William Rehnquist Dies At Home

Chief Justice of the Supreme Court William Rehnquist passed away tonight at his Virginia home (via e-mail from King at SCSU Scholars):

Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist died Saturday evening at his home in suburban Virginia, said Supreme Court spokeswoman Kathy Arberg.

A statement from the spokeswoman said he was surrounded by his three children when he died in Arlington.

"The Chief Justice battled thyroid cancer since being diagnosed last October and continued to perform his dues on the court until a precipitous decline in his health the last couple of days," she said.

Anyone following his activities for the past several months will not find themselves surprised by his passing. He showed no inclination to retire after 34 years on the Court, the final 19 as Chief Justice. His illness made retirement rather pointless, which he apparently sensed; what kind of retirement would he have had? Instead, he tried to outlast his illness, perhaps to outlast the Roberts confirmation.

His death will set off a new round of guesswork on a new nominee to the Supreme Court, but will also put pressure on the Senate to expedite Roberts through the confirmation process. Having one opening on the first Monday in October would have created enough political embarrassment for the Senate, but allowing two will create too much blowback for the moderates, especially those in vulnerable states. A few Senators will have to let their few minutes of Judiciary Committee inquisition satisfy their need for a pound of conservative flesh.

My prediction: Bush will have a nominee by the end of September, and the Senate will have the confirmation hearings in late October or early November.

Six Degrees Of Kim Coates

The Northern Alliance Radio Network will broadcast live from the Minnesota State Fair today and tomorrow, from noon to 3 pm. We'll be at AM 1280 The Patriot's booth on the south side of the fairgrounds, just across from the horticulture building. If you're not at the Fair or even in the Twin Cities, you can still catch us on The Patriot's webstream. We'll talk politics, but we have a lot of other events scheduled for these two broadcasts.

Last week, James Lileks joined us for an hour, always one of the highlights of our State Fair broadcasts. James and I share a love of film, but even more specifically, we both drive our spouses insane with an appreciation for really bad movies. James and I talked a bit about this curious predilection, and I've been thinking about it since then. I believe I may have found the key to making an entertainingly bad film.

Hire Kim Coates.

Don't get me wrong; Coates seems to be a fine actor, and he has an oft-compelling screen presence. What Coates doesn't have is good career management.

Take a look at Coates' filmography. He has appeared in almost every major Hollywood turkey over the past ten years. The bloated sea of red ink that was Waterworld? Coates played an inept pirate that lasted about five minutes under Kevin Costner's withering (and immutable) gaze. The sneak attack on movie audiences that was Pearl Harbor? Coates makes an appearance there as well. The remake of a hilariously bad original, Assault on Precinct 13? Book 'em, Danno. And the granddaddy of modern bad cinema, the grunting, cackling, tilted-angle Titanic of terrible film, Battlefield Earth? Coates gets plenty of screen time as a barely intelligible human who learns to fly Harrier jets in seven days, all while having to dodge John Travolta's teeth as the actor/producer chews through the scenery.

It's not as though Coates can be held responsible for the quality of the end product. His performances usually shine even amongst the ruins of the films themselves. He also appears in a few good films, such as Black Hawk Down and, uh ... did I mention Black Hawk Down? It's just that whenever truly epic disaster strikes Hollywood films these days, Coates seems to be around.

James and I discussed Troy after the show was over. He didn't seem as entranced by the big-budget failure as I was, with its pirouetting Brad Pitt, weepy-eyed Peter O'Toole, and hilariously bad Orlando Bloom. After I checked out the cast list, I think Lileks subconsciously understood that a modern film without Kim Coates could not possibly qualify as truly bad cinema. His instincts, as always, are magnificent.

Tune in this weekend to see what else we skewer on the Northern Alliance Radio Network, and call us at 651-289-4488 to join in the conversation!

Hamas: Nobody Does Terror Like We Do

Now that the Israelis have pulled out of Gaza, the politics of the region will hinge on who gets the most credit for their withdrawal. Hamas has started the competition by revealing their once-secretive military wing and claiming credit for a long string of terrorist activity, apparently believing that this will bolster their popularity among the Palestinian people:

Hamas' secretive military wing emerged from hiding Saturday, naming commanders and detailing how they attacked Israelis as part of a competition with the Palestinian Authority over who will get credit for Israel's pullout from Gaza. ...

On Saturday, a defiant Hamas delivered a new challenge to Abbas, who has come under increasing international pressure to disarm the group after the Israeli pullout, but is reluctant to do so.

On its Web site, the Hamas military wing, Izzedine al Qassam, laid bare its command structure for the first time, posting names of seven top operatives, along with photos, biographies and interviews. One of the commanders said the group had more volunteers for suicide missions than he could dispatch.

Hamas is also printing tens of thousands of flyers with the content of the Web site, to be distributed in coming days in mosques and at rallies.

One of the leaders named in the new Hamas PR campaign, Mohammed Deif, presents no great surprise to anyone. Israel has made several attempts to kill him, but he proved an elusive foe. Now that he has come in from the cold, he told Gazans that his Hamas unit has no intention of disarming, for the Palestinian Authority or anyone else. In fact, Deif plans to continue the production of rockets that have primarly targeted Israel rather than PA security forces, at least until now.

None of this qualifies as state secrets, even from Hamas, which has tried to keep its leadership from being identified so that the Israelis can't kill them. Why make such a fuss through this kind of announcement? The Palestinians still must hold the postponed elections in the near future, and Hamas wants to get the political credit for forcing Israel to retreat. Hamas already has a political edge on Fatah, capturing two-thirds of open municipal seats in Gaza and the West Bank during the last election. If Hamas can duplicate that in parliamentary elections, Mahmoud Abbas will have to hit the road, probably in a hurry if he wants to remain alive. All indications so far show that Hamas will indeed push Fatah out of the parliamentary majority, which is why Abbas has delayed the elections.

Hamas sells violence because the Palestinians buy it in droves. They understand their market better than the US and the Europeans do. The Western media and intelligentsia want to convince themselves and us that the Palestinians want peace, not war, but when given the opportunity they have consistently voted for the radical terrorists of Hamas (as opposed to the "moderate" Fatah terrorists). The fact that no peaceful-coexistence political movement challenging Hamas or Fatah for electoral representation speaks volumes about the supposedly peaceful motivations of the Palestinians.

They want peace, all right -- the peace of the complete annihilation of their Israeli neighbors. That's what Hamas is selling today, and my prediction is that they will find a vast market for their violence and hate.

WaPo On Katrina: It Starts Locally

Not all media outlets have forgotten about the responsibility of local governments to take care of its citizens. Today's editorial in the Washington Post not only reminds its readers that local authorities provide the first line of defense for its most vulnerable citizens:

But if blame is to be laid and lessons are to be drawn, one point stands out as irrefutable: Emergency planners must focus much more on the fate of that part of the population that -- for reasons of poverty, infirmity, distrust of officialdom, lack of transportation or lack of information -- cannot be counted on to leave their homes after an evacuation order.

Tragically, authorities in New Orleans were aware of this problem. Certainly the numbers were known. Shirley Laska, an environmental and disaster sociologist at the University of New Orleans, had only recently calculated that some 57,000 New Orleans Parish households, or approximately 125,000 people, did not have access to cars or other private transportation. In the months before the storm, the city's emergency planners did debate the challenges posed by these numbers, which are much higher than in other hurricane-prone parts of the country, such as Florida. Because a rapid organization of so many buses would have been impractical, the city's emergency managers considered the use of trains and cruise ships. The New Orleans charity Operation Brother's Keeper had tried to get church congregations to match up car-owners with the carless, and it had produced a DVD on the subject of hurricane evacuations that was to be distributed later this month. Unfortunately, none of these plans was advanced enough to have had much impact this week.

Instead the city decided to use the Superdome as a "shelter of last resort." Following that decision, a major mistake was made: Not enough food, water or portable toilets were made available to accommodate the enormous number of people who turned up. No one in the federal, state or city governments appears to have been prepared for the possibility that thousands would be forced to stay there nearly a week. With some forethought, the National Guard troops who arrived yesterday could have been en route before, or even immediately after, the storm. Five days was too long to tell people to wait without supplies.

The editorial misses two points that complete the loop. First, we can answer the question about the National Guard troops very easily. They get mobilized on orders from the governor of the state in which they serve. All that was needed was a mobilization order from Governor Blanco before the storm hit to get them in motion. Regarding the Superdome decision, that initially made sense -- until the levees broke, local authorities assumed that their stay would only take twenty-four hours or so. However, they wasted that time without moving transportation assets into position for a potential evacuation, hundreds of unused school buses that now sit under water.

The heavy-duty analysts at FEMA should also have anticipated this and provided direction towards these solutions. (We don't know that they didn't.) However, homeland security agencies in all major cities should have prepared for massive evacuations in the four years since 9/11. New Orleans' efforts show that it left itself woefully unprepared for such a contingency, even though it had known of its levee vulnerability for decades and its inability to stand up to a Category-5 hurricane.

Congress Takes Five Days To Act, Criticizes 'Bureaucracy'

In what would be seen as irony under less-deadly circumstances, Congress took the opportunity to carp at the federal response to Hurricane Katrina after passing a $10.5B funding bill five days after the destruction of New Orleans. The New York Times reports that members of both parties criticized the relief efforts while promising hearings into supposed bureaucratic inertia:

Members of Congress from both parties acknowledged on Friday that the federal response to Hurricane Katrina had fallen far short and promised hearings into what had gone wrong. ...

Senator Bill Frist of Tennessee, the majority leader, who plans to go to the New Orleans area this weekend, said he had asked the committee that oversees the Federal Emergency Management Agency to convene hearings so that "any lessons learned during this experience are brought to the forefront so that we may continue to be more effective in responding to any future disaster."

Before the House action, members of the Congressional Black Caucus strongly criticized the federal response to the hurricane, saying the government had abandoned many poor and frail victims, most of them members of minorities. ...

Republican lawmakers were also critical, with Representative Jim McCrery of Louisiana choking up during a news conference.

"You might note a bit of frustration in my face and in my voice," said Mr. McCrery, whose district in the northwest part of the state was spared by the storm but is struggling to deal with evacuees. "I will tell you: It is there. I am frustrated in my attempts to deal with a wide array of bureaucracy in trying to get assets on the ground."

Let's talk about poor response. Why did it take Congress five days to take action? They knew this storm went to a category 5 last week before it made landfall. No matter where it hit, it had a 100% chance of doing catastrophic damage somewhere, and by Friday it had New Orleans squarely in its sights. Congress should have been back in DC by Monday to get this bill passed and hand it to President Bush, not five days later. They couldn't be bothered to come back from their August vacation more than a couple of days early.

If CQ readers have not guessed it, a night's sleep has changed my mood somewhat. The above paragraph is more or less a parody of the criticisms aimed at George Bush, but if they apply to the President, they also apply to Congress. In fact, they simply don't apply to anyone.

When the storm reached Cat-5 status in the Gulf of Mexico, what did George Bush do? He declared the entire Gulf coast an emergency area and mobilized FEMA. Until it actually made landfall, however, he could not pinpoint the assets. Even at the last moment, the brunt of the storm hit Gulfport, not New Orleans. The levee failure came later, on Tuesday, and until then the damage to New Orleans was major, not catastrophic.

Even so, the existence of the storm off the coast of Louisiana should have prompted governments on all levels to act. What happened? The city of New Orleans and the state of Louisiana asked people to evacuate, but made no preparations to assist people in that endeavor. By Friday the outbound roads clogged with people in cars looking to escape, which all did. However, an entire fleet of school buses -- hundreds of them -- sat in their parking lots, gathering dust. Until George Bush called Governor Blanco personally and pleaded with her to make the evacuation order mandatory on Saturday, neither Mayor Nagin nor Blanco told people they had to leave. Apparently, that order only went out over the TV and radio from their press conference; no attempt was made to direct people out of their homes and onto the road.

After the levees broke on Tuesday, the situation broke down rapidly, a drearily predictable result. The two main refugee centers, the official one at the Superdome and the ad-hoc site at the Convention Center, should have been evacuated at that point. However, even two days after landfall, New Orleans had not moved its buses to high ground to keep them ready for use in case the levees broke. Lousiana's governor had not called out her National Guard units, only 25% of which have deployed to Iraq. With I-10 from the east completely unusable for vehicular traffic and the New Orleans PD completely absorbed by search-and-rescue functions, looting ran wild and order completely broke down. Nagin only ordered the PD to take on looting as a high priority on Thursday.

What did George Bush do? He had a wide area of devastation to manage. Mississippi has also sustained catastrophic damage, with entire towns destroyed, flooded, and unable to fend for themselves. He does not have the authority to call out anyone's National Guard until he federalizes the units, a move usually reserved for use when governors prove recalcitrant in mobilization. Yet within three days of the levee burst and the drowning of New Orleans, Bush had 40,000 troops entering the city to take over the management from Nagin and Blanco, delivering the aid that had waited for lines of communication to get established and the order that the NOPD and Louisiana could not maintain.

We work within a federal system, where cities and states control the allocation of resources used within their borders. We do this because we recognize that, for the most part, federalism works. Local decisions about resource allocation usually create better results than top-down bureaucratic management. The main requirement for that to work is local leadership. Blaming George Bush because he delivered results within three days of the major catastrophic event while following these rules is as silly as blaming Congress for taking five days to pass an aid bill.

The main failure in New Orleans came when the local and state governments refused to recognize that the storm had a high chance to cause catastrophic damage and use its assets to get the poor and infirm out of its way. They had plenty of resources (in vehicles) with which to do that, but left them right where the floods would destroy them. All the rest of the damage would have been mere property destruction, difficult to rebuild but nonetheless easier to accept than the unbelievable hardship we've seen this week.

However, I suspect that all of this will come out in whatever hearings get held after the rescues have been completed. In the meantime, let's continue to focus on getting assistance where needed and drop the idea of holding political events that will distract the very people conducting the emergency operations from their primary tasks. CQ readers have done a wonderful job of helping Catholic Charities, and I would encourage them to keep giving.

UNSCAM Probe Nets Another Russian

Reuters and the AP report on the second US arrest resulting from probes into the UN Oil-For-Food financial scandal. Police arrested Vladimir Kuznetsov after Kofi Annan withdrew his diplomatic immunity earlier today, joining Alexander Yakovlev in the klink for money laundering and bribery:

Vladimir Kuznetsov, a Russian Foreign Ministry official and the elected chairman of the U.N. General Assembly's budget advisory committee, was taken into custody by the FBI, Russian and U.S. officials said.

Kuznetsov later appeared in federal district court in khaki shorts and a green shirt and pleaded innocent.

The court offered to release him only if he could post a $1.5 million bond co-signed by three financially worthy parties and secured by $500,000 in properties and cash.

Even if released, he would remain under house arrest with an electronic monitoring device.

The arrest was only the latest scandal plaguing the world body following allegations of corruption and mismanagement in the defunct $64 billion U.N. oil-for-food program for Iraq, and a senior procurement officer's admission he had demanded illegal payments from would-be U.N. contractors.

