected al Qaida terrorists were located in the U.S., Shaffer reports that he made repeated requests of Defense Intelligence Agency (“DIA”) officials to schedule a meeting with FBI officials in order to present this intelligence to the FBI for further investigation. Shaffer further contacted FBI agent Xanthig Mangum and asked her to schedule such a meeting within FBI. Shaffer states that he made this request both verbally and by email to Agent Mangum. Shaffer claims that the DIA decided not to share this information with the FBI on the advice of legal counsel and that certain meetings that had been scheduled on this issue were cancelled as a result.

This is an official request that your office provide to the Judiciary Committee all information and documents it has in connection with Able Danger, Lt. Colonel Anthony Shaffer, Captain Scott Phillipot or any other persons having any connections with Project Able Danger, including, but not limited to, email communication, notes, phone message slips, memos or any other supporting documentation.

I would appreciate it if you would provide Agent Mangum for an interview with my staff at your earliest convenience. Also, please provide information concerning any and all requests made to the FBI by any other entity, agency, branch or commission in connection with Agent Mangum, Lt Colonel Shaffer, Project Able Danger or any related matters, including, but not limited to, requests for interviews or documents.

Thank you for your attention to this important question about cross agency information sharing.

Sincerely,

Arlen Specter

If the Able Danger team made contact with the FBI and the FBI refused the meeting, the explanation for that refusal should make for interesting viewing on C-SPAN 2.

Italians Hid Iraqi 'Insurgents'

The AP reports that the Italian Red Cross hid four Iraqi terrorists in exchange for the release of two Italian aid workers last year -- who promptly turned around and promoted their cause once they returned to Italy. The Italian government did not share this information with the US, and allowed the Iraqis to go free once they received the medical treatment they needed from their wounds sustained fighting Coalition forces:

Italy's Red Cross treated four Iraqi insurgents and hid them from U.S. forces in exchange for the freedom of two Italian aid workers kidnapped last year in Baghdad, an official said in an interview published Thursday.

Maurizio Scelli, the outgoing chief of the Italian Red Cross, told La Stampa newspaper that he kept the deal secret from U.S. officials, complying with "a nonnegotiable condition" imposed by Iraqi mediators who helped him secure the release of Simona Pari and Simona Torretta, who were abducted on Sept. 7 and freed Sept. 28.

"The mediators asked us to save the lives of four alleged terrorists wanted by the Americans who were wounded in combat," Scelli was quoted as saying. "We hid them and brought them to Red Cross doctors, who operated on them."

They took the wounded insurgents to a Baghdad hospital in a jeep and in an ambulance, smuggling them through two U.S. checkpoints by hiding them under blankets and boxes of medicine, Scelli reportedly said. ...

Scelli told the newspaper he informed the Italian government of the deal and of the decision to hide it from the U.S. through Gianni Letta, an undersecretary in Premier Silvio Berlusconi's government who has been in charge of Italy's hostage crises in
Iraq.

"Keeping quiet with the Americans about our efforts to free the hostages was an irrevocable condition to guarantee the safety of the hostages and ourselves," he told La Stampa. He said Letta agreed.

This puts quite a different spin on a number of issues with the Italians in Iraq. When terrorists released the two aid workers last September, Italian dailies published reports of high-priced ransoms being paid. Italian Foreign Minister Francisco Frattini hotly disputed that any deal had been made, saying that the release showed the love and esteem in which the Arab world held Italy. Hardly; now we know that the Italians double-dealt us, and then allowed the two freed women to spout anti-American rants after they abused the Red Cross vehicles and broke with the Geneva Convention to conduct what amounted to an espionage mission.

Speaking of espionage, that piece of history may have had something to do with the Giuliana Sgrena incident earlier this year. Once again, the Italians failed to coordinate with us on a hostage release. One wonders what the Italians paid for the journalist, but what we do know is that they had no compunction about handling it dishonestly with the US.

How many other Iraqi terrorists have the Italians given safe conduct and transported in secret to avoid our capture? How many Iraqis and Americans have died at the hands of those terrorists that Italian manuevering saved from capture? Allies like this do us no good at all. Berlusconi owes the United States an apology and the Italian Red Cross should immediately get decertified in Iraq.

Able Danger: The Strange Spanish Interlude

The 9/11 Commission claimed to have discounted the testimony of Captain Scott Phillpott in July 2004 on Able Danger specifically because of his assertion about when his team identified Mohammed Atta as a potential al-Qaeda terrorist in the United States. The official timeline for the Commission on Atta starts on June 3, 2000, when INS records the first of only three entries for Atta in Newark, New Jersey. Captain Phillpott insists that his team ID'd Atta in the US in January or February 2000, months earlier.

I covered the timeline issues in my Daily Standard column and in my follow-up post yesterday. I argued that the Commission's weak sourcing for the Atta timeline, essentially based on nothing but INS records and the testimony of two captured terrorists, reopens not only the question of when Atta first established his cell here but the long-debated Czech intelligence that has Atta meeting with the Iraqis in Prague. While we have information that the Commission apparently did not -- that the Germans had captured Iraqi spies working an extensive operation during the same time the AQ plotters worked on the 9/11 attack in Germany -- their stated reasons for discounting the Prague meeting and its critical Iraqi connection include relying on Atta's supposed habit of traveling under his own name.

However, the trip to Spain that Atta undertook in July 2001 creates new problems. Atta went to Spain twice, actually; when he met Ramzi Binalshibh in January 2001 in Germany, he traveled through Madrid to get there. The second time on July 7, Atta traveled to Zurich but stayed in Spain, as far as anyone can tell.

But why Spain? The terrorists knew Germany much better than Spain, and presumably could find better cover there. The Commission, predictably, relied on one source for the answer -- Atta's co-conspirator, Ramzi Binalshibh (page 244):

In early July, Atta called Binalshibh to suggest meeting in Madrid, for reasons Binalshibh claims not to know. He says he preferred Berlin, but that he and Atta knew too many people in Germany and feared being spotted together. Unable to buy a ticket to Madrid at the height of the tourist season, Binalshibh booked a seat on a flight to Reus, near Barcelona, the next day. Atta was already en route to Madrid, so Binalshibh phoned Shehhi in the United States to inform him of the change in itinerary.

Atta arrived in Madrid on July 8. He spent the night in a hotel and made three calls from his room, most likely to coordinate with Binalshibh. The next day, Atta rented a car and drove to Reus to pick up Binalshibh; the two then drove to the nearby town of Cambrils. Hotel records show Atta renting rooms in the same area until July 19, when he returned his rental car in Madrid and flew back to Fort Lauderdale. On July 16, Binalshibh returned to Hamburg, using a ticket Atta had purchased for him earlier that day.According to Binalshibh, they did not meet with anyone else while in Spain.

So we have the two terrorists going into unfamiliar territory at the height of tourist season, when making travel arrangements are the most difficult. In fact, Binalshibh had to contact Shehhi to recast the arrangements after Atta had already left. Why go through all of this hassle, unless (a) there were other people that Atta needed to meet, and/or (b) Germany was too dangerous for Atta? The Spanish government insists that Atta met with more than just Binalshibh in that trip, a fact that the Commission only includes as a footnote on page 530. They discount this information even though the Spaniards used it to indict several people on terror charges, preferring the testimony of Binalshibh instead.

If the meeting was only between Atta and Binalshibh, why risk operating in the open in unfamiliar territory to make that connection? Atta probably thought that after the German arrests, Germany was no longer safe for him to visit. Indeed, as far as is known, Atta never returned to Germany after the arrests of the Iraqi spies. He flew around it but never in or through it. His risk of operating in a new country -- the Commission report itself mentions no travel through Spain in its report before July 2001 for any of the plotters -- had to have been outweighed by other considerations, and not the thin excuse that Binalshibh offered.

Either Atta had more than one meeting scheduled for Spain, which would explain his 12-day absence from the United States just when he should have been organizing the muscle hijackers and training them for their roles, or he had good reason to avoid Germany, and probably both. If Atta went to Prague, Iraqi spy Samir al-Ani could have told him that the network had been sufficiently disrupted by German counterintelligence that he could not safely operate there again.

Again, this hypothesis would fit the known facts better than the Binalshibh explanation, which makes Madrid a whim on the part of Atta, and one Binalshibh blithely indulges despite the risk that excessive travel places on himself. It also highlights the real possibility that Iraqi intelligence had connections to the plot and the plotters in at least some support capacities.

Reform Starts With A Giant Step

John Bolton just made his presence known at Turtle Bay. The new American UN ambassador delivered a 36-page documents with 750 amendments and changes to a draft agreement that would bring unprecedented and sweeping reform to the United Nations:

Less than a month before world leaders arrive in New York for a world summit on poverty and U.N. reform, the Bush administration has thrown the proceedings in turmoil with a call for drastic renegotiation of a draft agreement to be signed by presidents and prime ministers attending the event.

The United States has only recently introduced more than 750 amendments that would eliminate new pledges of foreign aid to impoverished nations, scrap provisions that call for action to halt climate change and urge nuclear powers to make greater progress in dismantling their nuclear arms. At the same time, the administration is urging members of the United Nations to strengthen language in the 29-page document that would underscore the importance of taking tougher action against terrorism, promoting human rights and democracy, and halting the spread of the world's deadliest weapons. ...

The proposed U.S. amendments, contained in a confidential 36-page document obtained by The Washington Post, have been presented this week to select envoys. The U.N. General Assembly's president, Jean Ping of Gambia, is organizing a core group of 20 to 30 countries, including the United States and other major powers, to engage in an intensive final round of negotiations in an attempt to strike a deal.

"Now it is maybe time to go on some key issues where we still have controversies and negotiate on these key issues," he said Tuesday.

The proposed changes, submitted by U.S. Ambassador John R. Bolton, touch on virtually every aspect of U.N. affairs and provide a detailed look at U.S. concerns about the world body's future.

It didn't take long for Bolton to hit the ground running at the UN, but then again, his long delay by the Senate Democrats necessitates this expedited approach to his agenda. He only has until January 2007 before Bush will have to resubmit him for confirmation or select a new UN ambassador, and Bolton will want to have achieved as much as possible in the short time he knows he has. He has already asked other envoys to start negotiations "this week", giving an indication of the high priority the US will give reform efforts in this UN session.

It's a good start for Bolton, and a strong stand for the US at a time when the endemic corruption and incompetence at Turtle Bay threatens to collapse the world body and consign it to League of Nations status. It should have started months ago, and but for the obstructionists in the Senate, we might already have achieved some important reforms by this point.

Roberts Opposition Gets Desperate For Issues

As the date for the Judiciary Committee hearings on the nomination of John Roberts to the Supreme Court draws near, the opposition to his confirmation gets stranger and stranger. Having exhausted the Reagan-era data and found nothing objectionable, Democrats have started skipping any pretense of rationality, opting instead for nothing but empty scare tactics. Ralph Neas and Chuck Schumer took center stage yesterday in the Roberts Follies to once again demonstrate how little substance either employs in their obstructionist agenda.

First, the People For the American Way (PFAW) announcement from Neas opposing Roverts got delivered as if the nation had held its breath wondering whether PFAW might support Roberts in the end. Neas' performance had me laughing while I listened to it on the radio, and I imagine it had greater comedic value live and in person. He told the gathered press that he wanted to be able to support Roberts and had waited until now to take a position on his confirmation so that PFAW could do a thorough job researching his background. That's patently false; PFAW had material opposing the Roberts nomination within hours of its announcement.

Yesterday, Neas ran through a series of generalizations about Roberts intended to extend the scare campaign the Left started with the NARAL smear campaign to which even Democrats:

"He supported the legality of radical proposals to strip the courts of jurisdiction over certain school desegregation remedies, abortion, and school prayer," the report says. "He denigrated what he referred to as the 'so-called' right to privacy, resisted attempts to fully restore the effectiveness of the Voting Rights Act, and worked against measures aimed at increasing gender equity."

The last trots out the Washington Post smear that Roberts opposed equal rights for women, when in fact what Roberts opposed was the long-discredited "comparable pay" scheme that would have put almost all wage decisions in control of the courts. Supporting comparable worth demonstrates that PFAW willingly tosses out two decades of widespread rejection of that failed hypothesis and aligns itself with the far Left, representing the lunatic fringe of the political movement.

Also getting a bit more lunatic are Chuck Schumer and Russ Feingold. The two Democrats yesterday chewed out Roberts for failing to recuse himself in the Hamdan case involving Guantanamo Bay detentions. They claim that Roberts should have stopped hearing any cases involving the federal government after the first hint that the Bush administration might select him as a replacement for Sandra Day O'Connor:

"It is clear that you have long understood the ethical issues raised by continuing to work on a case in which a party is considering you for another position," Judiciary Committee Sens. Charles Schumer of New York and Russ Feingold of Wisconsin said in a letter to Roberts. ...

Roberts, a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, was nominated by
President Bush to the nation's highest court on July 19.

That month, Roberts sat on a three-judge panel that refused to block military tribunals for terror suspects. A lawsuit against the administration was brought by Salim Ahmed Hamdan, a Yemeni who once was al-Qaida leader
Osama bin Laden's driver.

But three months earlier, in April, Roberts had begun interviewing with administration officials for a possible Supreme Court spot, according to his questionnaire submitted to the Senate.

He recently recused himself from a case involving the American Bar Association, Feingold and Schumer said, presumably because the ABA was preparing its rating of him for his Supreme Court nomination.