It appears that Yakovlev has talked with investigators, a suspicion I had when authorities arrested him and just as quickly bailed him out. Note the difference between the bond conditions as described in this article. Yakovlev got out on a standard bail arrangement, albeit for $400K. Kuznetsov has to put up a third of his $1.5 million in cash or securities, with three underwriters, and still wear the Martha Stewart signature model electronic anklet.

The continuing Russian connections to the program also bears attention. Kuznetsov wasn't just some flunky at Turtle Bay -- he headed an important General Assembly committee and worked for Vladimir Putin in the foreign office. Russia supported France in the 2003 showdown over whether to remove Saddam Hussein by force. Only after we toppled him in three weeks did we find out the extent to which Russia had performed an end-run around the sanctions regime it argued to continue instead of using force.

This arrest causes one to wonder whether Putin or his government have more to do with UNSCAM than first thought. Yakovlev only had tenuous ties to the Putin regime, while Kuznetsov has much stronger connections to the autocratic former KGB chief. His credentials may lead to the discovery of more reasons why the Russians backed the French use of its veto when it came to holding Saddam accountable for his refusal to comply with sixteen UN Security Council resolutions.

Addendum: The Washington Post includes this choice tidbit:

The latest arrest comes less than two weeks before a Sept. 14 summit that will draw more than 170 world leaders to U.N. headquarters to address, among other issues, management gaps that allowed corruption to occur. A senior U.S. official said it was too soon to determine whether the case "would help or hinder" U.S efforts to strike agreement on a proposal to impose greater independent oversight of U.N. spending.

The Bush administration is facing intense resistance from Russia, China and the "Group of 77" developing countries to proposals aimed at strengthening outside scrutiny of the United Nations' books. The Russian government, meanwhile, has vigorously opposed a U.N. reorganization plan that would undercut the power of Kuznetsov's committee.

Interestingly, the Post buries this story on page A27. I wonder why?

Katrina: Focus (Update)

I will have plenty to say later on about the madness of the coverage and the political debate surrounding Hurricane Katrina and flood aid, but I won't be drawn into it now, not by ridiculous rappers who spew garbage on prime-time network TV nor by the asinine and biased reporting that presumes that the federal government has all responsibility for the citizens of a city, rather than the city itself or the state in which it resides. For now, we need to focus on the task at hand, which is to get food, water, and shelter for the victims of Katrina and start planning on how to pull New Orleans out of the muck, literally and figuratively.

Donate to Catholic Charities or another worthy organization. Volunteer your time and labor. Pray, pray, pray. Those activities provide positive and constructive methods of coping with the catastrophe and result in actual benefit for the people of New Orleans and Mississippi.

I'm starting a moratorium on debating the politics of the relief at Captain's Quarters for a fortnight. I hope my fellow bloggers will join me, on the right and the left. The links will still exist when two weeks have passed, and then we can all get down in the figurative mud and start slinging it back and forth. For right now, the entire exercise makes Americans look like snarling dogs when we should extend our hands to our brothers and sisters in need. It's dispiriting, it's demeaning, and it's too damned tiresome to pursue.

I plan on covering other stories in depth, and on Katrina I will continue to note progress and the remarkable stories of courage and hope as well as the difficult prognoses for recovery, but I'm waiting for a reasonable period to pass before assigning blame or defending others. By that time, we'll actually have the facts in front of us.

Any takers?

UPDATE: Okay, this is eerie. Hugh and I apparently had the same thought tonight, but he posted his first.

UPDATE II: Based on the e-mails I have received overnight about leaving the field exposed to the lunatics of the Left, I have reconsidered this approach, as Saturday's posts will show. I still wish we could put all this aside for two weeks while we focus on the critical tasks ahead of us, but unfortunately, that's not possible.

Able Danger: The Shaffer Interview

Several CQ readers sent me a link to a lengthy interview with LTC Tony Shaffer in the upcoming issue of Government Security News. Although hardly exclusive, the Pentagon's latest revelation of three more corroborating witnesses lends a lot more credence to Shaffer's testimony, and the broad reach of this interview will provide a touchstone for those who watch the upcoming hearings to see whether Congress really intends on a full investigation.

The interview starts off with a summation of its highlights, which allows readers to understand the scope of the discussion. Among the revelations in the summary is a CIA refusal to cooperate based on turf-protecting attitudes and an explanation of how Able Danger used information from mosques to identify relationships between potential terrorists:

After briefing the CIA’s representative stationed at SOCOM headquarters, and explaining that Able Danger would not be competing with the CIA’s own separate mission to find and kill Osama bin Laden, Shaffer was surprised by the CIA rep’s stern resistance to sharing any information, said Shaffer. “I clearly understand the difference,” the CIA rep told him, according to Shaffer. “I clearly understand. We’re going after the leadership. You guys are going after the body. But, it doesn’t matter. The bottom line is, CIA will never give you the best information from ‘Alex Base’ or anywhere else. CIA will never provide that to you because if you were successful in your effort to target Al Qaeda, you will steal our thunder. Therefore, we will not support this.” Shaffer told GSN that one key to Able Danger’s success in identifying suspected terrorists was its willingness to buy information from brokers that identified visits by individuals to specific mosques located around the world. By crunching data about such visits during a six-month period, Able Danger’s data miners were able to spot illuminating patterns and identify potential relationships among alleged terrorists, Shaffer explained.

Shaffer's testimony on these points underscore the lack of cooperation and undue competition between intelligence agencies that most had presumed caused some of the intelligence failures prior to the 9/11 attacks. We expected that some streamlining of intelligence units would comprise part of the 9/11 Commission recommendations, instead of the restructuring that allowed all the units to continue operating separately, but with an additional two layers of bureaucracy above them. The issue of cooperation and competition never got addressed at all.

Far more interesting, however, is the timeline Shaffer describes in his dealings with the 9/11 Commission as well as the chain of command for Able Danger after the terrorists attacked. Shaffer once again recounts the call he received, reminding him that their team had identified Atta and his cell as potential terrorists over a year earlier. Shaffer says that the information reached Congress and the NSA as soon as it became apparent, but that the chaos that followed the attacks may have buried the information:

GSN: How soon after the 9/11 attack did you realize that Able Danger had actually identified about a year earlier the Brooklyn cell and several of the actual 9/11 terrorists, including Mohammed Atta? SHAFFER: It was within two weeks of 9/11, when one of my colleagues, who had kept one of the charts, called me and said, “You’re not going to believe this. He’s on one of our charts -- Atta.” I just felt this sinking in the pit of my stomach like, “You’ve got to be kidding me.” “Nope, you want to come see?” This [colleague] and I get together for coffee. “Here it is,” [said the colleague.] I’m just sitting there shocked, like I can’t believe we have this, and I asked, “What are we going to do about this?” and [the colleague] said, “I don’t know yet.” I was told later that the information [on Able Danger’s findings] was passed by Congressman [Curt] Weldon over to Stephen Hadley [then the deputy national security advisor in the Bush White House]. At that point in time, I was convinced, “Okay, we got the word out. We’re good to go. At least someone will know now that this happened.”

Bear in mind that Shaffer, who worked on Able Danger liaison as one of several projects on his plate, went back to active duty at this time and moved on to new assignments. General Rod Isler had ordered him to drop the Able Danger project early in the year, which preceded its rapid demise after General Pete Schoomaker retired initially at the beginning of 2001. With a war on, Shaffer assumed that Able Danger data had reached the top and had the attention of investigators and intelligence operatives.

In October 2003, while he served in other intelligence roles in Afghanistan, Philip Zelikow came to visit. Army brass wanted anyone who had information relevant to 9/11 to step forward, and Shaffer compiled his talking points, which he showed GSN but would not allow them to publish. He specifically recalls telling Zelikow about Atta:

SHAFFER: Same thing [in Afghanistan.] It took time to go through these points. The bottomline was, and the way I phrased it was, “We found two of the three cells which conducted 9/11, to include Atta.” That’s the way I phrased it to them. I don’t know if they didn’t recognize the Atta part, but I did specifically mention two of the three cells which conducted 9/11, and at the end of that I threw in Atta. Because my focus, honestly, was that we found two of the three cells. That was to me the most important factor, rather than focusing on Atta, as an individual. And that was what I told them. ...

As I recall, at the end of the meeting, there was silence. People were just silent at what I’d said.

Now, I don’t know how to interpret that, but I do know that two things came out of that meeting, some of which are admitted by the 9/11 Commission now.

First, Zelikow approached me at the end of the meeting and said, “This is important. We need to continue this dialogue when we get back to the states. Here’s my card.”

Now a senior executive handing an [Army] major his card, I would consider that a fairly big indication that “Hey, there’s something to this.”

Second thing, by the 9/11 Commission’s own statement of 12 August, it talks about Dr. Zelikow calling back [to the U.S.] immediately. My understanding from talking to another member of the press is that [Zelikow’s] call came into America at four o clock in the morning. He got people out of bed over this.

So, I don’t know what they heard. I can only tell you that I was told by Zelikow to re-contact him and we have their own statement here. So, it seems to me that what they’re saying about [Able Danger] not being important is contradicted by the fact that he did tell me to contact him.

After this, strange events start to transpire. Shaffer completes his tour of duty and takes his 30-day leave. By the time he calls Zelikow in January, Zelikow no longer wants to see him. During his initial briefing, he offered to give Zelikow all of his collected documentation for Able Danger, as he had become the repository of the information. The last time he recalls seeing the data was February 2004. By the time Zelikow says he got the information in March 2004, Zelikow reported that it comprised two briefcase-sized boxes of documents, far less than what Shaffer had archived. By the next month, the Pentagon had suspended his security clearance over $67 worth of disputed cell-phone charges which Shaffer offered to pay just to get rid of the nuisance. Eventually the Army cleared him, but in the meantime his collected information on Able Danger had apparently disappeared.

Several questions come out of this interview, and the answers may make people from both administrations very incomfortable:

* Who had access to Shaffer's files, and what happened to them?
* Who initiated the clearance suspension for Shaffer?
* Shaffer identifies Pete Schoomaker as the man who specifically recruited him for Able Danger, and indeed as the leading light of the concept. Schoomaker retired, but returned in 2003 to the Joint Chiefs by the request of Donald Rumsfeld. Why has Schoomaker kept silent?

It would appear from this testimony that Shaffer's revelation in October 2003 set off a chain of events that rather conveniently left little from Able Danger except live witnesses. Seeing as how that revelation went to Philip Zelikow, now serving as Condoleezza Rice's right-hand man at State, one has to presume that Zelikow would know something about how that happened. To whom did he make that late-night phone call, and what happened in two months that made Shaffer go from explosive source to persona non grata?

If Congress is inclined to ask questions, they could start with those.

Katrina: Rebuilding On An Unimaginable Scale

Hugh Hewitt reminds us in his column at the Weekly Standard that we may not yet realize the scope of the task that faces us in New Orleans. We have rebuilt parts of cities after natural disasters in the past, but Hurricane Katrina has created a singular event, one which moves far past the task of simply recreating housing and commercial buildings. How does one re-create a living community?

Before long, however, the extreme needs will be met and the long-term rebuilding will get underway. At that point it will become much less obvious how ordinary Americans can help. When terrorists struck on September 11, the carnage was huge and the loss of life staggering, but an entire community was not wiped out. With this disaster, America confronts for the first time the daunting reconstruction of complex social and political organizations.

It is a task which may be beyond the ability of the local, state, and federal governments to manage. How, for example, does a government--at any level--presume to assist a shattered church in the reconstruction of its walls and its Sunday School programs, an Alcoholics Anonymous chapter in the care of its members, a community theater in the reconstruction of its playhouse, or scores and scores of high school athletes in the completion of their senior year schedules so that colleges and universities can offer talented kids a chance at a free education?

The only way such a multitude of specialized needs can be met is for the vast, vast numbers of their counterparts across the United States to act--independently of government--to come to their aid in a reconstruction effort.

Hugh has some excellent ideas about how that can be accomplished, and even has some help lined up from NZ Bear. He proposes setting up a clearinghouse of specific requests from community groups and getting word out to similar groups elsewhere who will know specifically what resources to gather and send. Cash does not solve all ills, after all, and plenty of specific expertise will be needed to recreate the community interaction that Hugh describes. Don't miss this article.

Speaking of Hugh, Radioblogger has the transcript from my appearance on his show yesterday. I feel fairly certain that Duane got the billing order backwards on this segment, however. Scroll through all of his entries from yesterday to catch up with what the blogosphere is doing for flood aid and Hurrican Katrina, and not just in New Orleans, either. Don't forget to keep the donations coming to Catholic Charities, too.

And pray, pray, pray for the victims and the rescuers in New Orleans.

Failed Levee Recently Upgraded

Several stories about supposed failures of the Bush administration to foresee the catastrophic failure of the New Orleans levee system have gotten published in the last two days, but one in the New York Times buries an uncomfortable fact midway through its report. Despite not getting the full federal budget money requested for levee engineering Louisiana requested, it turns out that the levees had indeed been improved and strengthened in targeted portions -- and that the main failure occurred in an upgraded section:

The 17th Street levee that gave way and led to the flooding of New Orleans was part of an intricate, aging system of barriers and pumps that was so chronically underfinanced that senior regional officials of the Army Corps of Engineers complained about it publicly for years.

Often leading the chorus was Alfred C. Naomi, a senior project manager for the corps and a 30-year veteran of efforts to waterproof a city built on slowly sinking mud, surrounded by water and periodically a target of great storms. ...

"A breach under these conditions was ultimately not surprising," he said last night. "I had hoped that we had overdesigned it to a point that it would not fail. But you can overdesign only so much, and then a failure has to come."

No one expected that weak spot to be on a canal that, if anything, had received more attention and shoring up than many other spots in the region. It did not have broad berms, but it did have strong concrete walls.

Shea Penland, director of the Pontchartrain Institute for Environmental Studies at the University of New Orleans, said that was particularly surprising because the break was "along a section that was just upgraded."

"It did not have an earthen levee," Dr. Penland said. "It had a vertical concrete wall several feel thick."

One might ask about the effectiveness of the overall plan for upgrading the levees based on this performance, and whether that had anything to do with their failure to win as much federal money for the project. However, that question can wait until Lake Pontchartrain gets hemmed in behind its girdle once again and New Orleans gets back on its feet -- as could all the anklebiting about the budget process and responsibility for the levee system.

However, since that anklebiting appears to have so much attraction, allow me to point out a couple of facts. The power of Category 5 hurricanes have been known since Galveston in 1900, and certainly snce Hurricane Camille in 1969. Given New Orleans' fairly unique situation, the result of a direct Cat-4 or -5 hit has always been presumed to carry the inevitable result of levee failure. If we want to play the blame-Bush game, we can also play the blame-Nixon, blame-Ford, blame-Carter, blame-Reagan, blame-Bush 41, and blame-Clinton game, especially after Hurricane Andrew in 1992. However, since Congress allocates the money and the President has no line-item veto or modification power, the responsibility for funding these programs falls to our representatives.