This issue makes no sense whatsoever. Three months earlier, O'Connor hadn't even resigned yet. In fact, her resignation came as a surprise, as even Schumer and Feingold should recall. The Bush administration spoke to Roberts in a preliminary sense, and any rational justice on the DC circuit would probably assume that such discussions were being held with numerous other candidates, including his or her colleagues on the same circuit. If such discussions created a need for recusals, the DC circuit would never hear half their cases, as that appellate court considers government positions in many of its hearings.

As for the ABA recusal, the Roberts nomination had already become official and the recusal made sense. Perhaps that explains why it confuses Schumer, Feingold, and the rest of the knee-jerk obstructionists grasping blindly for any thin excuse they can find to rationalize their hostility towards a well-qualified conservative jurist.

Seattle -- Help Find Men Cowards Who Beat Two Soldiers

Seattle CQ readers should keep an eye out for these three men who severely beat two US soldiers who had just returned from Iraq and went out for a night on the town:

KOMO-TV reports that these three mouthbreathers started the festivities by molesting women accompanying the soldiers at the dance club where the beating took place. The TV station has also posted the disturbing videotape of the attack on its website:

The brutality of it all was captured on tape outside of Larry's Nightclub on First and Yesler on July 31.

Police say the victims were with two women who'd been groped by the suspects. One of the women threw a hot dog at the suspects and walked away.

They didn't get very far. The three suspects ran after them and began attacking the two men -- two soldiers who'd come home from the war.

The graphic videotape shows both victims getting beaten over and over again, and then after one of the victims loses consciousness, a suspect starts stomping on his head.

The soldiers still are recovering, more than three weeks after the beating. Both of them suffered broken jaws and other broken bones as a result of this crime, but Seattle police have not yet found the perpetrators of this attack. These idiots appear mighty pleased with themselves. Maybe we can get lucky and a CQ reader can identify at least one of the trio, and ruin his year. If anyone recognizes these morons, please contact the Seattle PD at 206/343-2020. (h/t: Free Republic and CQ reader Rkchesn)

Note: The FR thread got shut down for inappropriate commentary based on the ethnicity of the people involved. That won't be tolerated here, either.

UPDATE: I misread the story, as KOMO-TV web producer Scott Sistek e-mails me in a very nice note. The police are looking for three males, not four; the first two pictures show the same "man". Scott also promises to keep in touch if anything new develops with the story. Big thanks to Scott for both the correction and the nice e-mail, as well as pushing this story to get some justice for the two soldiers.

Musharraf: Khan Supplied NoKos With Centrifuges, Designs

Confirming the suspicions of many in the West, Pakistan's leader Pervez Musharraf stated for the record that Pakistani nuclear scientist A. Q. Khan gave centrifuges and their designs to the North Korean regime of Kim Jong-Il, according to the Japanese news agency Kyodo:

Pakistani President General Pervez Musharraf has confirmed that disgraced nuclear scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan provided North Korea with centrifuge machines and their designs, Kyodo news agency said on Wednesday.

Khan, revered in Pakistan as the man who gave his country the weapons capability to balance that of nuclear-armed neighbour and rival India, admitted last year to leaking nuclear secrets to Iran, Libya and North Korea. ...

Asked about reports that Pakistan told Japanese government officials that Khan had given North Korea about 20 centrifuges, Musharraf was quoted as saying: "Yes, he passed centrifuges -- parts and complete. I do not exactly remember the number."

The leap in development of Pyongyang's nuclear work surprised the Bush administration during its first term, when the Kim regime first revealed that it had created nuclear weapons. At the time, people made an assumption that Kim had bargained for the technology. Musharraf has confirmed that Khan admitted to the transactions with North Korea's dictator in his first public statements about the Khan network. Khan's admission came last year, but it hardly comes as a shock. Khan made himself a popular man in the tyrant market, supplying such luminaries as Moammar Gaddafi, the Iranian mullahs, and perhaps others less bound by state boundaries; we may never know for certain how many people wound up with Khan centrifuges.

The Pakistani president tried to minimize the issue by arguing that Khan didn't transmit instructions for nuclear-weapons engineering, but just to enrich the uranium that could constitute the fissile material. However, that part causes the greatest difficulty. Most of the knowledge necessary to engineer a weapon can be found in libraries and readily-available books, even on the Internet as long as one knows where to look. Getting fissile material in sufficient quantities was the greater obstacle, and Khan helped Kim leap over it much sooner than expected.

Musharraf can't possibly believe his own rhetoric on this point, and indications show he doesn't. Despite his current status as a "hero" in Pakistan, Dr. Khan is not permitted to leave his house in the Pakistani capital. Musharraf apparently wants to keep a close eye on this "hero", to make sure that Khan doesn't get generous with his heroics towards the wrong people.

Skin 4: Two-Column War

If you haven't yet tried the new two-column format for Captain's Quarters, please click on the last CQ icon in the sidebar under the heading, Skin This Site (or clck here). Mel from Bonafide Style has finished the tweaks necessary to make the skin fully functional -- in fact, I've been using it for two weeks and I think it makes the site much easier to read. It loads much faster than the other skins, and best of all it retains the same look and feel of the default CQ skin while sprucing it up significantly.

Let me know what you think, and if you have any web design needs, I can give my highest recommendations for Mel. She does great work, is highly responsive, and won't break the bankbook to get you the look you want for your site.

The Ruffini Poll

I have been remiss in not providing a link to the Ruffini Poll on the 2008 Presidential election. I think it's too early to take much of this seriously; after all, we need to find out who can get themselves re-elected in their current positions, and we have plenty of time for those who look like a lock now to do something foolish and take themselves out of the running. A great example would be John McCain, who torpedoed himself by jumping in front of the Gang of 14 earlier this year.

Bear in mind that this poll isn't scientific, and really only reflects the hyperaware readers of the blogs -- all you highly educated and supremely tasteful CQ readers, for instance, across the entire political spectrum. If you hit the poll from the above link, we should be able to track the CQ preferences for the 2008 race. When Patrick closes his poll, I'll share my preference with you ... but I don't want to bias the results. Enjoy! (via Hugh Hewitt)

Another Stranger To The 9/11 Narrative Surfaces

The German news magazine Der Spiegel profiles yet another terrorist linked to the 9/11 attack plot and the Hamburg cell whence it sprang. Luai Sakra surfaced in Turkey, and although he has some apparent stability issues, DS reports that the Syrian has worked as an informant for Western intelligence agencies. Either that, or Sakra knows how to spin fantasies that might cost him his life (h/t: CQ reader Rob P-M):

Two weeks ago, Turkish police arrested an Islamist with ties to many upper tier al-Qaida members. The man not only tried to get asylum in Germany, but claims to have known about the London bombings beforehand and to have helped the 9/11 pilots. ...

Turkish anti-terror officials held the suspected al-Qaida member for four days. Just after his arrest two weeks ago, Sakra admitted to planning strikes against Israeli cruise ships; he hoarded 750 kilograms of explosives for the purpose. When some of those explosives went up in flames, in his Antalya apartment, he fled.

What Sakra told officials during his interrogation suggests a deep jihadist career. The Syrian, who knows weapons as well as he knows his whiskey and wine, has obviously played a far more important role in the terrorist underground than officials first suspected. According to his own testimony, he knew about the London bombings before they happened, and supported the pilots on 9/11.

"I was one of the people who knew the 9/11 perpetrators," Sakra reportedly said in passing during the interrogation, "and I knew the plans and times beforehand." He claims to have provided the pilots with passports and money.

Sakra lived in the German town of Schramberg from September 2000 to July 2001, during the period when the Hamburg cell actively supported Mohammed Atta and the primary leaders of the attack plot. By July 2001, when he left, most of the heavy lifting had been done by those abroad, and the rest of the attack preparation took place in the United States. Sakra would have moved on to a new assignment at that time.

However, according to Sakra, he had plenty of connections to other agencies other than al-Qaeda. He claims to have tipped off the Syrians about the 9/11 attacks, who waited until afterwards to notify the Americans of the tip. The tip, according to DS, accurately predicted that the AQ operation would use commercial aircraft as missiles against buildings in the US. The Turkish media also claim that the CIA made contact with Sakra twice in 2000 but were unable to turn him despite offering Sakra large sums of money. They turned to the Turkish intelligence group MIT, who could not track him down until August 2001, four weeks before the 9/11 attacks -- but released him, apparently without coordinating with the CIA.

Sakra seems like a strange Islamist fanatic. The Turks found plenty of pharmaceuticals on him during his latest arrest, and his mood swings suggest that he may be bipolar. He drinks alcohol, doesn't pray much, and his career as described by DS looks more like a free agent than true believer. Sakra claims to not only have trained with Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in Afghanistan but to have fought in Fallujah for his network.

The Turks have him in custody due to the kidnap and murder of a Turkish truck driver in Iraq, and his description of the event complements the video record almost perfectly. However, they consider him a reliable witness as his story coordinates well with estblished facts about al-Qaeda and their operations.The DS report clearly takes Sakra seriously.

The Germans will want to thoroughly investigate Sakra's stay in Germany very carefully, and the CIA should join them. He may prove worthless in the long run, but he might have interesting information about the kinds of connections the AQ plotters had with other espionage agents in Germany during that same period, especially the two Iraqis arrested in February 2001. It should surprise no one that Sakra's name doesn't appear at all in the 9/11 Commission report, nor any hint that Syrian intelligence informed the US about the attacks after they occurred. That may mean that Sakra has no credibility; however, if he checks out, it may be yet another dot that the Commission either ignored or missed while making the connections that pleased them.

Addendum: I would agree that a healthy dose of skepticism should accompany this development. He sounds like a fantasist, an dthe pharmaceuticals don't add to his credibility. It sounds like the Turks take him seriously for reasons of their own, though, and if he was mixing up some explosives in Antalya, he's at least dangerous ... to himself.

Doctor Reprimanded By Board For ... Honesty

In what may become a classic case of political correctness run amuck, a medical board has reprimanded a doctor for diagnosing a patient as "fat", ordering him to take a sensitivity course as a remedial step:

Dr. Terry Bennett believes in being honest with his patients, but one woman was so offended about the way he spoke to her about her weight, she filed a complaint with the state Board of Medicine.

The New Hampshire state attorney general launched an investigation, asked Bennett to take a medical education course and admit he has made a mistake. ...

The case has some medical professionals concerned.

"We are really walking on thin ice when we have the legal system coming into a doctor's office and saying what we can or cannot do," said Dr. Mark Fendrick, a professor of medicine at the University of Michigan.

I'd say that Dr. Fendrick's concerns come about four decades too late in general, but I agree with his point of view. Bennett did apologize to the patient in writing for offending her, but he points out that mild, politically-correct language offers too many excuses for people to disregard the medical advice. His bedside manner may be a bit too blunt for some patients, but that gets addressed by the market and shouldn't cause the medical board to reprimand him for his honesty. Getting the New Hampshire Attorney General involved is far more ominous, and far more ridiculous.

On the other hand, perhaps the doctors and government in New Hampshire have nothing better to do than to act as speech police. If so, the state's residents should cut funding for such efforts so that both waste less of the taxpayers' money.

Able Danger: Who The Commission Chose To Believe

My new column at the Daily Standard, "Rethinking Prague", explores the issue of the timeline assigned to Mohammed Atta by the 9/11 Commission, especially in light of the multiple-sourced Able Danger revelations over the past two weeks. Now that three members of the secret data-mining operation have publicly verified that the intelligence pointed out Atta and three other 9/11 hijackers as potential al-Qaeda terrorists, it calls into question how the Commission established any of Atta's movements. Much of it comes from unchallenged assertions by two of the 9/11 plotters themselves, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Ramzi Binalshibh:

IF ATTA HAD ALREADY MADE IT to the United States, how did the Commission establish this timeline? They deduced it from FBI interrogations of three sources: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Ramzi Binalshibh, two of the plotters who helped create the 9/11 attacks, and Mohammed's nephew Ali Abdul Aziz Ali. The footnotes in the Report to the Atta timeline paragraphs give almost no corroborative evidence besides that of the testimony of these men--who have little motivation to cooperate honestly with American investigators.

Could the "intelligence" gleaned from the interrogations of these al Qaeda plotters and high-level terrorists have been an attempt at disinformation?

If KSM and Binalshibh wanted to set up a disinformation campaign after their capture, it had to specifically benefit someone. One indication of a beneficiary comes from last week's revelation (bearing in mind that Pink Flamingos had this three years ago while receiving no notice) of the arrests of two Iraqi spies in Germany at the end of February 2001, while Atta and two other 9/11 leaders traveled to and through Germany. The Germans announced at the time that they had disrupted Iraqi intelligence operations in several cities just as Atta had met with Binalshibh to finalize some of the preparations for the attacks.

Even if the Iraqi operations in the same area as the AQ effort were nothing more than coincidence, the German counterintelligence efforts should have set off warning bells for Atta and Binalshibh, especially with the bulk of the hijackers set to travel to the US, the most critical and risky part of the pre-attack plan. A careful planner like Atta would have needed to recheck his network before proceeding with a plan that, if already exposed, would have sent all twenty men into a German-American intelligence trap.