But for what should they be blamed? After all, they have to weigh risks and benefits with each item in the budget, as well as whether a project has a responsible and practical value. We don't know what kind of project got proposed and whether the $71 million it lost funded any kind of practical effort. Given the new and improved levee that produced the failure, perhaps the decision made some sense at the time.

And let's not forget that the levee system protecting New Orleans belongs to the people of Louisiana, not the feds. It protects one city; it isn't an interstate system such as the ones built along the Mississippi. Why didn't Louisiana fund its own improvements? What have they done about the situation except wait for the rest of the country to fund them?

That's the problem with ankle-biting -- a plethora of ankles.

Now isn't the time for standing around and pointing fingers. We have much more important work to do in getting people to safety, getting them food, water, and shelter, and recovering what we can for New Orleans. Let's try reaching out instead of making this yet another point of polarization for the uberpartisans to stall with their venomous rhetoric. See John Cole and Ezra Klein for more thoughts.

UPDATE: Michelle Malkin has much, much more on this topic, including links to articles in the 1990s complaining of a lack of federal interest in maintaining and upgrading the levee system. In fact, Michelle has been a dervish on all things Katrina -- be sure to check on her site for updates throughout the day.

Able Danger: Pentagon Finds Three More Witnesses

The naysayers of the 9/11 Commission took another blow to their credibility today when the Pentagon announced that three more Able Danger team members remember the identification of Mohammed Atta and three other 9/11 hijackers a year before their terrorist attack. A briefing today gave the Pentagon a chance to reverse itself from a week ago, when spokesman Larry Di Rita strongly suggested that the two career officers who had come forward at risk of their careers either had faulty memories or ulterior motives:

Pentagon officials said Thursday they have found three more people who recall an intelligence chart that identified Sept. 11 mastermind Mohamed Atta as a terrorist one year before the attacks on New York and Washington. But they have been unable to find the chart or other evidence that it existed.

Last month, two military officers, Army Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer and Navy Capt. Scott Philpott, went public with claims that a secret unit code-named Able Danger used data mining _ searching large amounts of data for patterns _ to identify Atta in 2000. Shaffer has said three other Sept. 11 hijackers also were identified. ...

They said they interviewed at least 80 people over a three-week period and found three, besides Philpott and Shaffer, who said they remember seeing a chart that either mentioned Atta by name as an al-Qaida operative or showed his photograph. Four of the five recalled a chart with a pre-9/11 photo of Atta; the other person recalled only a reference to his name.

The intelligence officials said they consider the five people to be credible but their recollections are still unverified.

The Pentagon's response gets curiouser and curiouser. It says it interviewed eighty people, but the program supposedly only used a dozen or so analysts. The nature of the program and its counterterrorist mission should mean that only need-to-know access should have been granted. The Pentagon goes out of its way to say that Able Danger comprised a core of 10 staffers headed by Captain Scott Phillpott to devise a strategy against transnational terrorism, "specifically al-Qaeda", and not limited in scope to a datamining project.

Yet they interviewed eighty people? They had an eight-to-one ratio of witnesses to a secret program as opposed to its staff? That seems more than just passingly strange. It almost sounds as if they wanted to swamp out the discovery that with three more witnesses recalling the identification of Atta, it adds up to more than half of the Able Danger project team. That sounds like rather strong corroboration of Shaffer, Phillpott, and Smith.

The next odd part of the Pentagon briefing relates to the lack of documentation. Their statement says that they have uncovered "negative indications" of any order to destroy Able Danger documentation, and that two more witnesses specifically recall a chart with Atta's picture and name on it. (The third only recalls the name, not the picture.) Yet the Pentagon says it has finished searching for any more Able Danger documentation, despite the fact that over half of its team testifies to its existence and that they have some evidence that they never ordered any destruction of the data. One would think at that point that the Pentagon, especially DISCO (the security-clearance agency), might take an interest in where the records went. According to their briefing, however, they have dropped the entire effort.

Something does not add up.

Besides that, however, this provides even more substantiation that the AD team did in fact identify the four al-Qaeda terrorists over a year before their attacks, and that the identification calls the 9/11 Commission timeline into serious question. Since the primary sources of that timeline spring from the testimony of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Ramzi Binalshibh, we must again ask what gain the two 9/11 co-conspirators might have in misdirecting American intelligence on Atta's whereabouts.

At least two possibilities come to mind. They may have more cells in the US and needed to provide some misdirection to ensure that their cover stories hold up. That seems rather weak, especially since terror cells usually operate with enough separation that uncovering Atta should not have endangered any others. That leaves the possibility that KSM and Binalshibh needed to cover Atta's tracks not to protect other operatives but to protect their supporters. It would direct investigators into dead ends, leading them to believe that Atta and his team only worked with al-Qaeda leadership, who were only too eager to take full credit for the attacks.

AJ Strata and Tom Maguire have more, of course. Be sure to read their informative posts on this subject. Maguire, for instance, notes with considerable interest that the Pentagon claims that no "military lawyers" prevented Able Danger meeting with the FBI. He thinks that means that the Pentagon may have deferred the question to the Office of Intelligence Policy Review (OIPR) - the same agency addressed by Jamie Gorelick in her "wall" memo in 1995.

AJStrata, meanwhile, wonders why the Able Danger information never came out during the Richard Clarke and Sandy Berger testimony to the 9/11 Commission. After all, one of the primary complaints of the Commission regarding both administrations was a lack of focus on al-Qaeda, although both witnesses almost fell over themselves trying to prove that the Clinton Administration understood the nature of the threat. Here we have a program designed to strategize against AQ, and both have nothing to say about it to investigators? It brings into question yet again what handwritten notes may have existed on the copies of threat reports so conveniently "lost" by Berger after he purloined them from the National Archive.

So many dots, and so many connections -- and yet, so little effort by the Omission Commission and the Pentagon to connect them. Will Congress finally take an opportunity to ask why?

UPDATE: Captain V has some thoughts about how secret a program like Able Danger could have been with 80 people getting interviewed about it, as well as how secret any program can be.

Thank You, Mr. President

I normally have plenty of reasons to thank our current President, George Bush, and few reasons to thank either of the two who preceded him. However, tonight I offer praise to Bill Clinton, who took CNN's Suzanne Malveaux to task for playing partisan politics with the Katrina relief efforts and trying to embarrass his partner and new friend, George H. W. Bush (h/t: AJ Strata):

MALVEAUX: Let me ask you this: There are some people at the New Orleans Convention Center who say that they have been living like animals -- no food, no water, no power. And they are the ones who are saying: Where are the buses? Where are the planes? Why did it take three days to see a real federal response here? Mr. Bush, you, whether it's fair or not, had gone through some administration criticism about your handling of Hurricane Andrew.

G.H.W. BUSH: I sure did.

MALVEAUX: Do you believe that this is legitimate?

G.H.W. BUSH: Yes, I do. What happened? We all sighed with -- not legitimate. I believe that they ought not to be as upset, but I can understand why they are. We thought, a lot of people thought, that when the hurricane went to the right a little bit, New Orleans was going to be spared. And it was only the next day that, you know, there were these horrible problems with the levee. But, look, if I were sitting there with no shower, no ability to use bathroom facilities, worried about my family, not knowing where they were, I'd blame anybody and so you have to expect that.

MALVEAUX: But do you think this administration responded quickly enough?

G.H.W. BUSH: Of course I do.

CLINTON: Let me answer this. The people in the Superdome are in a special position. And let me say, I've been going to New Orleans for over 50 years. There's no place on earth I love more. They went into the Superdome, not because of the flooding, but because we thought the hurricane was going to hit New Orleans smack dab and they'd be safe in there if they didn't leave town.

What happened was, when the levee broke and the town flooded, what did it do? It knocked out the electricity and it knocked out the sewage. They're living in hellacious conditions. They would be better off under a tree than being stuck there. You can't even breathe in that place now.

So I understand why they're so anxiety-ridden. But they have to understand, by the time it became obvious that they were in the fix they were in, there were a lot of other problems, too. There were people -- they were worried about people drowning that had to be taken off roofs.

MALVEAUX: So you two believe that the federal response was fast enough?

CLINTON: All I'm saying is what I know the facts are today. There are hundreds of buses now engaged in the act of taking people from New Orleans to the Astrodome in Houston. And you and I are not in a position to make any judgment because we weren't there.

All I'm saying is the way they got stuck there, I see why they feel the way they do. But the people that put them there did it because they thought they were saving their lives. And then when the problems showed up, they had a lot of other people to save. Now they've got hundreds of buses. We just need to get them out. I think they'll all be out by tomorrow. Didn't they say they would all be out by tomorrow morning?

G.H.W. BUSH: Yes.

MALVEAUX: OK. Well, thank you very much. I'm sorry. We've run out of time. Thank you.

G.H.W. BUSH: Let me -- I just to want finish. I believe the administration is doing the right thing, and I believe they have acted in a timely fashion. And I understand people being critical. That happens all the time. And I understand some people wanted to make, you know, a little difficulty by criticizing the president and the team. But I don't want to sit here and not defend the administration which, in my view, has taken all the right steps. And they're facing problems that nobody could foresee: breaking of the levees and the whole dome thing over in New Orleans coming apart. People couldn't foresee that.

CLINTON: Yes, I think that's important to point out. Because when you say that they should have done this, that or the other thing first, you can look at that problem in isolation, and you can say that.

But look at all the other things they had to deal with. I'm telling you, nobody thought this was going to happen like this. But what happened here is they escaped -- New Orleans escaped Katrina. But it brought all the water up the Mississippi River and all in the Pontchartrain, and then when it started running and that levee broke, they had problems they never could have foreseen.

And so I just think that we need to recognize right now there's a confident effort under way. People are doing the best they can. And I just don't think it's the time to worry about that. We need to keep people alive and get them back to life -- normal life.

Let me answer this. Clinton took over this interview because he knew that Bush 41's response would just be considered the normal response of a father defending his son, and that Bush had too much class to go after Malveaux. In fact, Clinton's response aimed not just at Malveaux but the entire crew at CNN, especially Jack Cafferty, who crowed about the fact that 500 CNN viewers had nothing better to do than write e-mails criticizing the current President Bush. (Later in the segment, Cafferty upped the number to 6,000, proving that he didn't bother to listen to Clinton on his own network.)

Thank you, Mr. President, for reminding people that our focus should remain on the difficult work ahead in rescuing the victims and starting the recovery process. Anklebiters, nitpickers, and partisan hacks should step aside and let the grown-ups take over.

Katrina Aid: More Ways The Blogs Have Stepped Up

I will be on the Hugh Hewitt show in a few minutes to discuss the blogosphere's efforts to get relief to the victims of Hurricane Katrina...

I hope you had a chance to listen to the segment. I wound up paired with James Lileks and Michael Medved, both of whom I much admire, and Michael had a lot of encouragement and praise for the blogosphere. Hugh made sure we all had a chance to talk, except uncharacteristically for James Lileks, who gave the phone to Michael.

During the day, many reports of perfectly awful news stories, but I'm not going to focus on that now. We need to focus on getting help to the victims as fast as possible. I understand the media impulse of "if it bleeds, it leads," but we don't need to follow that impulse here.

I got a couple of e-mails today showing how the blogosphere puts its creativity and generosity to work when people need assistance. Daniel Ford created a new site today called KatrinaFinder, designed to put the Internet to work in finding people lost in the storm. Daniel has a heartbreaking personal interest in creating his site:

This site was set up in an awful big hurry, so I can't guarantee everything is exactly correct. My own sister, Jennie Belle Coulter, age 25, working for Domino's Pizza in Gulfport, Mississippi, was there when Katrina hit, and we have yet to hear from her. I wondered how I, a computer/web programmer, could do something to help, and I decided to make an easy-to-use Internet site where people who are searching and people who are trying to get word to their loved ones can - I hope and pray - find each other. I know there are improvements we can make, and if you think of something, please let us know. If you'd like to volunteer to help with this project, please let us know.

And while Wal-Mart might not qualify as a blogger, they took a very blog-like approach to the same problem on their website today:

Post a message to a loved one who is affected by Hurricane Katrina. This service is also available in any Wal-Mart Store, SAM’S CLUB, Neighborhood Market, or Distribution Center. Anyone in the affected area can go to their local store and post a message regarding their well-being. Please click the link above to search for information regarding loved ones in the affected area.

NZ Bear has given his time to creating a donation-tracking page, a self-reporting mechanism that surely underestimates the amount of money flowing from the blogosphere. Yet before the end of the first day, we have raised more than $100,000, and the number keeps going up. He will unveil a new page on his site designed to put specialized help together with the people who need it most, aiming at the time when cash will matter less than expertise and targeted social assistance.

I am so incredibly blessed with such a generous readership here at CQ. I scanned the list of contributors at NZ Bear's site and saw how many of you opened up your hearts and wallets to give something for our fellow citizens in need. Catholic Charities will do wonderful things in your name, and I thank you for your generosity. Let's keep this coming!

UPDATE: The port side of the blogosphere has also sent its armada out for donations. Tip o' the cap to all of you ladies and gents on the Left for your efforts.

UPDATE II: Stacy Harp has the audio of my appearance on Hugh Hewitt, along with those of other bloggers.

Katrina Aid: CQ Chooses Catholic Charities (Updates!)

The blogosphere will spend its efforts tomorrow on promoting disaster relief for the victims of Hurricane Katrina, an idea first floated by Hugh Hewitt and getting promoted by Instapundit and NZ Bear today. Instapundit lists plenty of fine charities for your donation efforts, and selecting one to sponsor makes for a difficult decision. I chose Catholic Charities for a couple of reasons. First, the Catholic Church has many connections to the local communities in that region and can get the funds and material to the victims that much quicker. Second, I believe they do good work at a minimum of overhead, allowing for a better rate of donations to relief than possible with some other agencies. Lastly, as a Catholic, I believe that this kind of effort needs encouragement from its congregation in order to ensure that the Church fulfills its mission to the world.

Regardless of where you decide to contribute, please join the blogosphere tomorrow in getting aid to our brothers and sisters in the disaster area.

UPDATE and BUMP: I'm bumping this to 9/1 to serve as my bleg post for CQ readers to donate what they can to the victims of Hurricane Katrina. I want to add a few words to the above post first.

One of the proudest and, ironically, humbling moments as a blogger came at the beginning of the year, after the deadly tsunami killed almost a quarter of a million people throughout Asia. I asked CQ readers to step up and donate what they could to provide relief for the hundreds of thousands of survivors, who had to live through hell while trying to piece their lives and homes together again. I privately hoped to raise $5,000; together, the CQ community donated over $35,000.

This time, we have a different set of circumstances. Instead of our distant cousins of the Indian Ocean, we now watch as our American brothers and sisters suffer through the destruction of perhaps the best-loved hometown in America, New Orleans. The devastation will go on for years. The entire community has disappeared under water -- not just homes, but the businesses that employ the people who live there, the shops that fed and clothed them, the services that give Americans the high standard of living that we enjoy and take for granted.

They have nothing left. It goes beyond homelessness. It goes beyond unemployment. Our brothers and sisters have gone through the looking glass -- and as Americans, we need to step up to bring them back.

Eventually we will rebuild New Orleans. Eventually the jobs, the shops, and the community will return. Right now, we need to extend the American community to the victims of Katrina. I'm supporting that effort through Catholic Charities, but many fine bloggers have sponsored many fine charities, so we have a wide variety of choices. I'm asking CQ readers to choose whichever one suits them best, but remember that we need to get aid to them now, when it's most needed.

As Americans, we bicker about politics, religion, sports, the weather -- pretty darned near everything. We never bicker about stepping up during an emergency to help our brothers and sisters, especially those who find themselves so tragically lost.

Thank you for your kind generosity.

UPDATE II: Pink Flamingos has a first-hand report of the deteriorating situation in the Superdome. The latest word I heard was that they would be moved to the Astrodome in Houston, so this may have already been somewhat superceded by events.

UPDATE III: I've been asked if we can track donations made through CQ to Catholic Charities. It can be done through NZ Bear's Katrina page as a self-reporting function, if you like! Big thanks to the Bear for all his great efforts.

(Technorati tags: flood aid, Hurricane Katrina)

US Pushing For UN Sanctions On Iran

Finally, it appears that the US has run out of patience with the EU-3 and wants to step up the pressure on Teheran to stop its nuclear program. Not only has the US called for the UN Security Council to take action, but we picked up a surprising ally, at least for the moment:

The Bush administration is trying to rally other nations to agree to impose U.N. sanctions on Iran to force it to negotiate an end to its nuclear programs. ...

Britain, France and Germany, negotiating in behalf of the European Union and with U.S. support, has offered Iran economic incentives to stop converting uranium into fuel that could be used for nuclear weapons.

The United States, has offered Iran spare parts for commercial aircraft and a help in becoming a member of the
World Trade Organization.

But with the talks stalemated, the administration clearly is losing patience.

It should have run out of patience months ago. The Iranians have clearly shown that they intend on developing nuclear fuel that could easily convert to fissile material for weapons and have engaged in evasive manuevering to conceal their work. The IAEA has repeatedly reported a lack of compliance on non-proliferation, and the Iranians thumbed their noses at the EU-3 by resuming the work while they continued to insist that progress was being made diplomatically.

How clear has Iranian intransigence become? Even Jacques Chirac is fed up:

The administration evidently has won over President Jacques Chirac of France to take a hard line.

In an ultimatum issued on Monday, Chirac warned Iran it would face censure by the U.N. Security Council if it did not reinstate a freeze on sensitive nuclear activities under an accord reached in Paris in November.

Chirac demonstrated that we cannot rely on him to stick with us at the Security Council, and his "ultimatum" probably produced gales of laughter in Teheran. However, it does provide a measure of how late in the game we have come when even France has decided to draw a line in the sand.

"Stop The Worship Of The Gods Of War!"

What kind of protest would feature the above exhortation? Has an outbreak of sacrifice to the ancient Greek gods of Apollo and Mars occurred in the heartland of America? Not exactly, no. Anti-war groups are using this as a rallying cry to converge on Naval Air Station Brunswick in Maine on the day before the anniversary of 9/11 to protest a free air show by the Blue Angels, the Navy's crack aviator squadron (via The Corner):

On Sat., Sept. 10th, Maine Veterans for Peace will be joined by other major peace and justice groups (see list of co-sponsors below) in a massive protest: . to protest the false god idolatry of the Blue Angels Air Show, whose "ooh-&-aah"performances have one purpose: to promote badly-lagging military recruitment to protest the obscene waste of American tax dollars to stage these Blue Angels' multi-million dollar extravaganzas . to protest Bush's immoral, monomaniacal Iraq war -- nearly 1,900 U.S. and 100,000 Iraqi civilians dead, at a cost of over $300 billion, and still counting . to protest NASB's complicity with the war machine, providing surveillance aircraftto target ground forces, which in the end cause horrendous "collateral damage" . to challenge NASB to convert to peaceful purposes, creating good-paying high-tech/industrial jobs, making products that improve lives, not end them

Guess who will provide one of the keynote speeches for this event? None other than Cindy Sheehan as a spokesperson for Gold Star Families for Peace. Apparently just the mere viewing of aerial acrobatics deludes our nation's young men and women into thinking that the military might make a good place for them to work and gather resources for later education, or (heaven forfend!) that volunteering for the nation's defense would be an honorable and productive choice for themselves. No, the VFP and other peace groups insist, the true motive behind those impulses is a "worship" of weapons and death, and they're going to make sure that no one gets a choice to serve their country.

The ridiculous hyperbole and pomposity of the Left never ceases to amaze. They seem blissfully unaware that they have transformed themselves into a parody of the Sixties, a decade very few of us view with any fondness at all. They couldn't choose worse timing than this, either. Not only will their protest come on the day prior to a massive remembrance of an event that demonstrated the need for a strong military, but the ongoing disaster in New Orleans and their ire over a harmless aerobatic show makes them appear even smaller and more petty than ever before.

If Sheehan and her newfound allies had not jumped the shark before now, this effort puts them well past Jaws and possibly into Orca-like standing.

Gaza Pullout Gets Diplomatic Results

Israel's pullout of the Gaza Strip has resulted in a new and important diplomatic development, the AP reports this morning. Pakistan has publicly met with the Israelis at a bilateral meeting sponsored by Turkey, and the two nations appear headed towards diplomatic recognition:

The foreign ministers of Israel and Pakistan, a Muslim country that has long taken a hard line against the Jewish state, met publicly for the first time Thursday, a diplomatic breakthrough that follows Israel's withdrawal from the Gaza Strip.

The meeting in Istanbul was at the initiative of Pakistan's president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, and was expected to be followed by confidence building measures, such as a relaxation of Pakistan's ban against travel to the Jewish state, an Israeli official said, speaking on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the subject. ...

Pakistan was encouraged by Israel's evacuation of Jewish settlers from the Gaza Strip, which was completed last week, and set up the meeting, Israeli officials said.

Slowly, Israel's actions have created some momentum in moderate Muslim countries to encourage diplomatic efforts with the Jewish state. Radical nations such as Iran will not follow suit, but Sharon understands the need to reach out to those who could help contain the extremists among the Muslims and Arabs. Pakistan could lend considerable prestige to its credentials with moderate nations in the area, and at the same time these nations could show that engagement with Israel gets better results for the Palestinians than monolithic opposition.

When people complain that Sharon withdrew from Gaza and got nothing for it, they reveal a short-term view that ignores reality. Israel had around 9,000 citizens in Gaza that found themselves surrounded by more than a million hostile natives. Plainly Israel could not effectively defend these people forever, and the effort to deny thi cost their government money and resources far beyond the worth of the land, real and perceived. Now the nation can focus on defending a contiguous border with Gaza instead of tiny islands behind enemy lines. Israel also just concluded an agreement with Egypt that will take even more pressure off of their military, and put more of the onus on Egypt to keep order in Gaza by making them responsible for the Sinai border.

Dumping Gaza not only bought the Israelis some credibility in diplomacy, but also allowed them to get rid of an albatross that had begun to stink decades ago. It allows them to use their resources more wisely in the West Bank. The diplomatic efforts and their increased efficiency places much more pressure on Abbas and the Palestinian Authority to clean up their act.

Terrorism Defined (Stupidly)

The Guardian (UK) reports that the Israeli defence ministry has decided that taking a gun on a bus and mowing down several civilians as a form of political action doesn't qualify as terrorism. Does that sound strange in a country that suffers more terrorist attacks than any other? It should, and the explanation only makes it stranger:

Four Arab Israelis shot dead by a soldier opposed to the closure of the Gaza Strip settlements are not victims of "terror" because their killer was Jewish, Israel's defence ministry has ruled, and so their families are not entitled to the usual compensation for life.

The ministry concluded that the law only recognises terrorism as committed by "organisations hostile to Israel" even though the prime minister, Ariel Sharon, described the killings by Private Eden Nathan Zaada, 19, as "a despicable act by a bloodthirsty terrorist."

He shot dead four people on a bus in the Arab Israeli town of Shfaram on August 4 and was then lynched by a mob.

Ariel Sharon diagnosed this attack perfectly, and the Defence Ministry should be ashamed of itself. Openly targeting civilians with lethal force to lash out for political purposes is terrorism no matter who conducts it. The difference between Palestinian terrorism and Israeli terrorism is that the latter results in punishment by the Israelis, while the former results in praise and celebration by the Palestinian "government".

The denial that this terrorism exists in the few isolated cases that occur, such as Zaada, erodes the moral standing of the Israelis. One cannot make an argument that the exact same action undertaken by a Jew and an Arab amounts to two different crimes and still claim to represent justice and tolerance. Either both commit terrorism, or both don't. The Defence Ministry risks a revival of the Zionism-equals-racism charge with this extremely poor decision and should immediately reconsider it.

Katrina: Will We See A New New Orleans?

Today's Washington Post looks at the catastrophe that Katrina has created in New Orleans and the prognosis for its recovery -- and the message appears relentlessly negative. It bolsters the President's warning yesterday that the recovery will take years and a great deal of national effort to accomplish, and calls for a debate on exactly how to rebuild New Orleans:

First they have to pump the flooded city dry, and that will take a minimum of 30 days. Then they will have to flush the drinking water system, making sure they don't recycle the contaminants. Figure another month for that.

The electricians will have to watch out for snakes in the water, wild animals and feral dogs. It will be a good idea to wear hip boots and take care of cuts and scrapes before the toxic slush turns them into festering sores. The power grid might be up in a few weeks, but many months will elapse before everybody's lights come back on.

By that time, a lot of people won't care because they will have taken the insurance money and moved away -- forever. Home rebuilding, as opposed to repairs, won't start for a year and will last for years after that.

Even then, there may be nothing normal about New Orleans, because the floodwater, spiked with tons of contaminants ranging from heavy metals and hydrocarbons to industrial waste, human feces and the decayed remains of humans and animals, will linger nearby in the Gulf of Mexico for a decade.

"This is the worst case," Hugh B. Kaufman, a senior policy analyst at the Environmental Protection Agency, said of the toxic stew that contaminates New Orleans. "There is not enough money in the gross national product of the United States to dispose of the amount of hazardous material in the area."

Without a doubt, Katrina gave us the worst natural disaster in a century, perhaps ever once the final death toll becomes known. Galveston nearly got wiped off the map by a similar hurricane in 1900 and remains our deadliest natural disaster for the moment, but didn't face the same obstacles for its rebuilding. Most of the problems that the Post reports come from two topographical features of the city that make New Orleans unique: its site in a bowl-shaped basin and the below-sea level position in which that places the city.

For rebuilding, the first priority will be pumping the water out, but where will it go? The water flooding the city has so many contaminants now that pumping it anywhere will lead to another ecological disaster. Its residue will still leave a dry toxic-waste site in the New Orleans basin once the water gets removed, and all of that will remain in every building that got flooded in any fashion, let alone submerged. And before anyone starts rebuilding, the problem of surviving another "big one" will require some rethinking of the levee system holding back Lake Pontchartrain and the ability to drain water from the basin in a more expeditious manner.

Small wonder that around the nation, watercooler talk openly questions the idea of rebuilding The Big Easy at all, especially since the trend in disasters like Katrina sees residents taking the insurance money and relocating elsewhere. Those disasters, like Hurricane Andrew, took weeks for recovery to begin. This recovery will take months before decisions even get made on whether to salvage anything in the stricken areas.

However, Americans don't do pessimism, not as policy and not as part of our national character. We grew into the nation we know through an unbridled optimism about the kind of people we are and the kind of people we could become. Jimmy Carter found that out when he decided to tell Americans that we had come as far as we could go in his infamous "malaise" speech, and that we needed to know our limits. Rarely has an elected leader so misunderstood the people he led. We put men on the moon less than a decade after the notion occurred to us as a real possibility. We don't do limits.

How we take care of New Orleans will say something about our national character and whether it remains as tough and optimistic as our history, for all its flaws, amply demonstrates. Will we walk away from a tough fight? Will America shrug its shoulders and tell the city that we don't want to take on difficult tasks? Make no mistake; our response to New Orleans will say just as much about our staying power as a cut-and-run from Iraq would, and to much the same audience. Believe me, some of those who plan our destruction have cheered the scenes shown on television around the world of Katrina's devastation in New Orleans, and they're watching to see what we do.

And so New Orleans must be rebuilt, in some manner, right where it is now. No leader will get up and say, We give up. Katrina beat us. Let's move on. That message will not resonate with the vast majority of Americans on either side of the political divide, which will bring a political consensus to ensure that we produce some kind of recovery for New Orleans. We can and will debate the how and the what, but not the whether. We're Americans, and we don't run from a fight.

Able Danger: Hearing Will Be Public

Arlen Specter raised the ante yesterday when announcing the scheduling of the hearing he will conduct with the Judiciary Commitee on the Able Danger project. The September 14th hearing into the datamining effort and its identification of Mohammed Atta and three other 9/11 hijackers as potential terrorist threats will be conducted publicly:

The Senate Judiciary Committee announced Wednesday that it was investigating reports from two military officers that a highly classified Pentagon intelligence program identified the Sept. 11 ringleader as a potential terrorist more than a year before the attacks.

The committee's chairman, Senator Arlen Specter, Republican of Pennsylvania, said in an interview that he was scheduling a public hearing on Sept. 14 "to get to the bottom of this" and that the military officers "appear to have credibility."

The senator said his staff had confirmed reports from the two officers that employees of the intelligence program tried to contact the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 2000 to discuss the work of the program, known as Able Danger.

Public hearings will allow Shaffer and Phillpott to get an examination that the nation can judge on its own. We can judge the credibility of the career officers, one of whom may have given up any hope for the Admiralty to take his case to the American people. Private contractor J.D. Smith will also take the stand, yet another witness to the results of the program and the identification of the terrorist cell that killed almost 3,000 Americans.

This has put the onus on the Pentagon, which now has to explain how all three men could possibly have lied about Able Danger or how they came to lose all of its relevant documentation. The New York Times reports that the Pentagon continues to hedge its initial skepticism. They now say they will not dispute the recollections of the three witnesses, even though they cannot find any documentation to support their statements. The Pentagon has apparently decided to take their usual spokesman, Larry Di Rita, off the case. Instead, Major Paul Swiergosz reiterated that the military couldn't even find documentation that led to the program's documentation.

I suggest that Senator Specter call the Pentagon counsel at the time of Able Danger as a witness, as well as anyone who handled documentation for the project. Something changed the Pentagon's tenor, something more than the revelation of the names of Phillpott and Smith. Probably the project documentation no longer exists, as it would have been destroyed after the project's cancellation, given the explosive reasons Smith cited for its abrupt end. A review of their counsel notes regarding meetings held between Pentagon lawyers and the Able Danger team regarding the sharing of the data should still remain extant -- and would corroborate a key portion of their testimony.