How would Atta have done that? He would have to travel somewhere near Germany to meet with his contacts, but not in Germany itself. The Commission report insists that Atta never left the US between his return from Germany until after the muscle hijackers arrived in the US. Czech intelligence, however, has always insisted that Atta traveled to Prague on April 9, 2001 to meet with an Iraqi diplomat they already had under surveillance for his role in an attempt to attack Radio Free Europe in 1998. The Commission discounts (but does not categorically reject) this intelligence for the following reasons:

* Atta's cell phone was used in the U.S. on April 6, 9, 10, and 11

* No U.S. records of Atta traveling under his own name

* No pictures of anyone who looked like Atta in the Czech Republic on those dates

* Testimony from two al Qaeda sources ... Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Ramzi Binalshibh

The Commission notes that Atta never used an alias while traveling before April 9. In checking the footnotes, it turns out that this comes from a denial given by a traveling companion of Atta's to Madrid that claims that neither of them sought out forged travel documents as alleged by Edward Jay Epstein and others. The traveling companion? Ramzi Binalshibh.

It could be that the FBI got the truth from KSM and Binalshibh, but then the identification of Atta by Able Danger could not have happened in the time frame that three AD team members have publicly insisted it did. It seems more likely that the two terrorists have spun a plausible tale designed to convince Americans that al-Qaeda acted alone in the 9/11 plot, a disinformation campaign that didn't account for an early identification by American intelligence that resulted in no action against the terrorists before the attack. If Able Danger proves accurate and the KSM/RB timeline collapses, that disinformation hides another state sponsor besides the Taliban for AQ.

In the meantime, with that speculation aside, the Commission needs to answer the question at the end of my column: why did they take the word of two terrorists over that of two high-ranking American intelligence officers when constructing this timeline?

America Losing Ground To China In Central Asia?

Kazakhstan's foreign minister expressed his support for American engagement in the Central Asian republics that once formed the southern portion of the USSR and now play key roles in battling Islamofascist terror. However, he sounding a distinct if low-key warning that we may lose ground to China, who appears more willing to play ball with the kleptocrats in the region rather than push for the political reform desired by the Americans:

Kazakhstan's foreign minister yesterday pledged his country's support for U.S. military operations in Central Asia and said his country worked to water down neighboring countries' efforts to evict American troops from the region.

Foreign Minister Kasymzhomart Tokayev added that the U.S. military presence since the 2001 Afghanistan war and China's emergence as a regional and global power were helping revive the 19th-century "Great Game" struggle for influence in the region. ...

Kazakhstan, a U.S. ally and the only Central Asian nation to contribute troops to the postwar mission in Iraq, startled the Bush administration last month when it endorsed a communique from the six-nation Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) widely interpreted as demanding a deadline for shutting down U.S. bases in Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, set up to support the Afghan war.

The increasingly influential SCO includes Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, but is dominated by its two largest members -- Russia and China. Both Moscow and Beijing have been unnerved by the prospect of permanent U.S. military outposts in their strategic backyard.

Tokayev explained that Kazakhstan managed to water down the final resolution somewhat, and that its eventual endorsement of the communique did not indicate a retreat from its alliance with the US. However, the efforts of Russia and China to push American influence out of the region should not be ignored, Tokayev warns, as the Americans have taken the place of the British in what appears to be a renewal of the Great Game from a century ago. The Great Game pitted the British primarily against the Russian monarchy for influence and supremacy in Central Asia, mostly to protect the British land communication with its Empire in India and the subcontinent.

The Chinese intend on complicating this Game, and they have used a decidedly market-based strategy to marginalize the Americans. While we insist on free-market and democratic reforms as a condition of our assistance, or at least refuse to deny our support to those groups pushing for these as a condition for our military presence such as in Uzbekistan, the Chinese sound much more willing to play Monty Hall with the dictatorships and autocrats in place. China just bought PetroKazakhstan, for instance, after dropping its politically explosive bid for Unocal earlier this summer. They have invested heavily in the region without regard for the political structures of the various nations, an approach that hard-liners like Uzbekistan will find more to their liking than American demands for free elections and political reform.

Expect more agressive action from China in this regard. They have the cash to spread through the area, and this is their back yard. They want to make it clear that continued prosperity for the 'Stans can come from China's good graces and not hung with American interference in their politics. In the short run, that puts us at a disadvantage -- but when the tyrannies eventually fall, the people of Central Asia will remember who assisted them in standing on their own two feet and who helped their oppressors keep them down. Our strategy still has the most sound long-term value, and we should not back down from democratization.

New Report On CIA Given To Congress

The long-awaited inspector general's report on the performance of the CIA has arrived at Congress, more than two years after Congress demanded a review of the agency's performance prior to 9/11. The Intelligence Committees in both chambers will unseal the report and decide what information to declassify for wide dissemination, possibly as early as today:

Porter J. Goss, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, delivered a long-awaited internal report to Congress on Monday night that is said to give a harsh assessment of the agency's performance before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Mr. Goss, who was chairman of the House Intelligence Committee before his appointment last year as head of the C.I.A., hand-delivered two copies of the classified report to staff members of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees.

The copies of the report, which is several hundred pages, were placed in committee safes and were not to be opened at least until Wednesday, said a Congressional official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak with the press on the record. ...

The draft report was described by intelligence officials in January as highly critical of George J. Tenet, the former C.I.A. director, and James L. Pavitt, the former deputy director for operations, both of whom retired last year. A spokesman for Mr. Tenet, Bill Harlow, and Mr. Pavitt both took issue with the reported findings in interviews at that time.

Mmebers of the committees will start working through the report soon, probably today, given the high profile of the material. Some may not get to it until later as they return from the summer recess. Senator Pat Roberts (R-KS), chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, has already indicated that the earliest he expects to address declassification will be next week when he returns to DC.

Congress should expedite this review. The pressing issues will be where the report coincides and contradicts the 9/11 Commission report findings, and especially whether that report reflects the full picture that the CIA had pre-9/11. The last two weeks have found several gaping holes in the 9/11 Commission narrative and report, including Able Danger and the arrests of Iraqi spies in Germany during the time that Mohammed Atta and two other 9/11 leaders traveled through and to there. Especially in the latter case, we need to know what actions the CIA took in determining the nature of the information it had and how it reported it back to the government.

Without a doubt, we need Congress to act quickly to bring confidence in our understanding of the actions and inactions that led to the success of the massive attacks by Islamofascist terrorists that day. That means that we need the entire data set, presented factually, and not just that which fits a predetermined narrative. Rather than passing this task off to a panel of unaccountable bureaucrats, Congress should take at least as much interest as it put into the ridiculously insipid issue of steroids in baseball and do its own investigation into the worst attack on American soil since the Civil War.

Chertoff Indicates Higher Priority For Border Enforcement

DHS chief Michael Chertoff spoke to reporters at a breakfast meeting yesterday and gave an "unusually blunt assessment" of the security issues involving the southern border of the US. He described the difficulties in keeping illegals from crossing the border at will and even keeping those caught in custody, and described plans to correct the situation. While far from a complete solution, Chertoff at least gives the impression that the Bush administration might have started to take the problem more seriously:

Acknowledging public frustration over illegal immigrants, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said Tuesday that the federal government's border control efforts must be significantly strengthened.

"We have decided to stand back and take a look at how we address the problem and solve it once and for all," Mr. Chertoff said at a breakfast meeting with reporters. "The American public is rightly distressed about a situation in which they feel we do not have the proper control over our borders." ...

The strategy that Mr. Chertoff said his department was preparing goes far beyond hiring more Border Patrol agents and installing more surveillance cameras, infrared and motion detectors, and fences, initiatives that are already planned or under way.

In addition to those apprehension efforts, the secretary intends to bolster the deportation process so that an overwhelmed detention system does not cause illegal immigrants to be set free instead of being sent home. He plans to add beds for detainees, expedite deportations by making more judges and lawyers available, and try to track down more illegal immigrants who do not appear for deportation hearings.

The sheer number of those detained in border crossings overwhelms the systems used to process them for deportation. That starts with a lack of beds for illegals, making it impossible to keep them all incarcerated until their INS hearings. Those get delayed due to a lack of both judges and lawyers for representation on both sides. This cycle jams the system and causes the number of cases delayed to rise exponentially, as each day brings new detainees into the system. Add in a lack of investigators to bring back people who fail to show for their hearings as scheduled, and the picture Chertoff paints looks bleak indeed.

Essentially, the issue does not differ much from a manufacturing efficiency problem in a factory, one which Henry Ford addressed in his pioneering work on assembly lines. One must move the resources directly to the line in order to make the most efficient use of the process, and Chertoff proposes exactly that. He wants to increase beds by 10%, which won't solve the problem but will help. He also wants more judges and lawyers near the detention centers, speeding up the judicial process to keep the beds available there, which will add to the value of the additional beds. Chertoff also described some high-tech evaluation systems to pinpoint where the most effort and resources will go.

Congress already has indicated it will fund a large increase in the number of border agents in the next budget cycle, but Chertoff describes a fundamentally better approach to the process that ensures their work accomplishes something other than playing tag. Having more border guards without improving the efficiency of the adjudication system does little to keep immigrants out of the country, especially when jumping bail has almost no consequences at all.

We still need to see more of a political commitment from the Bush administration on border control, starting with better enforcement and heavier penalties in the business community that employs illegals. Chertoff's ideas sound good, but his numbers look weak; more resources should be allocated to these efforts to create much more efficiency in the processes that the DHS Secretary proposes. If Bush and the GOP do not want to give up immigration as a political edge to the DLC-style politicians in the Southwest like Bill Richardson and Janet Napolitano, then they had better start taking it seriously now. Chertoff's efforts look like a good start.

Recruitment: A View From The Front

Yesterday, after a series of conflicting numbers on recruitment and re-enlistment got bandied about in the media and the blogs (including CQ), I received an e-mail from a commanding officer of a unit stationed in the Middle East. This officer wanted to let me know how he thinks recruitment and re-enlistment has affected his unit, and based on his three decades in the service, how it compares to other periods. I know his name and unit, but as he wants to make clear that he speaks only for himself and not as a representative of his branch of the service, I am leaving his name and specific rank out of the e-mail.

I wanted to make a point your post "WaPo Trots Out The Chickenhawk Smear". Some people probably don't understand the difference between recruitment and re-enlistment. Both have their values, but are separate and distinct, and complement each other.

So, IMHO, your post about "The Chickenhawk Smear" is pretty much dead on. I just wanted to clarify that these differences, in case the commenters get out of hand on this one.

I'm happy to say that this gentleman regularly reads CQ, but unfortunately because of the firewalls in place where he is stationed is unable to post comments. I appreciate his taking the time to share his perspective with me, and allowing me to share it with the rest of the CQ community.

Britain's Domestic Terrorists Win Round By Graverobbing

Animal-rights terrorists in Britain have forced breeders of laboratory guinea pigs to shut their business down in a last-ditch effort to get the body of their relative returned to them. Last fall, graverobbers stole the body of Gladys Hammond from her churchyard grave and extorted the Hall family to stop assisting the medical-research industry to have it returned to them, which they have now reluctantly agreed to do:

David, John and Chris Hall said that Darley Oaks farm in Newchurch, Staffs, would close by the end of the year. Their family, friends and business associates have been subjected to a six-year campaign of terror and intimidation that culminated last October in activists digging up and stealing the remains of Chris Hall's 82-year-old mother-in-law, Gladys Hammond, from St Peter's churchyard in Yoxall, Staffs.

Animal rights supporters celebrated the announcement but it was condemned by scientists as a triumph for mob rule that would hurt patients and damage an industry that employs 22,000 people and is worth £3.6 billion a year to the British economy.

The Halls provided animals to laboratories that work on therapies and cures that benefit everyone. In exchange, they have found themselves the subject of an ever-increasing campaign of terror. When that failed to work, the terrorists -- no other term fits -- decided to attack the dead. One of the taboos of almost every society is the respect shown for the remains of those who have passed away. It is telling that these ghouls have so little regard for any human feeling that they not only engage in this kind of behavior, but celebrate those who do it in their cause. How else to explain this reaction by the spokesman of the group set up as the public front for the terrorists targeting the Halls:

"This is the most fantastic day of my life. It's a victory for the animals and it's a fundamental victory for the animal rights movement. I feel so unbelievably proud to be part of the movement."

He feels unbelievably proud to associate himself with drooling morons who dig up the graves of law-abiding citizens in order to terrorize and extort them into knuckling under to the power of force. The fanily's attorney has it right, calling this a "very, very bad day for democracy." Laws exist to not just restrain government from using force to impose its will on the people, but to restrain people from using force to impose their will on others. What the activists could not hope to win at the ballot box, they have stolen through the use of force and the point of a shovel, in this case. Terrorists are nothing more than thieves and thugs with illusions of righteousness.

Will we hear from the "legitimate" animal-rights activists in Britain to demand an end to such tactics? Will Sir Paul McCartney, whom I greatly admire even though I disagree with him on this issue, go public and call these people out for the terrorists they are? If those who benefit from these tactics do nothing to stop the terrorists, they invite the breakdown of law and order that ironically will threaten their sparsely-endorsed agenda more than that of their opponents. That should give them something to consider before the next body that gets dug up comes back to haunt them.

The Oklahoma Heartbreak

The AP reports that maverick Republican J.C. Watts has decided against a run for the governor's office in Oklahoma next year, disappointing conservatives in the Panhandle State:

"I have determined that the timing for such an adventure is not right at this point in our lives," he said in a statement.

He said he spent more than two months talking to voters across the state before reaching his decision.

Watts is the second Republican to decide against making the race; Lt. Gov. Mary Fallin has announced she will run for re-election instead of running for governor. Their moves leave the GOP without a proven vote-getter with wide name recognition to challenge Gov. Brad Henry, the popular Democratic incumbent.

Watts, 47, recently bought a home in the Washington, D.C., area, where he started a lobbying and consulting business after leaving Congress.

I had an opportunity to meet Watts last year at the RNC. Watts impressed us all with his quick mind, sharp analysis, and excellent communication skills; in fact, he'd make a great blogger. At the time, Alan Keyes made the big news by announcing his run at Barack Obama in the Illinois Senate race, which all of us predicted would end in disaster. Watts wouldn't go that far, but he remained honest enough to not blow smoke up our backsides about it, either. He supported Keyes because "we both wear the same jersey," but he didn't exactly predict a close race, either.

A year ago, I wrote that having a committed conservative like Watts on the sidelines made little sense for the GOP, especially when we could use such an intellectual leader. His work with GOPAC kept him busy enough, of course, but we could use him on the stump. Had he decided on a run at the governor's office next year and won, he could have vaulted into a front-runner slot for the Presidency by 2012.

I had hoped that Watts would come to that decision -- but as always, J.C. Watts chooses his own way. That is why he remains such an admirable figure, but I can't help being disappointed that he will remain in the background for a while longer.

CQ On The Air Today

I will be on Right Talk Radio today at around 4:00 PM ET for a segment with Ace of Spades and Karol Sheinin from Alarming News, talking about Able Danger and the 9/11 Commission. Go to Channel 1 and look for Hoist The Black Flag. Aargh, ye mateys ...

UPDATE: Corrected the link; thanks to CQ reader Mike Morrissey.

Able Danger: More On Atta Timeline

Andy McCarthy makes a good point on today's Corner at National Review Online regarding Able Danger and its impact on the timeline given for Mohammed Atta by the 9/11 Commission. He writes:

The commission could, of course, be right. It’s quite possible Atta never went to Prague in April 2001. But the commission could also be dead wrong. And for present purposes, the point is: how sure can we be of its Atta timeline? The timeline based on which the commission insists Atta was not in the U.S. before June 2000, and based on which it rejected Phillpott, whose account has now been seconded.

McCarthy also recaps the known facts surrounding the timeline and the basics of the nagging Czech allegations that Atta met with an Iraqi diplomat and an IIS agent on April 9th, 2001, in Prague. McCarthy notes that the Commission rejected the Czech intelligence for several reasons:

* Atta didn't travel under aliases
* No video or photos of Atta in Prague or coming through Czech borders
* Cell phone activity during the period in question
* Testimony from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Ramzi Binalshibh
* No reason to conduct such a high-risk meeting with the muscle hijackers preparing to enter the US

Even the Commission did not go so far as to completely rule out the visit, by the way. On page 229, the report says that the Commission "cannot absolutely rule out the possibility that Atta was in Prague on April 9, 2001." It just concludes that the Czech intelligence is faulty, for the above reasons.

However, in my Daily Standard column tomorrow, I will point out that Atta had a damned good reason to check his six in Europe: the arrest of two Iraqi spies in Germany six weeks earlier and the exposure of their network, as covered in my previous Daily Standard column. The column reviews the information left out by the Commission in the final report and, combined with the Able Danger debunking of their timeline, shows that almost everything that the Commission assumed about Atta's travels come from two sources: KSM and Binalshibh, who may have good reasons to create a disinformation campaign.

I'll post the link tonight or early tomorrow with an excerpt.

Air America: Post Finally Reports On Financing Issues ... Somewhere Else

Now we know why the Washington Post has still failed to file a single report on the ongoing scandal at Air America, where $875,000 of grant money earmarked for poor kids and Alzheimers patients wound up funding the liberal radio netlet. Aside from running the single AP overview of the New York City investigation into AAR's connection to the fraud, the Post has ignored the story. Apparently, their silence comes from a commitment of resources to another financial issue involving a political group, one that promises to shake the earth with this revelation (second item):

The Christian Coalition is having a spat with a vendor over unpaid bills. That could be a bad sign for an advocacy group that was once one of the most potent and well-funded forces in conservative politics.

Mailing giant Pitney Bowes is suing the Christian Coalition to recover unpaid postage fees. The firm, which provides postage meters and other services, says that from September 1999 to June 2003, the organization ran up $13,643.44 in charges that it now refuses to pay. When political organizations stop or miss payments for utilitarian necessities such as rent and mail vendors, it sometimes is an indication of deeper trouble with their finances.

A lawyer for the Christian Coalition, Brad Weiss, dismissed such speculation. "It is not unusual for many organizations, both profit and nonprofit, to have disputes with suppliers," he said, adding: "I have no idea what would make this noteworthy."

Wow -- the Christian Coalition finds itself in court over $14,000 in dispute over unpaid bills! I agree with the Post and Jo Becker and Brian Faler that such developments can indicate serious financial difficulties for non-profits. That makes the Post's interest in reporting this to its readers perfectly understandable.

Maybe their readers would also find this interesting:

* The New York Department of Investigation finds itself looking into the illegal transfer of $875K from Gloria Wise to Air America. They want AAR parent Piquant Media to pay it back, but so far Piquant is either unable or unwilling to do it.

* Air America owes $225K in legal fees to Multicultural Radio and has yet to repay it.

* Multicultural Radio is suing Piquant and AAR for over $1 million in unpaid airtime fees.

* One of their former hosts and programmers, Lizz Winstead, is suing Air America for $290K in back pay.

It seems to me that all of these bills that AAR either refuses to pay or has no funds with which to pay them make this story around 200 times more fascinating than the Christian Coalition story. The Washington Post wouldn't delegate its resources based on the political orientation of CC and AAR, would they?

Would they?

You bet they would -- at 200-1.

UPDATE: If you want to know when if the Post finally covers this story, be sure to check at Postwatch. Chris' site provides a full-time blog on bias at the Washington Post and has adopted this particular crusade since the first days of the scandal eruption at Air America.

Zarqawi Network Claims Jordanian Attack

The spokesman for the Zarqawi/al-Qaeda network in Iraq claimed responsibility for the attack last week on two American Navy amphibious craft, rocket attacks that missed their targets and killed a Jordanian military officer instead:

The Internet statement was signed Abu Maysara al-Iraqi, the spokesman for Al-Qaida in Iraq. That group is headed by the Jordanian-born Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, blamed for a rash of kidnappings, killings and attacks against U.S. forces in Iraq.

Jordan said Monday it had arrested a Syrian, one of four men allegedly involved in the attack. The captured man's two sons and the Iraqi leader of the group were believed to have escaped to Iraq, officials in the Jordanian capital said.

The Jordanian statement said the four were part of an Iraqi-based terrorist organization, which the government did not identify. The government has received several warnings in recent months, however, that Aqaba had become a primary target of the al-Qaida terror network, a security official has said.

Al-Zarqawi's terror group was the second to claim responsibility for the rocket attack, but the authenticity of the statement, signed by group spokesman Abu Maysara al-Iraqi, could not be verified.

Both groups claiming responsibility have AQ links, and so far no other groups have competed for the dubious glory of missing two fairly large, stationary targets sitting in a harbor. As I posited earlier on this topic, the circumstances surrounding this attack suggest that AQ's ability to recruit, arm, and train its terrorists may have seriously degraded outside of Iraq, and perhaps even inside.

This attack came from an Iraqi-based cell that infiltrated Jordan for this specific assignment. That has confirmation not only from Zarqawi but also from Jordanian investigators who made key arrests in the case yesterday. Instead of martyring themselves for the glorious cause, they set timers on the rockets so they could make their escape. Not just that, but they used the notoriously inaccurate and unreliable Katyusha rockets as their weapons, which have the accuracy of a Hail Mary pass at the end of a football game.

So now instead of attacks set up with accuracy and care, involving volunteers so dedicated that they willingly commit suicide to attack Americans, we now see hit-and-run terrorist attacks with known low probabilities of success. In this case, it didn't even allow for the AQ operatives to get away cleanly, as their apparent ringleader got caught by the Jordanians. Zarqawi's spokesman openly talks about covering the "retreat" of their fighters after the botched attack.

All of this adds up to some serious strain on suicide-attack recruiting. It looks like Zarqawi has burned through a major portion of his lunatics in Iraq and now has to use tactics that make him much less likely to stage successful attacks on American assets. It also suggests that the Coalition efforts to interdict arms and other communications to his network has succeeded in forcing him to use less reliable weapons as well as less reliable tactics.

That sounds like success -- not a spectacular battlefield victory, but the attrition of a weaker enemy slowly losing battle capabilities as his base realizes the war has been lost. I'm surprised they even took credit for this failure.

WaPo Trots Out The Chickenhawk Smear (Update)

The Left has tried for months now to smear supporters of the war as "chickenhawks", people who encourage the war but do not want to fight it themselves. On its face, this rejects the entire notion of civilian control over the military and foreign policy. It also assumes a callousness on the part of those who advocate for military action when needed, that men and women somehow hold no value to us as Americans unless they happen to be us. Such personal attacks completely avoid having to argue the merits and disadvantages of military action as opposed to other strategies, reducing the intellectual level of the anti-war advocates to mindless namecalling.

Unfortunately, the Washington Post joins that crowd with a laughable look at recruitment by Terry Neal. Neal deduces that middle-class and wealthy parents, all of whom he assumes vote Republican, go out of their way to keep military recruiters from talking to their kids, which has led to a crisis in recruiting. How does Neal come to that conclusion? By a single data point:

The writer of the Post-Gazette article, Jack Kelly, explored this question in his story that ran on Aug. 11. Kelly wrote of a Marine recruiter, Staff Sgt. Jason Rivera, who went to an affluent suburb outside of Pittsburgh to follow up with a young man who had expressed interest in enlisting. He pulled up to a house with American flags displayed in the yard. The mother came to the door in an American flag T-shirt and openly declared her support for the troops.

But she made it clear that her support only went so far.

"Military service isn't for our son," she told Rivera. "It isn't for our kind of people."

This misrepresents Jack Kelly's original article, which noted a general resistance from parents to recruitment, not one based on class, income, or political stances. Not only does it misrepresent its source, but the article provides no data to support its conclusions. Instead, Neal wrote the article with an agenda already in mind:

Actually, I did have a premise, but it wasn't unshakable because neither the Army nor the Defense Department keeps detailed information about the household incomes of the people who join.

Neal then goes through a convoluted effort to demonstrate that because Kerry held a ten point advantage over Bush in households making less than $50K and Bush reverses that with households above that threshold, it points out that rich people don't let recruiters near their children. He manages to make this connection without any data on (a) the household incomes of those who join up, (b) the household incomes of those who refuse to join up, (c) the party affiliation of either data set, and (d) their support for the war in Iraq in any of the data sets, including the potential recruits themselves.

Yes, I'd have to say that Neal decided what he wanted to write well before he went out looking for support for his hypothesis. Unfortunately for the Post, he wrote it anyway despite having absolutely nothing to support it except for one family -- a family that he didn't even find for himself during his investigation, but one borrowed from Jack Kelly instead.

His underlying claims of a recruiting crisis appear to also be little more than a case of the vapors as well. Ralph Peters reports in this morning's New York Post that the military has kept up with its needs on recruitment this year:

* Every one of the Army's 10 divisions — its key combat organizations — has exceeded its re-enlistment goal for the year to date. Those with the most intense experience in Iraq have the best rates. The 1st Cavalry Division is at 136 percent of its target, the 3rd Infantry Division at 117 percent.

Among separate combat brigades, the figures are even more startling, with the 2nd Brigade of the 2nd Infantry Division at 178 percent of its goal and the 3rd Brigade of the 4th Mech right behind at 174 percent of its re-enlistment target.

This is unprecedented in wartime. Even in World War II, we needed the draft. Where are the headlines?

* What about first-time enlistment rates, since that was the issue last spring? The Army is running at 108 percent of its needs. Guess not every young American despises his or her country and our president.

* The Army Reserve is a tougher sell, given that it takes men and women away from their families and careers on short notice. Well, Reserve recruitment stands at 102 percent of requirements.

* And then there's the Army National Guard. We've been told for two years that the Guard was in free-fall. Really? Guard recruitment and retention comes out to 106 percent of its requirements as of June 30.

Neal and the Washington Post apparently don't like objective data for their news reporting on recruitment. They'd much rather stretch anecdotal evidence into an implied indictment of people who argue for a strong defense.

UPDATE: As the Confederate Yankee says, Ralph Peters has some 'splainin' to do. He mixed up the reinlistment rates with the enlistment rates. Truck has the link in the comments to the news that the Army will fall short of its recruiting goals, although it will meet its needs.

Able Danger: Pentagon Backlash Tries To Undermine Credibility

The Pentagon continued its attempted public-relations recovery after almost two weeks of remaining silent on the Able Danger revelations. After issuing its official statement, spokesman Larry Di Rita spoke out on Lt. Col. Tony Shaffer and their inability to find the records he claimed to have produced (via The American Mind):

"We have been very aggressive," Mr. Di Rita told The Washington Times. "We haven't been able to find anything that would corroborate the kind of detail Lt. Col. Shaffer and Congressman Weldon seem to recall." ... "We have to wonder whether [the chart] did exist," Mr. Di Rita said. "It's a bit of a phantom search here."

Mr. Zaid said Col. Shaffer was on active duty when working as a liaison between the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency and the Able Danger team. He then became a civilian analyst at DIA. He was suspended in March 2004.

The DIA is in the process of revoking Col. Shaffer's security clearance, Mr. Zaid said, for what he called "trivial matters." They include reimbursements for mileage and telephone charges, and whether he properly received an award for his Able Danger work.