We will know more in a fortnight, it appears. Set the TiVos for C-SPAN2 and review the material, especially the conclusions of the 9/11 Commission on the Mohammed Atta timeline.

Dafydd: the Tragedy of Hysteria

This is truly stunning: more people were just killed by a lemming-like panic on a bridge in Baghdad than have been slain in any suicide bombing in Iraq (and far more than were killed by Hurricane Katrina).

Sometimes, you just don't know what to say.

UPDATE: Alas, the estimated death toll from Hurricane Katrina has been raised dramatically; estimates vary, but it will likely be significantly greater than thought yesterday. There is enough tragedy to go all around, and then some.

Dafydd: Global Hot Air From a Different Kennedy

Continuing the political flailing and floccillation of the Democratic Party, today a renowned Kennedy eructated an astonishing blast of hot air at former Republican National Committee chairman Haley Barbour.

No, it wasn't Teddy; sorry. It was Robert Kennedy, jr. On Friday, RFKjr huffed into the Huffington Post a hit piece on Gov. Barbour... but psssst, really on President Bush. Bobby jr., who also broadcasts on Air America and hasn't had any heroin in, like, years, began with an escalating recitation of startling facts about Barbour -- such as the eerie coincidence that, as the chairman of the RNC, he gave George Bush advice -- all designed to prove that Barbour had more impact urging Bush not to flog the dead Kyoto Protocol horse than Christie Todd Whitman did on the other side.

That startling revelation out of the way, Bobbie descends into the sort of overheated rhetoric about global warming ("globaloney" to its pals) that he cultivated through long years at the National Resources Defense Council -- which is to environmentalism what NARAL is to abortion. The cultivation culminated with this:

Well, the science is clear. This month, a study published in the journal Nature by a renowned MIT climatologist linked the increasing prevalence of destructive hurricanes to human-induced global warming.

Now we are all learning what it’s like to reap the whirlwind of fossil fuel dependence which [Mississippi Gov. Haley] Barbour and his cronies have encouraged. Our destructive addiction [hm...] has given us a catastrophic war in the Middle East and--now--Katrina is giving our nation a glimpse of the climate chaos we are bequeathing our children.

Skipping lightly over question of how Lawyer Bob learned so much about "destructive addictions," he tossed off a final bon mot to the effect that God Almighty redirected Hurricane Katrina away from Louisiana (Democratic governor) towards Mississippi (Republican) in order to punish Haley Barbour for writing a memo.

So I got to thinking -- evidently unlike Mr. Kennedy -- and I poked around a bit to see what difference it might have made had Bush seized Kyoto and run around the Capitol with his hair on fire, somehow wrangling 67 [corrected] senators into ratifying a treaty that 95 rejected in a straw poll just a few years earlier. Let's suppose that as of March 2001, the U.S. had signed aboard the Protocols... and further, that the staggering reduction in carbon production occurred instantly, before the ink was even dry (rather than the more likely scenario, where it would take several years even to begin to pass the legislation necessary to cripple energy usage in the United States).

How might the climate be different?

According to Reason Magazine, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) estimates that if we do nothing, the rise in temperature over the next hundred years would average (among the various estimates) about 3.0°C. Full implementation of the Kyoto Protocols would reduce expected warming over the next century down to a mere 2.86°C; that is, Kyoto gives us a reduction in anticipated temperature increase of 0.14°C over 100 years.

The Kyoto Protocol, which President Bush has rejected, would limit U.S. emissions of greenhouse gases to 7 percent below their 1990 levels by 2012. Given the current trajectory of energy and economic growth, meeting that target means the United States would have to cut energy consumption by as much as 30 to 35 percent below what Americans are now expected to be using in 2012. Some economists estimate that it would cost 3 percent of U.S. gross national product per year to achieve that lower level of emissions. How much would Kyoto-mandated emissions cutbacks benefit the global environment? Climatologists estimate that implementing the Kyoto Protocol would, by 2100, avoid only 0.14 degrees C of temperature rise. That means projected man-made greenhouse warming that might have been 3 degrees C by 2100 would instead be 2.86 degrees C.

Okay, that gives us something to work with. 0.14°C divided by 100 gives us an expected reduction of 0.0014°C per year. Thus, from March 2001 to March 2005, we could have seen a reduction in warming of as much as 0.0056°C. But wait, there is more: in the five months from March 2005 to August 2005, there would have been an additional 0.0006°C, which brings the grand total to 0.0062°C if we had implemented that furshlugginer treaty (we're assuming the globalistas' predictions are correct).

So what K. is saying is that the extra 0.0062°C (or 0.01° Fahrenheit, if that's your bag) spelled the difference between a pacific Atlantic ocean and a Force 5 hurricane that killed scores and caused tens of billions of dollars in damage, flooding vast stretches of three states and stranding hundreds of thousands. And all for the want of a ten-penny nail!

I don't often speak this way about public officials, but based upon this sample of one article, I have to say that Robert Francis Kennedy jr. is a bonehead.

The Great Not There

My column today at the Daily Standard, "Accounting for the Final Report", reviews the standing of the 9/11 Commission report, the supposedly definitive and final word on the worst foreign attack on American soil. Able Danger started a steady stream of revelations that the Omission Commission either missed or deliberately ignored -- and a couple of patterns emerge from this new data. These patterns directly compromise the narrative and the recommendations of the Commission:

WHAT DID THE 9/11 COMMISSION CONCLUDE? Despite the highly coordinated nature of the attacks, the enormous scale of the plot, and the commando tactics used by the hijackers--a combination of elements that had not previously or since been seen in al Qaeda attacks--the report concluded that the only state which sponsored Osama bin Laden in 9/11 was Afghanistan and its Taliban government. The report explicitly concluded that no operational connection existed between the 9/11 attacks and governments in Syria, Iran, or Iraq. The panel laid the blame for the failure of the United States to prevent the attacks on our intelligence communities and their political leadership, and added during public hearings recent administrations (George W. Bush and Bill Clinton) had failed to "connect the dots." Its recommendations comprised an expansion of the bureaucracy.

For a year, the final Commission report provided the alpha and omega of all debate on 9/11 . . . until Able Danger came to light earlier this month.

The Special Operations Command data-mining program, which according to three public witnesses identified Mohammed Atta as a potential terrorist 18 months before September 11, wasn't included in the final report and was apparently ignored by the Commission's staff on at least two occasions. When confronted by this new evidence, the Commission changed its story several times over one week, eventually settling on a rebuttal which hinged on discrediting the one witness who had come forward. By the time another week had gone by, two more witnesses had appeared--and further damaged the Commission's credibility.

INSTEAD OF BEING THE DEFINITIVE WORD on September 11, the report has begun to resemble a literary equivalent of Swiss cheese as more and more data came out about what else the Commission missed in its report, either by chance or by design.

Three weeks after Able Danger, it behooves us to review all of the information that has come out which the Commission apparently never considered when deriving its conclusions. One has to wonder why, as most of this had previously been known to at least the agencies involved in the 9/11 investigations. Most of it came from previously-published reports, and all of it undermines the panel's main conclusions.

Now that Congress has scheduled hearings to review this, perhaps the Exempt Media will take all of it more seriously and refrain from duplicating the mistakes made by the Commission and themsleves the first time around: reporting only that which fits their predetermined narrative.

Freedom's Silver Anniversary

Americans may have forgotten about this date, but Eastern Europeans should celebrate the 25th anniversary of the singular event that spelled doom for four decades of Soviet oppression -- the formation of Solidarity, the first independent trade union behind the Iron Curtain:

The Polish city of Gdansk on Wednesday took the world's collective memory back 25 years to the day when a strike at the sprawling Lenin shipyard on the Baltic Sea ended and Solidarity, the first free trade union in the communist bloc, was born.

The main streets of the Baltic seaport were draped in the red and white of Poland, with Solidarity logos and huge posters recalling that the wave of strikes across the country in August 1980, but especially the much-publicised Gdansk shipyard strike, were the first brave steps towards ending communism in Europe. ...

On August 31, 25 years ago, Walesa emerged from more than two weeks of talks between the strikers and shipyard bosses, and proclaimed to his fellow workers: "We have free, independent trade unions." Solidarity, described by Walesa as the greatest proletarian monopoly ever and the only movement able to take on communism, was born.

Walesa showed the world that the Soviet hegemony could be challenged, a particularly poignant demosntration given the track record not only of earlier attempts such as Prague Spring in 1968 but the track record of the United States in recent years prior to Walesa's challenge. Jimmy Carter's kiss still remained fresh on Leonid Brezhnev's cheek when Walesa stood up to the Polish Communists, bolstered by Pope John Paul the Great and a sense that justice eventually prevails against tyranny.

Walesa touched off a series of events that took time to for their momentum to build into a movement. Americans rejected the defeatism of Carter and instead looked to Ronald Reagan for the same moral clarity in the war against Communist oppression that the Gdansk dock workers showed. His success and avoidance of imprisonment emboldened others to dissent. Within a decade, the superpower status of the Soviet state had crumbled into dust, and communism as a political philosophy got consigned to the asheap of history -- in other words, limited to Western academia.

If you have an opportunity today to take a look at a map of Europe, draw a line through Germany and then look between that line to the edge of Russia. One man led a small movement at a Polish dock that eventually freed all of that territory without a shot being fired -- one of the truly remarkable events in human history, and an anniversary well worth celebrating.

RFK Jr Releases Hot Gas Into The Political Atmosphere

Following on the heels of the Germans, Robert Kennedy Jr uses his science-challenged approach to also exploit Hurricane Katrina and the deaths of Americans in order to score a few political potshots at George Bush. Demonstrating the same hysterical scientific illiteracy that has characterized his scare campaign against vaccinations, Kennedy blames Mississippi governor Haley Barbour for killing his fellow citizens before their bodies have even been found, and suggests that God punished Mississippi specifically:

As Hurricane Katrina dismantles Mississippi’s Gulf Coast, it’s worth recalling the central role that Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour played in derailing the Kyoto Protocol and kiboshing President Bush’s iron-clad campaign promise to regulate CO2. ...

Now we are all learning what it’s like to reap the whirlwind of fossil fuel dependence which Barbour and his cronies have encouraged. Our destructive addiction has given us a catastrophic war in the Middle East and--now--Katrina is giving our nation a glimpse of the climate chaos we are bequeathing our children.

In 1998, Republican icon Pat Robertson warned that hurricanes were likely to hit communities that offended God. Perhaps it was Barbour’s memo that caused Katrina, at the last moment, to spare New Orleans and save its worst flailings for the Mississippi coast.

Even beyond the rubbish this represents, the argument itself is particularly reprehensible for its timing. Governor Barbour has no time for responding to political attacks from Democratic politicians in the middle of this disaster, a fact which Kennedy well knows. This cheap-short coward timed his screed so that Barbour wouldn't have an opportunity to respond. Instead of gleefully cheering on the destruction and loss of life as some sort of ersatz correlation-equals-causality proof, Kennedy should roll up his sleeves and start assisting the relief efforts if he wants us to take his concern about "bequeathing" our children, a ghoulish turn of phrase considering the multitudes of the dead we still presume to find in the Delta.

Besides, as Rich Lowry points out in NRO, hurricanes didn't spring into being during the era of big tailfins and conspicuous consumption:

If cable TV had existed in 1886, everyone in the U.S. might have been whipped into a hurricane panic. A record seven hurricanes made landfall that year, including a Category 4 storm that hit Texas and would have had on-the-spot cable newscasters dramatically fighting the wind to deliver their reports. All during the 1890s, reporters could have done the same along the Atlantic seaboard, as it was hammered by more powerful hurricanes than it would be in any decade except the 1950s. ...

Has global warming increased the frequency of hurricanes? One of the nation's foremost hurricane experts, William Gray, points out that if global warming is at work, cyclones should be increasing not just in the Atlantic but elsewhere, in the West Pacific, East Pacific, and the Indian Ocean. They aren't. The number of cyclones per year worldwide fluctuates pretty steadily between 80 and 100. There's actually been a small overall decline in tropical cyclones since 1995, and Atlantic hurricanes declined from 1970 to 1994, even as the globe was heating up.

It seems that Atlantic hurricanes come in spurts, or as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration puts it in more technical language, "a quasi-cyclic multi-decade regime that alternates between active and quiet phases." The late 1920s through the 1960s were active; the 1970s to early 1990s quiet; and since 1995 — as anyone living in Florida or Gulfport, Miss., can tell you — seems to be another active phase. ...

Indeed, if you adjust for population growth and skyrocketing property values, hurricanes don't appear to be any more destructive today. According to the work of Roger Pielke of the University of Colorado, of the top five most destructive storms this century, only one occurred after 1950 — Hurricane Andrew in 1992. An NOAA analysis says there have been fewer Category 4 storms throughout the past 35 years than would have been expected given 20th-century averages.

These are the data points one discovers when looking at the entire historical record and operate outside of the belief that time began in 1970. It's called research, obviously a concept with which Kennedy remains unfamiliar, along with honor and a sense of timing. His efforts to play to the eco-crowd while men like Barbour and Bush work to save lives and rescue one of the jewels of American cities diminishes himself and his pet causes. Kennedy demonstrates nothing more than his status as a political hack and a moral nitwit.

Yes, Virginia, There Really Are Communists, Just Not That Many

Dana Milbank and Alan Cooperman do a pretty good job of making John J. Tierney look like an alarmist nut based on their report of his presentation at the Heritage Foundation yesterday. His upcoming book apparently researches the funding and momentum behind the burgeoning anti-war protest industry and finds a lot of evidence that it primarily consists of unreconstructed communists. The Washington Post report of the event has Tierney painting a pretty broad brush on this score, however, and starts out by using what it believes to be a killer emotional rebuttal:

Cindy Sheehan: anti-American communist?

That was the accusation coming yesterday from the Heritage Foundation, which hosted author John J. Tierney Jr. for a forum titled "The Politics of Peace: What's Behind the Anti-War Movement?" ...

Tierney, of the Institute of World Politics, identified five groups: ANSWER, Not in Our Name, Code Pink, United for Peace and Justice, and MoveOn.org. He said these groups "come from the Workers World Party" and are an "umbrella" for smaller groups, such as the "Communist Party of Kansas City" and the "Socialist Revolutionary Movement of the Upper Mississippi." Of the last two, he said, "I'm just making these up."

Tierney singled out Sheehan, whose son died in Iraq and who camped out at President Bush's ranch this month to protest the war. "I've never heard of a woman protesting a war in front of a leader's home in my life," he said. "I've never heard of anything quite so outrageous."

The problem that comes with some people who get something right about their political opponents is a tendency to go too far, and Tierney falls into this trap. I have no doubt that Milbank and Cooperman give us the most egregious quotes possible in this piece, but the one above demonstrates a high level of cluelessness. Truly Tierney cannot have been serious when he said this, or he exposes himself as little more than a rube. Considering the permanent moonbat display across the walkway from the White House, where our "leader" lives, the notion of protests at his residence should not surprise anyone. That protest zone hardly qualifies as a men-only zone, either. If Tierney objects to the protests following George Bush to Crawford, then the responsibility for that goes to Bush for moving his base of operations to his ranch while Congress is out of session.

Overshooting the target allows for criticisms to stick. Tierney names a lot of organizations in his speech as reported by the Post, which doesn't report on whether the author brought any evidence of communist infiltration or backing within all of them. That scattergun approach leaves Tierney open to charges of McCarthyism -- seeing Red wherever he looks -- and diminishes his credibility even further.

Which is a shame, because he gets it exactly right with at least one of these groups: International ANSWER. One need look no further than their own website to find out the people who direct ANSWER's political direction to understand what fuels their passion, and it isn't an abiding love of democracy. In the About Us section, ANSWER lists its "steering committee", the organizations that comprise its leadership:

* IFCO/Pastors for Peace
* Free Palestine Alliance - U.S.
* Haiti Support Network
* Partnership for Civil Justice - LDEF
* Nicaragua Network
* Alliance for Just and Lasting Peace in the Phillippines
* Korea Truth Commission
* Muslim Student Association - National
* Kensington Welfare Rights Union
* Mexico Solidarity Network
* Party for Socialism and Liberation
* Middle East Children's Alliance

Edward Immler at FrontPage wrote an extensive expose of ANSWER in September 2002 which demonstrated the connections between the group and Stalinists such as the Workers World Party and the International Action Center. On this count, Tierney is on solid ground, and to the extent that ANSWER alone fuels these rallies, then he can show a solid link to communist participation in anti-war protests.

And while Cindy Sheehan may be anti-American, based on her public statements such as "America is all about killing" and her assertion that the country is not worth defending with one's life, that doesn't make her a Communist by default. Moreoever, it hardly helps to overly demonize Sheehan past what can easily be said about her based on her own words.

With polls showing a growing discontent with the direction of the war, one still has to presume that America has not suddenly turned Communist. Plenty of blame can go towards the media for this weakening of support, as they relentlessly cover explosions and deaths but report little of the rebuilding efforts seen by our troops and the few embeds still left in Iraq. Readers find little context in daily tallies of combat deaths (which after two years still doesn't come close to the one-day loss on 9/11) without understanding that nation-building takes long, hard work, but if successful will lead to many more lives saved, not just American but Iraqi as well. The White House shoulders some of this blame as well. It needs to communicate these issues better.

Regardless of the blame, Tierney and others like him need to remain precise and careful about their charges. Hyperbole only destroys the credibility and gives material assistance to the lunatics at the fringe, which need real exposure that includes solid evidence that speaks for itself.

Able Danger Fox Trot III: Dances With Pentagon

AJ Strata and Tom Maguire both link to a WTOP report on an apparent shift at the Pentagon on the question of Able Danger's ID of Mohammed Atta. Last week, Larry di Rita could barely contain his cynicism at the tale told by Colonel Tony Shaffer. Today, however, the Pentagon demonstrated that it can count:

The Pentagon appears to have reversed its position on Able Danger, the Army intelligence collection team.

A Pentagon spokesman now says "there's no reason to doubt the specific recollections" of the growing number of team members. The team members say the project had pre-Sept. 11 intelligence on al Qaida, which Defense Department lawyers prohibited them from sharing with the FBI.

What does this reversal mean? Besides demonstrating an ability to count to three, I think it means that the Pentagon has completed its search for the missing Able Danger materials. Either they found more information and it corroborates Shaffer, Scott Phillpott, and J.D. Smith in their assertion that Able Danger identified the four lead terrorists in the original al-Qaeda cell as terrorists, or they can't find anything at all. The formulation saying that they have "no reason to doubt the specific recollections" of the program members sounds like a generic non-endorsement/non-opposition non-position.

My guess says they came up empty for documentation, but that they may have other information that caused them to back off. The attorneys at the Pentagon may have more "specific recollections" than they want to publicly admit at the moment, and perhaps even more specific notes from specific meetings. After all, lawyers tend to maintain those records for good reasons. Had Shaffer and other AD team members actually met with the Pentagon counsel's office, they would have wanted it on record that they recommended not only dropping the request for coordination but ending the program altogether -- if 9/11 never happened. Gathering those notes would have taken just a week or two, meaning that effort should have been complete by now.

If they couldn't find any record of AD meeting with Pentagon attorneys, they would have announced that. If the documentation turned up, that probably would have been announced regardless of whether it supported the Pentagon's versions of events. In fact, had they found nothing, they probably would continue to stonewall. Something changed, and it would be good to find out what exactly it is.

Adding Insult To Death

Leave it to the current German government and their knee-jerk anti-Americanism to try to score political points off of the natural catastrophe occuring in New Orleans. As many of the blogosphere have already pointed out, German environmental minister Juergen Tritten blamed George Bush for Hurricane Katrina and the deadly devestation it inflicted on New Orleans and Gulfport this week. Der Spiegel also reports that Tritten is hardly alone among Germans in believing that George Bush controls the weather:

The toughest commentary of the day comes from Germany's Environmental Minister, Jürgen Trittin, a Green Party member, who takes space in the Frankfurter Rundschau, a paper owned by the Social Democrats, to bash US President George W. Bush's environmental laxity. He begins by likening the photos and videos of the hurricane stricken areas to scenes from a Roland Emmerich sci-fi film and insists that global warming and climate change are making it ever more likely that storms and floods will plague America and Europe. ...

Trittin also calls for a reworking of the Kyoto Protocol -- dubbing it the uncreative title of "Kyoto 2" -- and insisting that the US be included.

The Germans, especially on the Left, have plenty to say about their newfound belief in George Bush's deity. Die Tageszeitung also urges politicians to draw a lesson from Katrina, apparently believing that one data point demonstrates causality. Handelsblatt follows suit, arguing that Katrina shows that hurricanes have gotten more intense. Financial Times Deutschland argues that the effects of global warming on hurricanes will make oil exploration and pumping more difficult, apparently unaware of the irony that its preferred solution -- a Kyoto-like cap on emissions -- would have the same effect.

Does anyone see any similarities between this reaction and the so-called outpouring of sympathy we received after 9/11? Oh, it's a shame about the poor Americans in New York/Orleans, they say. But you know they brought it on themselves, warming the planet like that. Why, don't they know that their arrogant and unilateral policies anger al-Qaeda/Gaia? Tritten even trotted out the statistics on energy consumption as rescue workers had only just started rafting past the dead bodies floating in the Big Easy to try to find survivors.

Let's forget that the science behind global warming so far has a long way to go before being at all convincing. (Twenty-five years ago, scientists warned us about the coming Ice Age.) The Kyoto treaty wouldn't have solved anything, as everyone knows. It let China and India off the hook entirely, remarkable especially in the former case as its energy production uses remarkably inefficient means, spewing greenhouses gases in far greater proportion than in the US. All Kyoto meant to do was to kneecap the US economically so that the EU could compete on equal footing with the American economy.

And given the track record of countries like France, Germany, and Russia in keeping their word on other accords -- say, sanctions on Saddam Hussein or the budgetary constraints of the EU -- I'd say we could be pardoned for our healthy dose of skepticism on their intention of handicapping their own economies with Kyoto limitations.

And as far as Tritten's statistics go, they may well be correct. However, it fails to take into account that Europe has abdicated almost any role in peacekeeping or maintaining strength against global threats, preferring to spend its money on nanny-state social services instead of military capabilities. We use more energy because we produce far more goods and services, and we use the money to defend nations that no longer have the ability nor the will to defend themselves. They couldn't even handle the Balkans on their own, requiring American help just to ferry the paltry forces they could rustle up to serve as peacekeepers.

It took less than twenty-four hours for the Germans to decide to exploit the dead in New Orleans and Mississippi to wallow in their hate-America philosophy. Instead of simply offering assistance or prayers, they show their ignorance of the long history of devastating Gulf storms (the destruction of Galveston a century ago comes to mind) and decide to stoke even more Bush-hatred and anti-Americanism. These words and actions do not reflect friendship, and they will not be forgotten.

Up Again, For Now

Having problems hitting the site today? You had good company; it looks like the servers have been down for about half of the day today. Hosting Matters has worked hard to reroute around a couple of breakdowns, but now we appear to be going strong.

As far as I know, none of the outages had anything to do with CQ. I received a few e-mails while the servers were up asking if my site had been hacked. Not my site, but apparently HM had to deal with some sort of DoS attack on one of its other servers during the middle of everything else. All I can do is shake my head and wonder what small little lives some people lead. Thankfully, the good folks at HM know how to deal with these attacks and should have the rest of their clients up again soon.

I'll start working again soon on new posts. Right now I need to catch up with e-mail and developments in the news. Hopefully we'll stay up for the rest of the evening!

More Dots Missing From The Omission Commission

The invaluable Steven Hayes presents yet even more information that never made it into the supposedly comprehensive 9/11 Commission report in this week's edition of the Weekly Standard. Hayes reports that two figures tied to both the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993 and Iraq also have ties to the 9/11 hijackers -- but Americans relying on the independent panel tasked with providing the definitive look into the latter would never know it:

AHMED HIKMAT SHAKIR IS A shadowy figure who provided logistical assistance to one, maybe two, of the 9/11 hijackers. Years before, he had received a phone call from the Jersey City, New Jersey, safehouse of the plotters who would soon, in February 1993, park a truck bomb in the basement of the World Trade Center. The safehouse was the apartment of Musab Yasin, brother of Abdul Rahman Yasin, who scorched his own leg while mixing the chemicals for the 1993 bomb.

When Shakir was arrested shortly after the 9/11 attacks, his "pocket litter," in the parlance of the investigators, included contact information for Musab Yasin and another 1993 plotter, a Kuwaiti native named Ibrahim Suleiman.

These facts alone, linking the 1993 and 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center, would seem to cry out for additional scrutiny, no?

The Yasin brothers and Shakir have more in common. They are all Iraqis. And two of them--Abdul Rahman Yasin and Shakir--went free, despite their participation in attacks on the World Trade Center, at least partly because of efforts made on their behalf by the regime of Saddam Hussein. Both men returned to Iraq--Yasin fled there in 1993 with the active assistance of the Iraqi government. For ten years in Iraq, Abdul Rahman Yasin was provided safe haven and financing by the regime, support that ended only with the coalition intervention in March 2003.

Readers of The Weekly Standard may be familiar with the stories of Abdul Rahman Yasin, Musab Yasin, and Ahmed Hikmat Shakir. Readers of the 9/11 Commission's final report are not. Those three individuals are nowhere mentioned in the 428 pages that comprise the body of the 9/11 Commission report. Their names do not appear among the 172 listed in Appendix B of the report, a table of individuals who are mentioned in the text. Two brief footnotes mention Shakir.

A year after receiving almost-universal adulation, the Commission and its report have lost the credibility and authority that it held. Unlike other attempts at historical review that suffer only through the passage of time and accessibility of fresh information and evidence, the panel wrote its own epitaph through the ignorance of data already in the public sphere. Whether that ignorance came from inept investigation, the reliance on predetermined assumptions, or something more sinister may never get answered, unless Congress holds their creation responsible in public hearings for these oversights. The sudden discovery of the trove of data left out of the Commission's report and apparently their deliberations clearly shows that the report and its conclusions can only be called incomplete in the most charitable interpretation of events.

As Hayes points out, the problem with the charitable interpretation is that it ignores a certain pattern of "ignorance". The Commission appears to have included every data point that supports the popular notion (even before their start) that the 9/11 attacks came with almost no state support other than the Taliban in Afghanistan, and even then only in sheltering the al-Qaeda strategists who ordered the attacks. The "dots" that the Commission excluded from even a mention -- if only just to debunk them -- all seem to point to state assistance from either Iran, Iraq, or both. Most of them show that the intelligence community actually did uncover some interesting data, on which the bureaucracy either explicitly blocked further investigation or discouraged action. Why would the Commission want to do that? Could it be that the collection of bureaucrats that comprised the panel wanted to believe that the bureacracy could save America, and that the intelligence communities needed more constraints, post-9/11? Or could they have wanted to underscore the meme, during a presidential election, that our "unilateral" approach to policy regarding the two potential state actors had no basis in national-security requirements?

We can speculate as to the why, but we cannot speculate as to the what any longer. My column in tomorrow's Daily Standard will provide a list of data and events that the Commission failed to include in its review, and the pattern becomes even more clear when shown in this format. (I wanted to comment last night on Hayes' article, as AJ Strata did, but I needed to meet the deadline.) I wish I could claim it to be comprehensive, but the last two weeks have shown that any such list will likely need updates within a few hours of its composition.

Data Mining Attacks Privacy: Congress

In one indication as to why the Pentagon might have wanted to keep the existence of Able Danger from becoming public, Congress has determined that data-mining presents a danger to privacy, although so far no one has demanded an end to the practice. The GAO reports that a sample of five agencies using the technique routinely violated safeguards intended to protect citizens from unnecessary incursions by the government:

None of five federal agencies using electronic data mining to track terrorists, catch criminals or prevent fraud complied with all rules for gathering citizen information. As a result, they cannot ensure that individual privacy rights are appropriately protected, congressional investigators said Monday.

The agencies' lapses either "increased the risk that personal information could be improperly exposed or altered" or "limited the ability of the public — including those individuals whose information was used — to participate in the management of that personal information," the Government Accountability Office said.

A study by the GAO, Congress' investigating arm, sampled five of the dozens of federal agencies that use computerized data analysis: the Agriculture Department, FBI, Internal Revenue Service, Small Business Administration and State Department. It evaluated how one data mining activity in each agency complied with the Privacy Act, federal information security laws and government directives.

The ranking Democrat on the Senate government management subcommittee, Daniel Akaka of Hawaii, who requested the study, said the findings represent "a troubling trend given the number of data mining activities in the federal government that use personal information."

Without a doubt, data mining will cause problems with privacy, but rather than toss out the technique -- which appeared to work pretty well for the Able Danger team -- we should instead move to limit its application. For instance, the need for the Internal Revenue Service to conduct data-mining operations eludes me. The IRS already has its hands on almost every single movement of cash through the requirement of federal tax IDs and Social Security numbers for financial transactions to take place. What more does the IRS need, and what kind of information would it mine from open-source data? The same question should go to the Department of Agriculture. Those agencies that perform data-mining for non-critical purposes should drop it altogether.

On the other hand, those who have missions that involve national security should continue to use the techniques. The State Department had exemptions from many of the rules Congress put in place as its operations looked primarily outside the United States. The FBI needs to have the flexibility to make these connections on operations within the United States if we want to find the "sleeper cells" of Islamist terror that cause us so much concern. Context makes all the difference; Americans understand the need for wartime sacrifice. We will accept reasonable and limited incursions into our lives, especially regarding open-source data, in order to protect our nation from attack. We will rightly object to such measures, however, if the grand purpose of it only works to float the price of pork bellies or to figure out how to wring more taxes from our paychecks.