Sean at TAM writes about his concern that this undercuts Shaffer's credibility, but it really just rehashes what has already been public knowledge. The first part, where Larry Di Rita adds a bit more emphasis than his official statement had, just means that the Pentagon still won't say categorically that the evidence doesn't exist now, let alone never existed at all. They say they're still looking, although Di Rita adds "aggressively" for Rowan Scarborough. Di Rita's statement falls apart now that three named witnesses all say the same thing -- the chart existed, and it identified Atta as a potential AQ operative in early 2000.

The revocation of Shaffer's security clearance has also been discussed since the first article at the New York Times, even before Shaffer came forward publicly. Mark Zaid disclosed that from the start, although we only have Zaid's word on the issues prompting the DoD review. Had Shaffer committed a serious breach of his clearance as an officer of the armed services, it would result in disciplinary action far worse than a simple revocation, and much sooner than 18 months later. The attempt to revoke his clearance while still promoting him in the Army Reserve (as happened last year) tends to argue against the clearance review being over anything very substantial, and looks more like a petty payback -- the kind of action that whistleblowing provokes.

The intel source that wrote "Al-Qaeda Brought The Matches," Big Sea, has some thoughts on credibility based on the ranks and status of the witnesses:

I'm curious if it has struck anyone else as quite significant that the second person to come forward to talk openly about Able Danger is an active-duty Navy captain? To me this seems huge. Except for the 3 years I worked at NAVSEA, I haven't had that many direct dealings with military officers, but I have real trouble believing that a Flag Officer would put his career on the line to support questionable or sexed-up claims to embarass a previous administration and the 9/11 commision.

I suspect witness credibility will be the main thing we have to go one in this case: I doubt actual details will be released, given the classification of the project and the risk that significant details would give the terrorists too much info on how we might ID them. And from what I know about document handling for canceled programs, it's quite possible the revelvant source material simply isn't around anymore, except in a summarised and downgraded form. So personal testimony may well be as good as it gets.

If Able Danger was all some dirty Rovian trick, I might argue that a Lt. Colonel would be just about the perfect guy to push it along -- senior enough to sound impressive with the public, and an excellent "fall guy" if his story does not bear up at a later date. Of all the ranks, Lt. Colonels can probably best afford to be mavericks and whistle blowers since most don't pursue promotion unless they think they have a good chance of making General. I might also add that Lt. Colonel Schaffer being a liaison officer, not an analyst or program manager, gives him a degree of "plausible deniability" as he can claim he was mislead, having "no direct knowledge." I certainly don't believe any of this, but if I was inclined to be conspiracy minded (or playing devil's advocate), those are the arguments that would occur me.

But an active-duty Navy captain is much too consequential a figure to act as a fall guy. Nor, in my experience, do mavericks make it to that rank. I suppose I could be wrong, but I just can't imagine Capt. Phillpott coming forward if he wasn't telling the truth and if he didn't have official sanction for doing so.

It will come down to credibility, as Big Sea points out. Three men, two of whom have put their military careers on the line -- including a flag officer who might have wanted a shot at the Admiralty -- have spoken out publicly to tell us about Able Danger and its results. The 9/11 Commission obviously did not bother to investigate this, and the Pentagon didn't want to do so either. Congress needs to start their own investigation immediately and start with these men who clearly have made the commitment to get this story to the American people.

UPDATE: Jim Geraghty at TKS has the transcript for the National Geographic special that appears to refer to Able Danger:

“AT THIS AIR FORCE BASE IN TAMPA (Picture of Entrance Gate to MacDill Air Force Base), MEMBERS OF THE U.S. ARMY SPECIAL OPERATIONS COMMAND ARE REVIEWING AN UNUSUAL CHART THAT REPORTEDLY IDENTIFIES BOTH ATTA (picture ID of Atta shown) AND AL-SHEHHI (picture ID of Al-Shehhi shown) AS LIKELY MEMBERS OF AN AL-QAEDA TERROR CELL OPERATING WITHIN THE U.S. THE OFFICIALS DECIDE THEY CANNOT PASS THIS INFORMATION ALONG TO THE FBI, IN PART BECAUSE THE MEN ARE HOLDING VALID U.S. VISAS AND MAY BE OFF LIMITS FROM INTELLIGENCE GATHERING BY THE MILITARY.” The next segment discussed terrorist training camps in Kandahar, Afghanistan.

In his next post, Jim does a good job of running down the know/don't know of Able Danger thus far but retains a bit of skepticism. Power Line's John Hinderaker says he's losing some of his skepticism now and wonders whether the entire Commission timeline on Atta should be thrown out. And Rick Moran agrees with me that Congress needs to act immediately.

UPDATE: Larry Di Rita, not Joe Di Rita. Not sure where that came from other than a lack of caffeine this morning. Thanks to CQ reader Ereynol in the comments for that one.

Able Danger: Did They ID Atta Before He Got Here?

One of the reasons why the 9/11 Commission claim they dismissed the information regarding Able Danger is because the claims made by Col. Tony Shaffer and Captain Scott Phillpott did not match the known travel timeline for Mohammed Atta. That timeline had Atta arriving for the first time in the US in June 3, 2000, on a flight from Prague to Newark. However, according to Shaffer, he recalled seeing Atta on a chart as early as spring 2000, and Phillpott today said that Able Danger ID'd Atta in January-February 2000.

That poses an interesting question. If the Commission timeline holds up, could Able Danger have ID'd Atta as an AQ operative while he was still overseas? Or did the 9/11 Commission use faulty data to construct a completely incorrect timeline for Atta?

The Commission report gives the following data for Atta's travel during the early months of 2000 (page 167-168 of the Commission report):

After leaving Afghanistan, the four began researching flight schools and aviation training. In early January 2000, Ali Abdul Aziz Ali — a nephew of KSM living in the UAE who would become an important facilitator in the plot — used Shehhi’s credit card to order a Boeing 747-400 flight simulator program and a Boeing 767 flight deck video, together with attendant literature;Ali had all these items shipped to his employer’s address. Jarrah soon decided that the schools in Germany were not acceptable and that he would have to learn to fly in the United States. Binalshibh also researched flight schools in Europe, and in the Netherlands he met a flight school director who recommended flight schools in the United States because they were less expensive and required shorter training periods.

In March 2000,Atta emailed 31 different U.S. flight schools on behalf of a small group of men from various Arab countries studying in Germany who, while lacking prior training, were interested in learning to fly in the United States. Atta requested information about the cost of the training, potential financing, and accommodations.

This information came from interrogations of Ali and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. However, that puts Atta and the gang squarely in Hamburg for the period in which Able Danger team says the four men had been identified as potential AQ threats. That can mean have one of three different explanations:

1. Shaffer, Phillpott, and Smith all lied, and went out of their way to lie to the Commission not once but several times, despite the Pentagon themselves today noting the "respected" service of the two officers.

2. The Able Danger team identified the cell overseas before they traveled to the US.

3. The Commission got their timeline wrong, or incomplete, and Atta and his team had already been in the United States.

None of these explanations sound promising. The first could have been plausible when none of Weldon's sources would come forward publicly, but now we have three of them openly stating their case, at least one and probably two of whom appear to have worked directly on the project.

The second has a flaw built into it, although not a show-stopper: had Able Danger identified Atta and his henchmen as AQ while in Hamburg, they could have simply informed the State Department of their suspicions about him. That would have kept Atta from getting a visa for entry into the US, and more importantly, it wouldn't have set off any bells regarding coordination between foreign counterintelligence investigations and domestic law-enforcement, such as the policy in place with the 1995 Gorelick memo at OIPR and the DoJ.

Would the Pentagon attorneys still have stopped Able Danger from talking to State? Probably not, but another possibility exists: the generals might not have wanted to explain how Able Danger came up with the names of potential terrorists -- the program appears to have been a black-box operation at the time -- or else simply didn't trust the product of the analysis. However, the Able Danger team specifically wanted to coordinate with the FBI, which points to Atta being in the US at the time of identification.

That leaves option 3. How good was the data for the Atta timeline, and how solid did the Commission nail down his movements? Looking at the data on pages 167 and 168 of the report, it appears that all of the information that the Commission used to establish travel timelines for the Atta cell came from interrogations of Ramzi Binalshibh and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. These two AQ officers later also discounted Atta's travel to Prague in April 2001, despite the insistence of Czech intelligence that he met with the Iraqi envoy and an IIS agent at that time.

It seems most likely that Atta and his team may have traveled to the US, either under their own names or variants, and performed some scouting for suitable locations before moving themselves to the US for good. The Able Danger squad has insisted that their requests to coordinate with the FBI got denied on the basis that Atta had become a resident of the US. Binalshibh and KSM could have created a disinformation scenario for the FBI; only the interrogators there know for sure how reliable the pair's information proved to be.

If the timeline for Atta's travels proves incorrect or incomplete, this casts serious doubt on the insistence that Atta never went to Prague, as it is based on the same intelligence. We need to know when and where Able Danger first ID'd Atta, and whether their data has better evidence of his travels in and out of the US than that given by two co-conspirators with plenty of motivation to mislead American investigators. Congress needs to act now to do what it should have done itself the first time -- find out what the hell went on before 9/11.

Able Danger: Second Source Sheds Anonymity, Confirms Shaffer

The second source for the Able Danger story, the somewhat mysterious Navy captain that tried to get the 9/11 Commission to look into the data-mining project at the last minute, has shed his anonymity and pushed the ID of Mohammed Atta even earlier than first thought. Captain Scott Philpott now says that Able Danger identified Atta as an al-Qaeda operative in January-February 2000 (h/t: CQ readers Bill and and Eddy B):

The officer, Scott J. Phillpott, said in a statement today that he could not discuss details of the military program, which was called Able Danger, but confirmed that its analysts had identified the Sept. 11 ringleader, Mohamed Atta, by name by early 2000. "My story is consistent," said Captain Phillpott, who managed the program for the Pentagon's Special Operations Command. "Atta was identified by Able Danger by January-February of 2000."The officer, Scott J. Phillpott, said in a statement today that he could not discuss details of the military program, which was called Able Danger, but confirmed that its analysts had identified the Sept. 11 ringleader, Mohamed Atta, by name by early 2000. "My story is consistent," said Captain Phillpott, who managed the program for the Pentagon's Special Operations Command. "Atta was identified by Able Danger by January-February of 2000." ...

The statement from Captain Phillpott , a 1983 Naval Academy graduate, who has served in the Navy for 22 years, was provided to The New York Times and Fox News through the office of Representative Curt Weldon, Republican of Pennsylvania, who is vice chairman of the House Armed Services Committee and a longtime proponent of so-called data-mining programs like Able Danger.

Not only did Philpott come forward and confirm that identification, Rep. Weldon also found and named a contractor who created the chart in 2000 that included Atta as an identified potential threat. James Smith recalled the identification because he retained a copy of the chart created for Able Danger, keeping it on his wall until it stuck there and could not easily be removed.

This makes three different witnesses, including at least one named source who worked on Able Danger and insists that Atta was identified well before the attacks. The Commission and the Pentagon look more and more ill-informed at best. When will Congress decide to act?

And Now, Insanity Corner With Pat Robertson

When conservatives want to find something juicy to fisk, we turn to the Minneapolis Star Tribune. When liberals want to do the same, they turn to Pat Robertson, who fulfills much the same role as the Strib as a fount of barking idiocy. Today, score one for the port side of the blogosphere, as Media Matters notes Robertson's latest insanity on Hugo Chavez. On today's 700 Club, Robertson endorses the assassination plot that sprang from Chavez' overactive imagination (emphases mine):

ROBERTSON: There was a popular coup that overthrew him [Chavez]. And what did the United States State Department do about it? Virtually nothing. And as a result, within about 48 hours that coup was broken; Chavez was back in power, but we had a chance to move in. He has destroyed the Venezuelan economy, and he's going to make that a launching pad for communist infiltration and Muslim extremism all over the continent.

You know, I don't know about this doctrine of assassination, but if he thinks we're trying to assassinate him, I think that we really ought to go ahead and do it. It's a whole lot cheaper than starting a war. And I don't think any oil shipments will stop. But this man is a terrific danger and the United ... This is in our sphere of influence, so we can't let this happen. We have the Monroe Doctrine, we have other doctrines that we have announced. And without question, this is a dangerous enemy to our south, controlling a huge pool of oil, that could hurt us very badly. We have the ability to take him out, and I think the time has come that we exercise that ability. We don't need another $200 billion war to get rid of one, you know, strong-arm dictator. It's a whole lot easier to have some of the covert operatives do the job and then get it over with.

Er, no. The Monroe Doctrine forbade Europe from interfering in Western Hemisphere politics, establishing American independence on both continents. It did not mean that we reserved the right to stuff Chavez into a trunk and toss him into the Pacific. Nor do we have any proof, or even any allegations, that Chavez has invited al-Qaeda or any Islamists to join up with him. (Neighboring Trinidad and Tobago might be another story, however.)

Media Matters posts the video and the transcript without comment, in a splendid demonstration of the power of understatement. Unfortunately, we have to work a little harder to make it clear that calling for the assassination of a head of state of a country with which we are not in conflict amounts to political insanity. Having someone use their credentials as a Christian broadcaster to issue this kind of advice takes it past political insanity to a moral disgrace, one at which Robertson's viewers should be appalled.

UPDATE: Well, Pacific, Atlantic, Caribbean ... I'm the Captain, not the navigator ...

UPDATE II: Pat Robertson now claims that he was misquoted, taken out of context. Hogwash. Take a look at the video, either at Media Matters or at the Political Teen, which also has it. Crooks and Liars may also have it posted, although I didn't see it on their post that linked back to me here -- and welcome to C&L readers visiting here for the first time.

Able Danger: Pentagon Can't Find Data

The Pentagon has provided its official response to the revelations made almost two weeks ago by Curt Weldon, Col. Tony Shaffer, and Able Danger staff that alleges that the US Army team had identified four of the 9/11 hijackers as possible al-Qaeda operatives a year before the attacks. According to spokesman Larry Di Rita, no one at the Pentagon can find that specific data:

The Pentagon has been unable to validate claims that a secret intelligence unit identified Sept. 11 hijacker Mohamed Atta as a terrorist more than a year before the attacks, a Defense Department spokesman said Monday.

Larry Di Rita said that some research into the matter continues, but thus far there has been no evidence that the intelligence unit, called "Able Danger," came up with information as specific as an officer associated with the program has asserted.

"What we found are mostly general references to terrorist cells," Di Rita said, without providing detail. ...

Di Rita said Pentagon researchers have found no evidence that Able Danger had Mohamed Atta's name. He said he was unsure whether the unit came up with the identities of the other three hijackers but then said that none of Shaffer's specific claims had been validated.

This doesn't tell us much we hadn't already guessed. The Pentagon has searched its archives and, as it says, came up with nothing specific. That doesn't mean it didn't exist at one time, however, nor does it mean it did. From the Pentagon's perspective, proving a negative to anyone's satisfaction is terrifically difficult, especially since it took this long for them to issue even this weak denial. From the tone of the language and their statement that they will continue to investigate the program, it sounds like they know they have not seen the entire data set for Able Danger.

All this does is provide a place marker for the controversy, and allow Congress to step in and make a few demands. First, Congress should request that the DoD allow those Able Danger team members who took part in the August 8th questioning to publicly reveal themselves and their part in the program, without fear of retribution. They should do this in an open hearing before the House Intelligence Committee (or Armed Services), or their counterparts in the Senate. They can certainly reveal the results of their investigations in public without necessarily revealing the techniques; if Congress feels the necessity to understand the latter, they can hold that portion of the hearings in camera.

In the absence of definitive answers from the Pentagon, we need to understand the Able Danger program and its results from the people who produced them. The 9/11 Commission failed to follow up with the Pentagon properly on this point. Let's not do the same thing now.

UPDATE: If Congress needs some idea of what to ask, they can check with Jack Kelly at Irish Pennants.

Sunnis May Miss The Boat Again

Another deadline approaches for the Iraqis to create a draft constitution for approval by the National Aassembly, and this time the Shi'a and the Kurds do not intend to let Sunni intransigence to derail the process. A broad agreement on the text has apparently been reached between secular and religious Shi'ite factions and the Kurds, while the Sunnis who have dragged their feet during the entire process now want unanimity before it goes to the Assembly:

A Shiite negotiator said Monday a draft constitution would be presented to Iraq's parliament, but a key Sunni Arab delegate said talk of a deal was premature and he doubted an agreement was possible by the midnight deadline. ...

One of the top Sunni Arab negotiators, Saleh al-Mutlaq, told Al-Arabiya television that he was "surprised by these statements" from the Shiites.

"There are still major points of disagreement," al-Mutlaq said. "I don't think we will reach a solution for them in the next few hours. We are holding talks with the Kurdish brothers and the brothers in the (Shiite) alliance and we haven't reached unanimity so far. The meetings are now taking place, and they claim that an agreement has been reached." ...

Jalaaldin al-Saghir, a Shiite negotiator, said the constitution "has a time limit that we do not want to breach."

"We had talks with our Sunni brothers at the end some of the Arab Sunnis reached several conclusions," he said. "We cannot wait for all the time needed by those people to be convinced. We agree that the constitution, including federalism, be put before the people. If the Arab Sunnis do not want to vote in favor of federalism, then they can reject the constitution."

In other words, we find ourselves in much the same position we did last week -- with a draft that could win a wide majority of votes in the National Assembly but fail to garner much support among the Sunni. At some point, however, that may be as good as it will get, as the Sunni do not seem terribly interested in coming to any agreement. Democracy does not require unanimity; it only requires that the majority view prevails and that the minority accept this as a legitimate outcome.

The latter part of that formula will get tested in the constitutional process, first in the assembly and later when the Iraqis vote on the proposal in a national referendum. The Sunnis could fight it out in the elections, but that would require them to engage more fully in the political system than they have done before. The National Assembly could also address the concerns themselves before the referendum, tweaking the draft to address more of the Sunni concerns, assuming that the Sunnis get serious about learning to live as a minority in a democracy as opposed to the privileged class in a genocidal tyranny.

In either case, it doesn't appear that the extra week did much to resolve the basic underlying tensions. In the end, competing interests will rarely result in unanimity. That is both the curse and the blessing of democracy, and the Iraqis will need to learn how to adapt to it.

UPDATE: The National Assembly will take three more days to try to get the recalcitrant Sunnis on board:

Iraqi leaders finished their draft constitution Monday and prepared to submit it to parliament — but withdrew it in the final minutes in order to give time to win over the Sunni Arab community, whose support is key to ending the insurgency.

The parliament gathered with just minutes remaining before a midnight deadline to adopt the constitution. The document still faced fierce resistance from minority Sunnis over such issues as federalism, which they fear could cut them out of most of the country's vast oil wealth, and ridding the government of members of Saddam Hussein's Baath Party.

Parliament speaker Hajim al-Hassani then announced that there was strong interest in reaching unanimity on the draft "so that the constitution pleases everyone."

If the threshold by which Iraqis measure success requires pleasing everyone, then they had better get used to disappointment. Democracy means that everyone gets a voice, but most of the time the result pleases few while mollifying the many.

The Gorelick Wall Encompassed Defense, CIA, And State (Updated!)

One of the arguments at places like Think Progress and other sites which have made themselves the defenders of former Deputy AG Jamie Gorelick consists of pointing out that Gorelick didn't work at the DoD when she erected the "wall" separating intelligence and law enforcement operations. Therefore, they argue, she had no effect on the DIA's decision not to share information with the FBI. As I pointed out earlier, that argument fails for two reasons. The first is Gorelick's earlier assignment at the DoD as general counsel for ten months, during which one supposes she promulgated Bill Clinton's policies as the top attorney at Defense just as she did later at Justice. The second, and most obvious, is that as the number-two person at Justice, she still set policy for the FBI. Since sharing and cooperation require two parties to work together, her wall would have made any attempt to engage the FBI pointless.

Now William Tate at What's In The News points out another reason why the "wall" constrained Defense. Gorelick addressed her 1995 memo to several different people:

* Mary Jo White, US District Attorney, prosecuting the 1993 WTC bombing terrorists

* Louis Freeh, FBI Director

* Jo Ann Harris, Assistant Attorney General, Criminal Division (DoJ)

* Richard Scruggs, Chief Counsel, Office of Intelligence Policy and Review

This last addressee makes the connection to the Department of Defense that the Gorelick defenders claim didn't exist. As Tate points out and as the OIPR website makes clear, the DoD looked to the OIPR for legal opinions on anything having to do with the legality of their operations, especially in regard to those involving domestic targets:

The Office of Intelligence Policy and Review, under the direction of the Counsel for Intelligence Policy, is responsible for advising the Attorney General on all matters relating to the national security activities of the United States. The Office prepares and files all applications for electronic surveillance and physical search under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, assists Government agencies by providing legal advice on matters of national security law and policy, and represents the Department of Justice on variety of interagency committees such as the National Counterintelligence Policy Board. The Office also comments on and coordinates other agencies' views regarding proposed legislation affecting intelligence matters.

The Office serves as adviser to the Attorney General and various client agencies, including the Central Intelligence Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the Defense and State Departments, concerning questions of law, regulation, and guidelines as well as the legality of domestic and overseas intelligence operations.

The inclusion of Richard Scruggs, the lead counsel at the OIPR, intended to send the message that any advice given to the DoD, CIA, and State regarding the sharing of files had better fall in line with her new stated policy of going "beyond the law" to avoid any appearance of impropriety. Given that Gorelick held a high-profile position within Justice as a political appointee of Bill Clinton, this policy would rightly get attention as an official directive of the President's wishes. The one office that all of these intelligence agencies would consult in terms of sharing and coordination between themselves and law-enforcement operations would therefore have advised all agencies to follow the Gorelick Wall as a standard and as White House policy.

Given that kind of connection, it doesn't take much imagination to understand why all of these agencies became shy about even attempting to stretch the limits of the Gorelick policy.

The notion that Gorelick's memo had no effect outside the DoJ does not stand up to scrutiny at all, once the fact and intent of including Scruggs and the OIPR become known. This shows why Mary Jo White objected so strenuously to this memo and its implementation, and why she went out of her way to antagonize her bosses at the DoJ with a second and more heated memo predicting, correctly, that such a policy would leave America unprotected against the very people she had just successfully prosecuted.

It's bad enough that Gorelick erected that wall in 1995. It's ludicrous that four years after 9/11, people waste their time defending her and her participation in the 9/11 Commission as a panel member instead of a witness.

Addendum: Relating this to Able Danger, one can easily see why the Wall kept the DoD from pursuing an FBI investigation of the program's findings. The AD team would have asked for permission from DoD attorneys, as Col. Tony Shaffer has said was done three times, and all three times the attorneys denied the request. Either they already had great familiarity with Clinton's policies -- which probably was the case -- or they consulted with the OIPR and got the Gorelick policy from Scruggs and his team.

Scruggs, by the way, was no mere bystander in this issue. He pressed for stricter constraints on information sharing in 1994, after the prosecution of Aldrich Ames for espionage. He complained about the supposedly loose interpretations of FISA at the FBI and in the intel communities, and on his own began imposing his own "wall" even without direction to do so from Reno or Gorelick. This action gets Scruggs his only mention in the Commission report (page 78).

UPDATE II and BUMP TO TOP, 8/22: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Apparently, I'm getting some visibility over at Think Progress, because the mass e-mails have started again. They're pretty easy to spot -- they contain no argument whatsoever, just mindless regurgitation of the talking points of TP:

Provide evidence that the OIPR used Gorelick’s 1995 memo to advise the Department of Defense.

Mark

And:

Dear Sir,
Your argument re: Jamie Gorelick is an embarrassment and should be removed immediately. It is demonstrably false.

Sincerely Yours,
A Reader

Another "reader" named BigAl dropped a comment that was an exact duplicate of Mark's e-mail in an Air America comment thread. I'm bumping this to the top so that "readers" from TP can actually read what I've written on the subject. I'll simplify it a bit so that everyone understands it:

1. The OIPR answers to the DoJ and is tasked with providing legal advice not just to the DoJ, but the DoD, CIA, and the State Department on matters concerning the legality of intelligence work.

2. The Deputy AG (Gorelick) issued a policy statement directly to the OIPR in 1995 (the "wall" memo) dictating the policy regarding intelligence and coordination with law-enforcement agencies. The DoJ certainly dictated what the FBI could and could not do in any case, and the "wall" memo would have precluded them from coordinating with other agencies regardless of their own disposition -- and the FBI was the only national law-enforcement agency available for that kind of assistance.

3. The chief counsel of the OIPR, Richard Scruggs, had already implemented much the same policy in 1994 as Gorelick officially dictated in 1995 (which the 9/11 Commission itself points out).

If the denizens of Think Progress really cannot connect those dots, no amount of evidence will suffice to dent their dogmatic worldview. Slade Gorton can say whatever he likes, but in this case he is simply incorrect.

NDP Splits With Liberals: Radio Canada

Radio Canada reports in its French-language news service that Jack Layton and the NDP have abandoned their partnership with Paul Martin and the Liberals, just two months after winning a major tax concession in exchange for propping up Martin during the Adscam scandal (via CQ reader SpaceNeedleBoy):

Le chef du Nouveau Parti démocratique, Jack Layton, a confirmé au quotidien Le Devoir, que l'alliance entre sa formation politique et les libéraux de Paul Martin était terminée.

In other words -- c'est fini. If this gets confirmed, the Liberals will suddenly be vulnerable to a Tory/BQ no-confidence motion as soon as Parliament comes back into session. The Liberals may have avoided the axe in May and June, but they have not capitalized on their political manuevering at all. Their national polling has them stuck at the mid-30s, a number which clearly gets them short of a Commons majority. Without a legislative partner, the Liberals cannot maintain a government.

It appears all Harper has to do is show up once Parliament returns next month. Martin may have to prorogue Parliament in order to maintain his grip on power, or else attempt to wrest BQ away from Harper to keep the Liberal government going. Neither option looks good or reasonable for the Liberals' long-term health.

UPDATE: The first Anglophone report comes from 580 CFRA (via CQ reader SpaceNeedleBoy again):

NDP Leader Jack Layton says his party is no longer in bed with the federal Liberal government.

Layton says the Liberal-NDP alliance that kept Prime Minister Paul Martin in power in the spring ended when the federal budget received Royal assent.

The Liberals struck a 4.6 billion dollar deal with the NDP in the spring to help pass the federal budget.

Layton isn't ruling out a possible coalition with the Bloc Quebecois and the Conservatives to bring down the government this fall.

That last shot across the bow will definitely have the Liberals calling the BQ to head off another attempt to bring down the Martin government. If they cannot, I expect Martin to prorogue Parliament with the excuse that he wants to give Judge Gomery enough time to report on the Adscam testimony and evidence before anyone calls for an election.