Congress should make clear the uses and parameters of data mining to head off major abuses of the data, and it should limit the use of this technique to critical national-security functions. Do not let the privacy-at-all-costs make us fight the war without the effective tools necessary to find our enemies before they find us.

Virigina Withdrawal Presaging Presidential Brawl?

The Washington Post reports that Virginia Governor Mark Warner will not run against George Allen in the latter's bid for re-election next year, making the incumbent's bid look much easier than expected. Allen had geared up his campaign to run against the popular governor who could have put a major dent in Republican plans to hold and expand their Senate majority. Instead, Warner will have two years to prepare for an even bigger race -- one which might find him eventually pitted against the same opponent:

Virginia Gov. Mark R. Warner (D) plans to announce Tuesday that he will not challenge Sen. George Allen (R-Va.) next year, leaving the popular Democrat free to explore a presidential bid, several close associates said Monday.

Warner, who leaves office in January, will announce his decision on his monthly radio show on WTOP, said Virginia Democratic Party Chairman C. Richard Cranwell, a Warner confidant.

"He is not going to run for the Senate," Cranwell said. "He really wants to finish out his term strong. He doesn't want anything to distract from that."

A senior political aide who spoke on condition of anonymity because Warner wants to make his own announcement said: "He is not going to run. He is going to announce it tomorrow."

If true, this helps Allen further his own presidential aspirations. The more he can avoid bare-knuckled political infighting until 2008, the better he can stage himself as a positive force in politics. A re-election challenge from Warner would have cost a fortune and required both candidates to slug it out on the record, a prospect that Warner did not find appealing for reasons of his own.

If re-elected, Allen could easily jump into the role of front-runner for the GOP 2008 presidential bid. However, Warner -- even if he were to beat Allen -- could only hope for a #2 position against Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primaries. In order to beat Allen, he would have to campaign to the left as a serious alternative to Allen and his center-right politics. That would put Warner on the left of Hillary for the primary campaigns, which might garner him some support but likely would cost him more in the end. Hillary will win the Left, anyway, based on her pre-Senate history. She has vulnerabilities from the DLC center even though she mostly espouses their positions now, but Warner could not hope to carry that banner less than two years removed from the kind of campaign he would have to wage against Allen to convince Virginians to change horses.

All that being said, I doubt it will make much difference in the end. Unless Hillary fumbles badly or the collapse of the 9/11 Commission causes a serious re-evaluation of her husband's tenure at the White House, she will wind up with the nomination. Warner may be playing for the VP slot instead.

Roberts -- Conservative But Not Crazy

Two news articles report on the release of additional material from the career of John Roberts, giving more ammunition to the opponents of his nomination to the Supreme Court while not providing any revelations or bomb bursts. Curiously, the pair continue the pattern of seeing more balanced coverage from the New York Times than the almost-hysterical tone provided on Roberts by the Washington Post.

For its part, the New York Times sticks to the relevant issues rather than rhetorical flourishes, and provides evidence both of Roberts' conservative leanings and common-sense approach to political extremism. Roberts expressed concern over the increasing police power that government agencies had taken, seeing this as an ever-increasing encroachment on individual rights. He advised the Reagan team that federal police powers should instead remain limited to the Justice and Treasury departments:

Mr. Roberts's advice was in a May 16, 1984, memorandum to the White House counsel, Fred F. Fielding, then his boss, at a time when agencies including the Environmental Protection Agency and the Bureau of Land Management were pressing for - and sometimes getting - police powers to handle problems like toxic waste investigations and armed marijuana growers in the West.

But Mr. Roberts's view, a classic conservative articulation of the individual's right to be protected from state power, rings with perhaps renewed relevance today, in light of the government's use of expanded law enforcement authority in pursuit of the war on terror. The memorandum was among the tens of thousands of pages of documents released in recent weeks from the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and reviewed by The New York Times. ...

Mr. Roberts offered his views on expanded law enforcement powers as an associate White House counsel, reviewing proposed guidelines that would "represent a general administration commitment not to grant law enforcement authority to agencies other than Justice and Treasury." They would require an agency that sought such powers to prove that "the need cannot be met by other agencies with such authority."

The guidelines arose in a context in which various agencies were seeking new police powers, sometimes with the support of Congress and liberal groups, which questioned the Reagan administration's commitment to enforce environmental laws. In February 1984, for example, The New York Times said in an editorial that argued for an expansion of criminal investigators at the E.P.A., "Toxic waste dumping isn't just another white collar crime."

Mr. Roberts acknowledged that the administration's guidelines "will doubtless be viewed as an effort by Justice and Treasury to protect their 'turf,' but it is true that the proliferation of criminal law enforcement authority throughout the government is a dangerous trend that should be halted if not reversed."

This is a great example of solid, conservative legal thought. The reaction to the ever-expanding bureaucracy and its power over the lives of American citizens helped elect Reagan in 1980, and Roberts' thinking reflects this. It remains a problem today, and not just on the basis of encroaching on civil rights. Having a cornucopia of law-enforcement agencies makes for inefficient enforcement and more so an inconsistent approach to it. Unnecessary duplication of oversight eats up resources that a single law-enforcement agency could use to field more investigative personnel. Ensuring that abuses do not occur, or are quickly corrected, becomes an almost impossible task when so many different agencies conduct their own police forces.

The New York Times also notes that Roberts stuck to intellectually supportable conservatism and rejected extremists, even those who supported Reagan and his administration. The record shows that Roberts had little patience with Bob Jones University when it complained that Reagan hadn't done enough to support its efforts to bypass the INS for one of its foreign ministers, issuing threats to keep evangelicals at home in the next election. Roberts, who had seen the political capital Reagan had already spent trying to get Bob Jones University its tax-exempt status (which the Supreme Court later reversed), barely restrains his contempt for the university in his response to Fred Fielding, Reagan's White House counsel:

"The audacity of Jones's reply is truly remarkable, given the political costs this administration has incurred in promoting the interests of fundamental Christians in general and Bob Jones University in particular," Mr. Roberts wrote. "A restrained reply to his petulant paranoia is attached for your review, telling Jones, in essence, to go soak his head."

The Times analysis gives its readers a clear look at a conservative attorney, but one who operated in the mainstream and did not advise any currrying of favor with extremists. On the other hand, the picture painted by the Washington Post gives a much different impression -- a relentless portrait of a radical conservative who hates government programs. The Post gives little context to Roberts' thought, relying on rhetorical snippets instead to create this impression:

Supreme Court nominee John G. Roberts Jr. advised the Reagan administration's attorney general that "it makes eminent sense" to seek legislation permanently barring the use of employment quotas to redress discrimination and prohibiting the busing of students to foster the integration of schools, according to newly disclosed archival documents.

The March 15, 1982, recommendation to enact administration policy into law came up in a written assessment that year by Roberts and a colleague in the office of then-Attorney General William French Smith of legal issues raised by conservative groups. ...

In a memo written in 1983, after Roberts moved from the Justice Department to the White House counsel's office, Roberts left open the possibility that he agreed with a statement that the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission -- which is responsible for enforcing laws against discrimination -- was "un-American."

The memo, sent by Roberts to White House counsel Fred F. Fielding on June 7 of that year, noted that a citizen had written President Ronald Reagan to complain that the EEOC was "un-American" and that "he will hold the President to his promise to get rid of it." The letter was shunted to Roberts, who told Fielding he could not confirm that Reagan had made such a promise.

"We should ignore that assertion in any event," Roberts said, "as well as the assertion that the EEOC is 'un-American,' the truth of the matter notwithstanding. I have drafted a deliberately bland response for your signature."

One can make an argument that the EEOC, which has created many headaches for employers trying to comply with its vague requirements, does not meet the American ideal of treating people equally. In fairness, however, one must recognize the EEOC came as a reaction to a long, historical failure to meet that ideal, one the victimized minorities and women for decades if not centuries. Calling the EEOC itself "un-American" would be demgaoguic, but not a sin of the mortal proportions that the Post attempts to paint it, especially through the use of the people it quotes for reactions. Nor was it what Roberts said, but in fact part of a letter for which Roberts provided a response. The Post doesn't even report fact here -- it reports that his response "left open the possibility that he agreed" with that assertion. I suppose it left open the possibility that he thinks the moon is made of green cheese as well.

Is this the kind of fact-based reporting that the Washington Post wants us to expect? On the basis of their reporting on Roberts, it certainly appears that we can see more of it. Last week, Roberts was a racist for using an official designation of the Civil War as the "War Between The States". Two weeks ago, Roberts was a racist because of a house his parents bought, with a deed that had none of the exclusion clauses on which the Post based its allegations. Today, Roberts is a racist because he crafted a typical bland response to an angry citizen. If the Post wants us to see a pattern in these reports, they succeed -- but probably not in the way they imagine.

Dafydd: the Great Wall of FISA

Several previous posts here have discussed Jamie Gorelick's wall of separation between intelligence and law enforcement, enunciated by her now-infamous 1995 memo to U.S. Attorney Mary Jo White, FBI Director Louis Freeh, Assistant Attorney General for the Criminal Division Jo Ann Harris, and Justice Department Counsel for Intelligence Richard Scruggs, who also ran the Office of Intelligence Policy and Review.

As the OIPR may well have played a role in preventing the intelligence on Mohammed Atta and three other eventual 9/11 hijackers from reaching the FBI, and as this may be related to Bill Clinton's China problem (as a number of commenters on past Able-Danger posts here have suggested), it's worth taking a look at this agency and its chief counsel in 2000, Frances Fargo Townsend.

The OIPR

The counsel for intelligence at the Justice Department is also general counsel for the Office of Intelligence Policy and Review at the Department of Justice; Scruggs held this position in 1995 (though not in 2000). The OIPR is tasked with advising the attorney general on "all matters relating to the national security activities of the United States," according to their website, as well as advising "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 OIPR's primary, day-to-day task is to serve as the gatekeeper to the FISA court on behalf of the FBI and other investigators at the Justice Department. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 established guidelines for obtaining wiretaps, clandestine searches, and other investigative tools in cases involving national security, where intelligence agencies and law enforcement agencies might have to cooperate and in which classified materials that cannot be revealed in open court may be involved. The act also established the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, commonly called the FISA court, which would meet in secret to consider applications for FISA warrants from the Justice Department; those warrants routinely passed through the OIPR, which rewrote them, could demand more information from the requesting group (often the FBI) -- and ultimately had to decide whether to send them on as formal applications to the FISA court or reject them entirely without the court even seeing them.

In August 2002, Accuracy In Media (AIM) wrote a report about the May 21, 2002 letter by FBI Special Agent Coleen Rowley to FBI Director Robert Mueller, complaining about the roadblocks thrown up by the FBI and the Justice Department in Rowley's 2001 investigation of Zacarias Moussaoui. AIM pinpointed the blame on the OIPR, which had repeatedly refused to attempt to obtain a warrant from the FISA court to search Moussaoui's computer and other possessions. In that report, AIM detailed some of the history of the OIPR and chronicled its role in building the wall of separation, starting even before Jamie Gorelick moved to Justice.

(Curiously, Rowley, a lifelong Democrat, went down to Camp Cindy a couple of weeks ago to protest in support of Cindy Crawford's call for immediate and unconditional surrender to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. So it goes.)

The OIPR had long been a valuable asset to the Justice Department in obtaining warrants from the FISA court.

From 1984 to October 1993, Mary C. Lawton was the Justice Department's Counsel for Intelligence, in charge of the OIPR, the critical node in the FISA process. During her tenure, she occasionally rejected efforts by the FBI to obtain FISA warrants, but once an application left her office it was never turned down by the FISA court. Lawton also permitted the FBI to work with Justice's Criminal Division to ensure that it did nothing that would hinder any eventual prosecution. A former agent who worked with her says Lawton had a razor-sharp legal mind, particularly with regard to national security. Agents knew that once she approved it, the final application would sail through the FISA court.

But in 1993, Lawton died. This conveniently allowed Janet Reno to appoint Richard Scruggs, who she had brought to Washington from the U.S. Attorney's office in Miami, as the Justice Department's counsel for intelligence (hence general counsel for the OIPR).

Scruggs had no background whatsoever in national security, no connections with the FBI's National Security Division, and no ties to the Criminal Division at Justice. I believe he was appointed to be a cat's paw for Reno (a year later, Reno brought Jamie Gorelick over from the DoD to be her Deputy Attorney General, the second most powerful position in the department -- I think for similar reasons). In 1993 -- two years before Gorelick's Wall -- Scruggs himself added another layer to the FISA wall, refusing more often, and with flimsier reasons, to allow intelligence agencies to transfer data to criminal investigators.

The Chinese Connection

According to the AIM report,

Simultaneously [with the appointment of Scruggs in 1993], Director Freeh was dismantling the FBI's counterintelligence capabilities. The China section was especially hard hit. Experienced China counterintelligence specialists like Ray Wickman and T. Van Majors had retired or sought reassignment to field offices. Consequently, the National Security Division lost the expertise built up over the years of working with OIPR and preparing FISA applications.

Scruggs was criticized by Ronald Kessler in his book The Bureau: The Secret History of the FBI, for using this issue as a pretext to increase his status with Reno and expand his staff and budget. Scruggs erected barriers between the FBI and Justice's Criminal Division and threatened to reject automatically any FBI attempt to obtain a FISA warrant should the Bureau violate his rules. In this fashion, the FBI was deprived of advice and assistance from the Justice Department's Criminal Division in espionage or terrorist cases. [emphasis added]

It is now generally conceded that the People's Republic of China (which I hereafter call Red China, because I'm an old fogey who doesn't like changing terms of long usage and perfect clarity) established a spy network of stunning breadth during the Clinton administration, primarily focusing on obtaining our most up-to-date nuclear technology and strategy. Of more controversy is why: the Right asserts, and the Left hotly denies that Clinton himself turned a blind eye to Chinese espionage because of the very large campaign contributions funneled into the Clinton war chest by the Peoples Liberation Army (PLA) and various intelligence agencies of Red China; the last estimate I saw indicated that the PLA eventually donated as much as $4 million to Clinton's campaign and library funds and to the Democratic National Committee, channeled through various cutouts, including Maria Hsia, Johnny Chung, John Huang, and Charlie Trie.

The United States also changed its foreign policy with respect to Red China in several ways favorable to them during this period; for example, retracting our promise to defend Taiwan in the event of an attack by Red China, granting technology-transfer waivers to Loral Space and Communications and Hughes Electronic Corp. to share state-of-the-art launch technology with Red China, and attempting to sell the former U.S. Naval Base at Long Beach to COSCO, the China Ocean Shipping Company -- a well-known front for the PLA. Much of this is detailed in Edward Timperlake and William C. Triplett II's excellent book the Year of the Rat: How Bill Clinton Compromised U.S. Security for Chinese Cash, as well as in Bill Gertz's Betrayal : How the Clinton Administration Undermined American Security. Each person can draw his own conclusions about any connection between these events.

But how does any of this relate to the wall of separation at Justice that prevented transmitting Able Danger intelligence to the FBI in 2000?