Able Danger: Team Members Spoke With Reporters

The Washington Times reports that although Col. Tony Shaffer remains the only person connected to Able Danger to willingly part with anonymity, several other sources met with the press on August 8 when the story went public, including members of the AD team. The meetings with reporters came with the explicit blessings of key Congressmen and the "tacit" approval of the Pentagon, Shaffer says:

House Republican leaders approved in advance plans by a military intelligence official to go public with details of a top-secret Pentagon project code-named Able Danger. ...

"I spoke personally to Denny Hastert and to Pete Hoekstra," Col. Shaffer said. Mr. Hastert, Illinois Republican, is speaker of the House, and Mr. Hoekstra, Michigan Republican, is chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.

"I was given assurances by [them] that this was the right thing to do. ... I was given assurances we would not suffer any adverse consequences for bringing this to the attention of the public," Col. Shaffer said.

Col. Shaffer said his conversations with Mr. Hastert and Mr. Hoekstra took place before he and members of the Able Danger team spoke as anonymous sources to reporters in the offices of Rep. Curt Weldon, Pennsylvania Republican, on Aug. 8.

This last paragraph gets repeated by Shaun Waterman as fact later in the article, saying that "members of the Able Danger team" joined Shaffer on at least one occasion on August 8. This should change some evaluations of this story. Now we have multiple sources, including people who had their hands on the data, telling reporters what they know about the identification of Mohammed Atta and three other 9/11 hijackers over a year before the attacks. Up to now, the assumption has been that only two sources came forward, one of which (Shaffer) only worked in a liaison capacity.

This explains why the New York Times and other media ran the story despite the anonymous sourcing. It also explains some of the inconsistencies between the first reporting on the story and Shaffer's interviews later. We had all assumed that Shaffer and the Navy captain were the only two original sources for the story. However, the original articles on Able Danger just mention "sources" as a generic term, and if the team members took part in this press conference on August 8th as the Washington Times says, then the information gleaned would have had more detail than Shaffer knew from first-hand experience.

We need to have these witnesses come forward publicly. At the least, we need the Times and other media outlets that participated in this August 8 meeting to confirm the number and nature of these sources, even without their names.

The Coming Democratic Split?

While the media has focused on the low polling numbers for George Bush in recent weeks and have their analysts working overtime talking about how that could result in election setbacks in 2006 and 2008, scant attnetion has been cast on the Democrats and their inability to take advantage of the situation. Two articles in two different newspapers explain why the opposition cannot gain traction on Republican setbacks, as the Democrats continue to struggle through a ferocious power struggle fed by their DNC chief and the radical activists that back him. The Washington Post and the New York Times picks up on this battle, but look at it superficially in terms of specific issues rather than as the gestalt of the party itself.

Both articles get headlines that start, "Democrats Split," but the Post looks at the war while the Times analyzes Democratic strategy on the Roberts nomination. The Post notes that the war has given the Democrats an opportunity to gain strength at Bush's expense, but that the radicals and the centrists cannot agree on a strategy to do so:

Democrats say a long-standing rift in the party over the Iraq war has grown increasingly raw in recent days, as stay-the-course elected leaders who voted for the war three years ago confront rising impatience from activists and strategists who want to challenge President Bush aggressively to withdraw troops.

Amid rising casualties and falling public support for the war, Democrats of all stripes have grown more vocal this summer in criticizing Bush's handling of the war. A growing chorus of Democrats, however, has said this criticism should be harnessed to a consistent message and alternative policy -- something most Democratic lawmakers have refused to offer. ...

The internal disarray, according to many Democrats, reflects more than a near-term tactical debate. Some say it reveals a fundamental identity crisis in the post-Sept. 11, 2001, world for a party that struggled to move beyond the antiwar legacy of the 1960s and 1970s to reinvent itself as tougher on national security in the 1990s.

But historic fault lines in the party run deep.

Make no mistake -- this radical movement that gets its support from well-funded organizations like MoveOn have threatened to rip the Democrats in half. Their radical wing had mostly found itself marginalized during the 1990s when the Clintons took over the party and the centrist DLC provided them with their power base. While national-security issues took a back seat to economics, the radicals had little to fuel their steam. The invasion of Afghanistan brought them back with a vengeance after 9/11, but the real boost to their fortunes came with the ascension of Howard Dean and his Internet campaign. For the first time since the Viet Nam War, the radical fringe showed real power through its support of Dean and MoveOn and found a deep-pockets sponsor in George Soros.

The DLC has found itself on the ropes ever since. The centrists have tried mightily to maintain some distance from the radicals but cannot afford to lose them or their fundraising abilities, regardless of how the Republicans fare in the polls. This has led to a complete abandonment of message, as the two cannot agree on strategies for a single, coherent Party stance on issues. As the Times points out, that applies to domestic issues as well, especially on the nomination of John Roberts to the Supreme Court. Roberts should have been a slam-dunk for the GOP and a pass for the Democrats, most of whom knew that Roberts represented the best they could expect from George Bush: a non-political straight shooter who would be conservative but not an idealogue. However, the fringe would not sit still for anyone nominated by the man who won the election:

The party's liberal base, whose contributions during judicial confirmation fights earlier this year have helped the Senate Democratic campaign fund amass twice as much as its Republican rival, is pressing for another vigorous fight against Judge Roberts as documents from the Reagan administration clarify his conservative credentials.

But as Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts and other liberal stalwarts on the Judiciary Committee step up their criticism of Judge Roberts's record, other Democrats are reluctant to join them.

"I am turned off by senators trying to act like they have already found the guy out and they know what he is like," said Senator Russell D. Feingold, a Democratic committee member from Wisconsin who spent last week focused instead on calling for a pullout from Iraq. "I am not part of any Democratic effort to 'set the table' " for the hearings by laying the groundwork to criticize Judge Roberts, he said.

Several Democratic senators said the hearings on Judge Roberts were shaping up as a risky balancing act. Failing to press him could look weak to their liberal base. But attacking too hard could draw Democrats into a losing battle on the treacherous turf of abortion, race and religion at a time when Republicans appear vulnerable on other fronts.

John Breaux, the Louisiana centrist Democrat who recently retired from the Senate, notes that holding the base isn't going to win the Democrats elections, arguing against going to war over Roberts. Breaux misses the other part of the paradox in his advice, however. Losing the base will doom the Democrats just as surely as the radical fringe's efforts to antagonize the center.

The essential Catch-22 of the Democrats consists of the central question set up by the successes of the Clintons in expanding the Democrats' voter base in the 1990s combined with the debacle of national security issues during their tenure, which has become even more apparent in the past few weeks. No one trusts national security to the cut-and-run Democrats, which limit the party's options in Iraq. Centrists cannot understand the rabid, foaming-at-the-mouth objections to Roberts and find themselves appalled and exasperated at the smear tactics of NARAL and others in their efforts to defeat him. Yet the few from the party with common sense to address these issues get swamped out by the radical wing, assisted by a media sympathetic to their cause, making any middle ground an impossibility.

If this continues, expect the Democrats to lose more Senate seats in 2006 and field another John Kerry-like candidate in 2008 -- one who has to waffle his or her way through every issue in order to hold the Democrats together. Eventually, if the Party cannot come together on key philosophy and policy, either the radical wing will depart, perhaps to the Greens, or the centrists will bolt to the GOP, perhaps to support a Giuliani bid in 2008.

UPDATE: Michael Crowley at Talking Points Memo notices the same problem, and comes to a similar analysis.

Sachi: So Who Does Cindy Sheehan Speak For?

Ever since Cindy Sheehan started protesting in Crawford Texas, the mainstream media has been portraying her as the voice of grieving mothers. She has absolute moral authority, as Maureen Dowd of New York Times, puts it.

Newspaper articles and television shows claimed that a flock of people, including parents who lost children in Iraq, had gathered in Crawford, Texas to show their support for Sheehan. According to AP, "By Thursday, about 50 people had joined her cause, pitching tents in muddy, shallow ditches and hanging anti-war banners; two dozen others have sent flowers." On CNN's Anderson Cooper 360 Degrees, the announcer said "Within days, the numbers grew along this Texas roadside. Other parents who had lost sons and daughters to the war, seasoned antiwar protesters, ... all made Cindy's cause their own."

Surprisingly though, neither of these two sources showed any grieving mother (or father) who supported Sheehan.

Don't get me wrong. She has plenty of supporters in Camp Casey, as they call it. One man, Trucker Craig Delaney, altered his route from California to Texas, just to be with her; he just isn't a grieving parent. In fact, the only grieving person CNN could find at all was a young woman who lost her soldier pen-pal in Iraq.

Even on Military Families Speak Out, a website dedicated to military families who oppose the war, I could not find a single article naming any parent who lost a child in Iraq and who supports Sheehan, despite many stories about her on the site.

The only exception to the rule so far is today's Minneapolis Star Tribune, which featured two grieving mothers who supported Sheehan... along with ten who do not, even if they are not necessarily pro-war. "I was not in favor of the war...but my son was a gung-ho soldier, so I back him and all of our troops in Iraq and everywhere," said Norma Benson, who lost her son Sgt. First Class Michael A. Benson only a few days ago. Out of twelve mothers featured here, only two emphatically support Sheehan, one of whom is Minnesota state senator Becky Lourey of the Democratic Farmer Labor Party, a well known Bush critic whose son, Army Chief Warrant Officer Matt Lourey, died last May.

By contrast, I have heard and read many comments from parents of fallen heroes who support the president and our war effort from, e.g., Cherenkoff and the Wall Street Journal.

Clearly, Cindy Sheehan does not represent most greiving mothers, let alone have "absolute" "moral authority" in this matter. The recent survey taken by Rasmussen confirms this point: "Among those with family members who have served in the military, Sheehan is viewed favorably by 31% and unfavorably by 48%." the study said.

It seems I am not the only one who is having a hard time locating grieving mothers who support Cindy Sheehan's anti-war protest. Dana Millbank, hardly a right-winger, reports that MoveOn.org was quite open about their deception:

"We're also asking that you bring pictures of children," MoveOn.org requested, and it didn't matter "whether or not you have a child serving in the military."

There must be many grieving families who oppose the war, but they evidently choose to grieve differently than does Sheehan. At least they have not made their presence known in Crawford, Texas.

(Posted by Sachi, Dafydd's wife.)

Movie Review: The Great Raid

The First Mate and I decided that we would follow the recommendations of our friends in the blogosphere and see The Great Raid. The R-rated war film tells the largely-unknown story behind the raid on the Japanese POW camp near Cabanatuan in the Phillipines.

By January 1945, the Japanese had begun to understand that the war had mostly been lost. The American advance had finally included Luzon, and even the bushido code of the Japanese fighters could not withstand the American Marines and soldiers that clawed their way onto island after island, dismembering the vast Japanese empire that they had thought would never fall. In response, the Japanese started liquidating POW camps, afraid that their POW practices would get exposed, risking war-crimes trials for their entire leadership. The opening sequence shows 150 American POWs getting burned to death by a Japanese death squad charged with eliminating any witnesses to their atrocities.

This uncompromising look at Japanese cruelty to captured prisoners has caused several movie reviewers to pan the film as playing to stereotypes. Ebert and Roeper gave the film high marks, but as Scott Johnson and Hugh Hewitt noted, the New York Times' movie reviewer Stephen Holden pans the film for its authenticity:

The story meticulously re-enacts the against-all-odds liberation of 500 American prisoners of war from the heavily guarded Japanese camp at Cabanatuan, in the Philippines, by a band of untested American soldiers in January 1945. ...

Its scenes of torture and murder also unapologetically revive the uncomfortable stereotype of the Japanese soldier as a sadistic, slant-eyed fiend.

Unfortunately for the historically-challenged Gray Lady and Holden, this authenticity makes the film much more compelling than the typical Hollywood dodge of making POWs in Asia look like starving skeletons while portraying their captors as soulful philosophers conflicted about their duties. The movie has no problem pointing out that the Japanese filled the roles of bad guys quite nicely in real life, and for once a modern film decides to tell the truth about the Japanese treatment of POWs and the Filipino people during their brutal occupation of Luzon.

The film's slightly longer run time could hardly be noticed. The film maintained a gripping narrative and managed to avoid most of the pitfalls of war movies, such as the faux multiculturalism that usually shows up by assigning each man in the platoon a specific enthnicity. Fortunately, TGR shows instead the heroic actions of the Filipino resistance, both in a subplot in Manila and Cabanatuan and with guerilla fighters that played a key role in the success of the mission. This avoids the normally Americentric focus of Hollywood movies, taken to ridiculous heights by movies such as U-571, which blithely takes a WWII British intelligence mission and assigns it to an all-American naval crew instead.

Benjamin Bratt, James Franco (last seen in the Spiderman series of movies), and Max Martini do a splendid job as key members of the Army Rangers on their first commando mission, one which seems to have little chance of success. Connie Nielsen shines as an American nurse who assists the underground in smuggling medicine into the POW camp. Joseph Fiennes almost steals the film as Major David Gibson, the ranking officer of the POWs and one who knows his time is running out as malaria slowly eats away at his health.

The film depicts battle sequences in highly realistic terms, which gets the R rating. That isn't an accident, either; not just battle sequences but also executions by the Japanese trying their best to keep Manila in check while the Americans sweep across Luzon get graphic treatment. Don't go unless you can handle these heartbreaking sequences. If you can, you will see one of the best films of this year, and one likely to get overlooked by most of the film-going public.

Box O' Roberts #8: Will DC Home Rule Trip Up Roberts?

My next assignment from the Hugh Hewitt/Radioblogger effort to parse the document dump from the Reagan Library gives us a look at the arcane but politically potent issue of home rule for the District of Columbia. One could hardly select a less "sexy" topic for research regarding the confirmation of John Roberts to the Supreme Court, but given the proximity and the sensitivity of DC home rule to the Senate, it could provide for some inside-the-beltway debate in the upcoming hearings. The issue of home rule has had its partisan overtones, given the overwhelming Democratic advantage in DC, and that might influence a Senator or two to carefully peruse Roberts' writings on the subject.

My portion of Box 8 contains some provocation for debate, although nothing terribly explosive. The Reagan administration asked Roberts to review issues surrounding the Chadha decision by the Supreme Court, negating the one-house legislative veto on laws passed by the DC Council. Chadha required that Congress override the DC Council in both houses, not just one, to overturn Council actions with which they disagreed. That gave the DC Council much more latitude in which to operate, as they could only be overturned by a joint resolution -- a more difficult feat to engineer, especially given the touchy issue of home rule.

Roberts gave his advice to Fred Fielding on 4 October 1983, along with a slap at an OMB official that prematurely stated the White House position on a legislative response to Chadha, one that would support the Supreme Court decision. Roberts proposed taking a different tack regarding oversight of the DC Council to render Chadha moot:

Stan Harris reacted with understandable horror at the prospect of giving such a free hand to the D.C. Council, particularly in criminal matters, and has asked our office (through Richard Hauser) and the Justice Department to see if there was some different approach that could be taken. ...

Ted Olson is meeting with Harris to review Harris' arguments that Chadha may not be fully applicable to D.C. legislation. Even if these arguments fail, we can still point out policy concerns, and suggest alternatives to the bill. For example, at least in certain areas, it may be better to require affirmative Congressional approval of D.C. laws rather than an opportunity for disapproval by joint legislation.

This would have solved the issue created by Chadha by reversing the process. Instead of the D.C. Council enacting law and the Congress having to muster the necessary political will to reverse it, Roberts suggested that Congress require its approval for at least certain types of laws and regulations passed by the Council before they went into effect. A failure to act would therefore constitute a veto, a kind of legislative pocket veto, as it were.

This suggestion would hardly have captured the delight of DC residents, who firmly believe in Home Rule. The idea that every decision regarding criminal law, at the least, would have to find approval by Congress would not have proven popular at all with a town already predisposed to resent the Reagan Revolution -- and likely would have used his themes of self-government and the elimination of federal interference against this effort. However, I cannot find anything on the Internet that shows if Roberts' suggestion prevailed; what I do find makes it appear that Chadha still prevails.

This may not present a big opportunity for Roberts' opposition to paint him as an extremist, although it would certainly give the DC Home Rule crowd another opportunity to jeer. It might give Roberts a few moments of discomfort at most if his opinions and suggestions on Chadha get mentioned and he is asked about his efforts to circumvent a Supreme Court ruling. He should answer, correctly, that Congress has the power to correct Supreme Court decisions through positive legislation as part of the balance of power created by the Constitution, and that he suggested one legal manner in which Congress could re-establish its authority over the District of Columbia.

I will watch carefully to see if this gets mentioned. My guess: no Senator will find this interesting enough for their 10 minutes on C-SPAN.

Rich 'Swiftboats' Himself Into Irrelevancy

Rarely does a columnist for a national news outlet publish a piece as intellectually bankrupt as Frank Rich's entry today in the New York Times. The only item in the column that has full engagement with the truth is this single, lonely statement:

Nicholas D. Kristof and David Brooks are on vacation.

Otherwise, Rich engages in transparent sophistry that must be fisked to be believed. First Rich decries the supposed character assassination of Cindy Sheehan by engaging in the same tactic himself:

Once Ms. Sheehan could no longer be ignored, the Swift Boating began. Character assassination is the Karl Rove tactic of choice, eagerly mimicked by his media surrogates, whenever the White House is confronted by a critic who challenges it on matters of war. The Swift Boating is especially vicious if the critic has more battle scars than a president who connived to serve stateside and a vice president who had "other priorities" during Vietnam.

The most prominent smear victims have been Bush political opponents with heroic Vietnam résumés: John McCain, Max Cleland, John Kerry.

Two points have to be made here. First of all, if one wants to decry character assassination, perhaps one should not engage in it. Unfortunately, that would leave the serially dishonest Mr. Rich out of a job. Second, the transformation of Swift Boat into a verb implies that the 250+ veterans of the Viet Nam war lied about their testimony regarding the in-country and post-war behavior of John Kerry. If Rich wants to get back into that debate, he's welcome to it, because the Swift Boat vets have not been disproven in any of their major allegations -- while Kerry was forced to retract his Christmas in Cambodia tale, the arrogation of Tedd Peck's service record on PCF 94, the battle stories including David Alston as a member of his Silver Star engagement, and so on and so forth.

Besides, if Rich wants to argue that this country cannot abide any criticism of the political rants of a Gold Star Mom, how can he tar these men who actually served in battle as liars? Does that make any sense to anyone at all? Why not just address the criticisms themselves?

True to form, the attack on Cindy Sheehan surfaced early on Fox News, where she was immediately labeled a "crackpot" by Fred Barnes. The right-wing blogosphere quickly spread tales of her divorce, her angry Republican in-laws, her supposed political flip-flops, her incendiary sloganeering and her association with known ticket-stub-carrying attendees of "Fahrenheit 9/11."

Let's let Cindy speak for herself, and let people make up their own minds. Here she is in April of this year:

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!

Or in Dallas:

“And the other thing I want him to tell me is ‘just what was the noble cause Casey died for?’ Was it freedom and democracy? Bullshit! 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 exclaimed.

As the veterans in Dallas rose to their feet, Sheehan said defiantly, “My son was killed in 2004. 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.”

Cindy Sheehan has every right to protest in this manner. However, reasonable people reading her rants come to the understandable conclusion that she represents the most radical leftist positions possible without advocating violent overthrow. Rich writes that this characterization comes from a Fox-led effort to associate her with people who attended Fahrenheit 9/11, but Sheehan herself made that association plain when she began posting her views on Michael Moore's website. Did Fox arrange for that to happen?

In Rich's little world, the First Amendment applies only to those whose views he shares, and the use of free speech to criticize the political stands of his comrades amounts to character assassination. Harry Truman said it best when he advised the heat-sensitive to stay out of the kitchen. Sheehan has gone on speaking tours and courted the national media that has treated her far too generously thus far. Her pronouncements are fair game for criticism, and if she and Rich can't abide it, they can go back to the oblivion for which they seem eventually destined.

Saddam Declares His Martyrdom ... For Palestine?

Saddam Hussein continues to attempts to cast himself as an Arab martyr despite evidence that he may have killed more Arabs than any one figure in history. In a letter to the dwindling faithful, Saddam now offers himself as a sacrifice for Palestine, of all places:

Facing trial soon on charges he massacred fellow Muslims, Saddam Hussein purportedly vowed in a letter published Sunday to sacrifice himself for the cause of Palestine and Iraq, and he urged Arabs to follow his path. ...

"My soul and my existence is to be sacrificed for our precious Palestine and our beloved, patient and suffering Iraq," the letter said. ...

"Life is meaningless without the considerations of faith, love and inherited history in our nation," the letter said.

"It is not much for a man to support his nation with his soul and all he commands because it deserves it since it has given us life in the name of God and allowed us to inherit the best," he wrote in what appeared to be a clear call to Arabs to follow his footsteps.

"My brother, love your people, love Palestine, love your nation, long live Palestine."

The Iraqis who fight for Saddam's restoration (as opposed to the foreigners who fight for Osama) might find Palestine's primacy a rather unsettling tone in this letter. It sounds as if Saddam acknowledges that he has lost Iraq and has given up hope of finding vindication in his native country. While Iraqis may have trouble finding common political ground at the moment, most of them would agree that their former dictator hardly fits the mold of a martyr for their nation. His brutal regime based itself more on creating marytrs as a manufacturer might produce cars; he killed hundreds of thousands of Shi'ites and Kurds and no small number of Sunni dissidents, either.

Saddam created martyrs to keep himself in power.

So why write this letter? Nothing captures the Arab mind like the mention of Palestine, and Saddam wants to marry himself to that struggle in order to create some sympathy for his position. He did, after all, spend plenty of cash paying off families that used their relatives as Kamikazes on civilian targets. This letter will remind Arabs of that "service" in their cause, and hopefully get them to forget the genocides he perpetrated on fellow Arabs and Muslims in return.

It creates a more pressing problem for Saddam, however. Thanks to the inaction of Arabs and especially Palestinians to oppose his own brutal oppression in Iraq, the new Iraqi government that controls his fate will not find themselves moved by this appeal. Indeed, another common thread among Iraqis of all stripes is an understandable distaste for all things Palestinian. The money that Saddam spent on the Palestinians was supposed to feed and clothe Iraqis, a fact that the new order in Iraq has not forgotten. His elevation of Palestine in this latest missive will only remind them of Saddam's perfidy rather than soften their hearts through his "martyrdom". It will also remind the Western allies of the new, democratic Iraq that Saddam did indeed support terrorism in concrete and open actions.

Saddam should continue to write his letters. If nothing else, they show how desperate tinpot dictators get when they spend their last days locked up and awaiting justice for their myriad crimes.

Unbalanced Coverage Of An Unbalanced Protest

Patterico gets an op-ed in today's LA Times, as part of their "Outside the Tent" series of external criticism. He focuses on the coverage provided by the LAT on the Sheehan protest in Crawford, a scolding that applies to more outlets than just California's largest daily:

The Times uncritically reported Sheehan's claim that the president had behaved callously in a June 2004 meeting with her and her husband, refusing to look at pictures of Casey or listen to stories about him. The Times claimed without qualification that Sheehan "came away from that meeting dissatisfied and angry."

But the article failed to mention that Sheehan had previously described Bush as sincere and sympathetic in the meeting. According to an interview with her hometown paper, the Vacaville Reporter, Sheehan had said that although she was upset about the war, she decided not to confront the president — who clearly left a favorable impression: "I now know he's sincere about wanting freedom for the Iraqis…. I know he's sorry and feels some pain for our loss. And I know he's a man of faith."

Of that trip, Sheehan said: "That was the gift the president gave us, the gift of happiness, of being together." In the 11 articles and columns about Sheehan that The Times had run on its news pages as of Friday, there is no hint of her previous praise for the president. ...

Sheehan's changing accounts of her meeting with Bush are relevant to understanding the president's decision not to meet with her again. So are her descriptions of the president in a Dallas speech reported by leftist newsletter Counterpunch as a "lying bastard," a "maniac" and the leader of a "destructive neocon cabal." In an article for CommonDreams.org, she called that supposed cabal "the "biggest terrorist outfit in the world."

She also has turned her son's death into a tax protest, refusing to pay her income taxes for 2004, the year her son died, reportedly saying in the Dallas speech: "You killed my son, George Bush, and I don't owe you a penny." Sheehan's use of such inflammatory rhetoric sheds light on why Bush likely sees little upside in a public confrontation with her. But you would never know about these statements from reading The Times' news pages.

These problems do not just relate to the coverage granted by the LAT. Most of the coverage given by the Exempt Media has included little of the actual rhetoric spouted at Camp Casey and by her supporters. Even when the radical-leftist screeds get any mention, almost no mainstream newspaper reports that Sheehan has engaged in that rhetoric for months. In an appearance last May in San Francisco, Sheehan appeared with now-convicted lawyer Lynne Stewart -- who assisted a terrorist leader in prison in ordering his minions to attack civilian targets -- to spew unbalanced vitriol such as this:

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!

Had the Exempt Media covered these kinds of speeches from Sheehan, it would create the proper context for the understandable decision not to allow Cindy Sheehan to get anywhere near George Bush. Her demands for another meeting with Bush came after these appearances by Sheehan, and at least the White House did some Googling before making a decision about her credibility as an apolitical Gold Star mom just wanting some answers about why her son had to die in Iraq. It's too bad that the media hasn't done the same thing.

A (Not-So-) Small Act Of Heroism

A few decades ago, when rare acts of senseless violence broke out on our streets, one expected the men in the area to protect any women and children from harm as best they could. Chivalry and social mores required it, and such action did not seem remarkable in the least. Today, when street violence has become so routine, one rarely hears of anyone who puts themselves at risk to protect anyone else, regardless of age and gender. The weapons in use and the regularity of the attacks have eroded that sense of chivalry, it seems.

Perhaps not entirely. In a short article from the New York Times, a 13-year-old boy in Brooklyn may have saved a young girl's life after she got shot in a crossfire, taking a bullet in the back:

A gunman fired shots in the direction of a group of people sitting in front of a building in Brooklyn early yesterday, hitting a 10-year-old girl, the police said. As the girl's friend, a 13-year-old boy, tried to shield her from further harm, he was shot in the back, he and his family said. ...

In a phone interview from his hospital bed yesterday, Ellis said that as he was getting his hair braided, the gunman fired the first of three shots. "When she got hit the first time, I heard her scream," he said, referring to Destiny, who was shot in her arms and upper chest, the police said.

As Ellis tried to pull Destiny into the building, he was shot, he said, though he did not realize it until about 15 minutes later, when the wound started to swell.

The hospital says that both kids are in stable condition. I use the term 'kids' loosely for Ellis Mercado; many adults would have reacted quite differently to the same circumstances. Let's pray for full recovery for this remarkable young man and his friend, and hope that the police can round up the cowards who opened fire on them.