Starting in 1993, the FBI began investigating what they believed to be one of the most effective and damaging Chinese spies in the country: Dr. Wen Ho Lee, working on nuclear technology at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Lee was eventually charged with fifty-nine counts; but the case was botched, and all but one of the charges were dropped. Lee pled guilty to one count of "unlawfully retaining national defense information" and was sentenced to time served.

In 1997, the FBI wanted to search Wen Ho Lee's computer accounts at Los Alamos, both those for classified information that he had access to and also his personal office computer, which was unsecured: the FBI believed that Lee was transferring highly classified technical documents from the classified computer to the unsecured, web-connected computer -- whence, the government eventually alleged, the Red Chinese snatched them. None of this was proven at trial; in fact, at least some of the information seems not to have been accessible by Lee. But the FBI believed they needed to inspect Lee's computers and wiretap his phone, and they sent a Letterhead Memorandum up the chain at Justice requesting a FISA warrant... which the OIPR had to decide whether or not to turn into a formal application to the FISA court.

In 1996 or 1997, Scruggs, a protege of Attorney General Janet Reno, left that position and was replaced by an interim acting counsel, Gerald Schroeder. It was Schroeder who rejected the FBI's request, refusing to pass it along to the FISA court.

Under Scruggs, the OIPR had significantly expanded the wall of separation; after Scruggs left, Schroeder refused even to relay an FBI request for a FISA warrant to the FISA court to investigate potential Red Chinese espionage of critical nuclear technology. At this very same time, President Clinton was under investigation by members of Congress for cozying up to Red China in exchange for campaign cash... and Janet Reno was frantically stonewalling demands that she appoint a special counsel to investigate Clinton's China connections.

There is no proof that Reno's attempts to stifle investigation into Red Chinese penetration of the White House influenced the decision by the acting counsel for intelligence at the Department of Justice (who heads the OIPR) to put a lid on the investigation of suspected Red Chinese spy Wen Ho Lee. But certainly it was -- I can't resist -- another brick in the wall of separation. By this point, it had become terribly difficult for OIPR to approve any connection at all between intelligence and law enforcement. As the AIM report put it:

Although OIPR attorney Dave Ryan prepared the application, the key player in the rejection was Allan Kornblum, OIPR's Deputy Counsel for Operations. He testified that he was shocked when he first read the Bureau's draft, but he then proceeded to throw up a series of ever-higher obstacles to OIPR's approval....

The Senate report concludes that Kornblum was applying a standard appropriate to establishing guilt in a courtroom, but not to establishing probable cause to obtain a FISA warrant. Kornblum is viewed as an experienced career attorney, but one more "political" and "attuned to the front office" than his colleagues. In this case, Kornblum may have been playing to Schroeder's "very restrictive definition of probable cause."

Another way to put it is that by 1997, the OIPR had become gun-shy about any interaction at all between intelligence and law enforcement. On FISA warrants, it became more important to the OIPR under Schroeder to maintain its near perfect record of not being rejected by the court than it was to get vital intelligence to investigators and prosecutors. But vigorous enforcement of the wall seeped from the OIPR through every department, every field office, and every agent and employee of the Justice Department.

The stage had been set for the colossal failure of Able Danger.

Frances Fargo Townsend

Acting Counsel for Intelligence Schroeder left in 1998, and was replaced by the soon-to-be controversial Frances Fargo Townsend. Townsend -- a Republican and former deputy to Rudolph Giuliani in the U.S. Attorney's Office in New York City, but a very close friend of Attorney General Janet Reno nevertheless -- was elevated to that position at Reno's request; since Townsend was also the protege of then FBI Director Louis Freeh (another recipient of Gorelick's memo), she was a shoe-in for the job heading OIPR.

U.S. News and World Report profiled Townsend last December. Although they did not discuss Able Danger, they did report on the feeling among nearly all of Townsend's critics that she was too enamored of that wall of separation, and that she was just as conservative in applying for wiretapping and surveillance warrants from the FISA court as Schroeder and Scruggs had been.

Townsend found herself in the middle of that debate over how much of a "wall" should exist between intelligence-gatherers and prosecutors, and her tenure at OIPR remains controversial today. Many FBI agents say Townsend was crucial in obtaining FISA wiretaps, especially during the period of heightened terrorism concerns around the new millennium. But many prosecutors felt that Townsend was less than helpful in making sure the FBI shared wiretap data with lawyers at Main Justice when there was evidence of criminal activity. Townsend believed that the FISA court and its chief judge at the time, Royce Lamberth, would refuse to approve search warrants and wiretaps if they believed too much information sharing was going on and if prosecutors were controlling or directing the intelligence-gathering efforts....

Both the Government Accountability Office and the 9/11 commission have blamed OIPR in part for the government's intelligence failures before the terrorist attacks. Sources say that OIPR's narrow interpretation of FISA led to misunderstandings and overly cautious behavior by the FBI. As a result, in July and August of 2001, FBI intelligence analysts prohibited their own criminal-case agents from searching for two men on the government's terrorist watch list who they knew had entered the United States. The men later proved to be two of the 19 hijackers.

In fact, under Townsend, the control by OIPR of all connections between intelligence and law enforcement became nearly absolute through what can only be called political extortion:

The 9/11 commission said OIPR had become the "sole gatekeeper" of FISA intelligence by arguing that "its position reflected the concerns" of Judge Lamberth. "The office threatened that if it could not regulate the flow of information to criminal prosecutors, it would no longer present the FBI's warrant requests to the FISA court," the report said. "The information flow withered." [emphasis added]

And of course, less than three years into Townsend's tenure, the Pentagon's Able Danger team requested permission from the Department of Defense's general counsel to share with the FBI intelligence information about an al-Qaeda cell in Brooklyn, a cell that included Mohammed Atta and three other soon-to-be 9/11 hijackers. Again, there is no absolute proof that the DoD lawyers contacted the OIPR; but that would be the regular source they would use to get Justice Department advice on the legality of such sharing. And assuming they did, the decision would ultimately fall to Frances Fargo Townsend: she would have to make the call.

Her personal history, as well as that of her office under two previous general counsels, and of the entire Justice Department under Janet Reno, makes perfectly clear that Townsend's natural inclination under such circumstances would be to "just say no." Indeed, by that time, the DoD lawyers (possibly still operating under Jamie Gorelick's own tenure as general counsel for the Defense Department and her later memo at Justice) might not even have bothered asking, since they already knew what the answer would be.

Thus, in the end, the Able Danger catastrophe, like death and taxes, was predestined.

The Great Wall of China

Critics of the almost obsessive focus on Jamie Gorelick's role in the Able Danger fiasco, which may have prevented the breakup of Mohammed Atta's al-Qaeda cell in Brooklyn and the quashing of the 9/11 attacks, are right in one sense: Gorelick was not alone. Gorelick's mentor, Janet Reno, had other agents: Richard Scruggs, Gerald Schroeder, and Frances Townsend were all close associates of the attorney general; and Louis Freeh became close to Reno, as well. All followed the same trail blazed by the boss, President William Jefferson Clinton.

All six of these individuals (seven, counting the president himself) were true believers in building that wall higher and higher. I suspect that OIPR's fear of being rejected by the FISA court and Clinton's well-known loathing of defense and disdain for intelligence gathering in general combined into a "perfect storm." The intelligence side would simply not even be allowed to talk to the criminal investigation side. The wall of separation became a veritable Great Wall of China, completely segregating intelligence gathering at the CIA, DIA, Naval Intelligence, the National Security Divison of the FBI, and yes, the Able Danger data-mining operation from the criminal investigators and prosecutors under the Department of Justice -- including the FBI. Everybody on both sides of the wall contributed another brick or two.

That same Great Wall also imprisoned the federal criminal-justice system itself: they were isolated, sequestered, and kept in the dark about the great and terrible events swirling around the country (and the world) from 1993 right up to when the hammer fell on September 11th... and even beyond, until Congress enacted the USA PATRIOT Act a month later.

In another sense, though, the critics are dead wrong: it is worth focusing on Gorelick because she wrote the clearest (though not the first) directive expanding the Great Wall -- and because she was subsequently foisted upon the 9/11 Commission by the Democrats in a crass and blatant (and ultimately successful) attempt to ensure that none of this would come out in the commission's final report.

In this case, success may not have a thousand fathers, but it surely has at least seven progenitors.

Camp Casey Diary From A CQ Reader

CQ reader Curtis Loftis decided to check out the digs at Camp Casey firsthand, trekking to Crawford for a couple of days to see how the anti-war demonstrations have been staged for himself. He sent me this e-mail on his return with his thoughts and observations. I thought it might interest the rest of the CQ community.

Two Days In Camp Casey:
A Conservative's odyssey in the belly of the beast.

I arrived at the original Camp Casey at 2:30 in the afternoon. It was hot and dry and the assembled demonstrators were in a melancholy state. I quickly made friends, stressing “cocktail” conversation, not political discussion. My goal was not confrontation, but a desire to understand what was actually happening here in Crawford…and being incognito was the only way this would happen.

After bonding with several nice ladies from the central coast of California, I drove with these new buddies to the larger, tented camp where Ms. Sheehan and Company was to be found. There I found a well funded, well orchestrated public relations campaign, run by media professionals complete with the highest quality electronic equipment available. From Satellite trucks and cell phone to wireless computer access, every modern convenience to enhance the “message” was there…and being used by left wing, socialist and Marxist (self-described) media representatives and Bloggers.

The environment was collegial, and everyone had a purpose. There were rules such as no drinking, no bad behavior and the like that were ruthlessly enforced. Everyone had to be on message, and the message was the point of everything…stray from the message and you are out. Even the protesters’ signs were monitored less they distract from the message.

Most of the Sheehan protesters were either professional (paid staff of Fenton Communications or the radical organization Code Pink or the like), or were long time protesters, some admitting to beginning vigils against the government as early as 1965. I had conversations with approximately 50 of these people over 48 hours, and all seemed like interesting and engaging people. We talked sports, and cars and how wonderful California is, and just about everything that could be discussed without my divulging that I am a conservative. But when “scratched” just a little with some mild political talk, they all responded the same way…”it is Americas fault”. No matter what the issue, each and every one of them had the same default…”bad things are America’s fault”.

Toward the end of my time there, I decided to innocently toss into the conversation different issues just to elicit a response. One issue I politely deposited into our talks was of the peasant unrest in rural China, and the brutality shown to the peasants by the government and their hired thugs. There response to this problem was…”well, look how we treated the blacks in America”, or, “gays are being beaten everyday in America”.

So the cliché of the “hate America” crowd is indeed true. It is as if the protesters were intellectually bulimic, and having ingested all of the hate America bile, they looked forward to regurgitating it as a show of their steadfastness to their cause of peace and love.

Cindy Sheehan spent most of her time huddled with VIPS in and air-conditioned trailer. When she ventured out it was for a scripted and often televised moment. She was always trailed by her media people, and they were quick to keep her on point. During one conversation I had with her I tried to ask her a pointed question about how much time she would actually be on the bus tour to Washington. (I had discovered she would only be on the tour for two days, and would be away giving speeches during the rest of the trip…and I wondered if she were being paid for these speeches.) Her media person grabbed her arm and led her back to the trailer, and away from me. The message was protected. I was left standing there…alone, and feeling a little less secure about my status at Camp Casey.

But just a few minutes later, she emerged from the trailer, smiling, and performing for the cameras. Like the chicken at the local carnival that plays tic tac toe, she eagerly performs for any microphone. She is relentless, and professional, well financed and on message.

And the message is “All things bad are America’s fault”.

Curtis gave me permission to post this with just a couple of grammatical edits and with his full name.

UPDATE: Rusty Shackleford has another letter from one of his readers that visited the counterprotest from Move America Forward. She notes that several Sheehan supporters infiltrated the rally and disrupted it, unlike Curtis.

UPDATE II: Curtis also reads Power Line, apparently...well, who doesn't?

UPDATE III: Brian Maloney interviewed Curtis for the Rusty Humphries radio show, and has also now posted the essay. Unfortunately, it's not exclusive, although Brian didn't know that when he posted it.

Able Danger: Chart Existed In 2002

Newsmax reports that a chart shown at a Heritage Foundation event in May 2002 by Curt Weldon came from the Able Danger program, and that the classified version of it would have shown Atta in the picture (h/t: CQ reader Ginetta):

A third of the way through his May 23, 2002 address on data fusion techniques, the video shows Rep. Weldon unfurling a copy of the now missing document and displaying it to the Heritage audience.

"This is the unclassified chart that was done by the Special Forces Command briefing center one year before 9/11," he explains. "It is the complete architecture of al Qaeda and pan-Islamic extremism. It gives all the linkages. It gives all the capabilities. . . ."

Though Weldon never mentions Able Danger or Atta by name - and the video never zooms in on the chart to the point where Atta's photo is identifiable - it's clear from Weldon comments that the chart is the same one currently being sought.

Actually, that last part may not be completely accurate. Weldon makes clear in the video (which those with Real Player can see at this link) that the chart represents the unclassified data from the "Special Forces" program that generated it. He tells the audience that the classified version, designed for a special briefing for the Joint Chiefs, contained the complete look at al-Qaeda and their connections, one year prior to 9/11.

Weldon also says in this video, at around the 33-minute mark when the chart makes its appearance, that the unit responsible for the chart prepared a three-hour brief for General Hugh Shelton that included recommendations for an attack on five AQ cells identified by this "Special Forces" program (Able Danger was a Special Operations Command program). Weldon's contact, probably Col. Tony Shaffer, told Weldon that the briefing got reduced to a one-hour presentation and did not include any recommendations for action.

Weldon says that he demanded the full three-hour brief after he discovered it. He spoke to General Holland, commander of SOCOM, who agreed to give him what they could, but some of the data remained classified as it held some value for the Afghanistan operation. Even the reduced brief, Weldon says, caused him grave concern that someone had deliberately watered down the brief for Shelton to avoid taking real action. Weldon then forcefully states that 9/11 should have been avoided, and would have been had the intelligence community not "dropped the ball".

None of this makes it into the 9/11 Commission report, of course.

Addendum: What does this mean? I think Weldon didn't know about the Atta connection in 2002; otherwise, as this video makes clear, he would have blown it wide open then. I believe that may have been the portion of the briefing (and the chart) that was withheld at a higher level of clearance. It would make sense that Shaffer would have tried to work through his chain of command, and then through the Commission, before breaking the clearance on the data and bringing it to Weldon. I think Weldon may have sat on it a while, gathering more people willing to talk, until he felt he had enough corroboration for the facts to come out this month.

Clearly, though, Weldon knew that SOCOM had a good idea about what and where Al-Qaeda was far before 9/11 and had opportunities to destroy or disrupt them. A predilection towards inertia would be the most charitable reason to assign the lack of action he describes.

UPDATE: Did Newsmax get this from Laura Rozen and fail to attribute it? It looks that way. Tom Maguire points that out in the comments, as well as provides a link to a floor speech Weldon gave in Congress that is essentially the same as the video, minus the chart.

Bloggers Spearhead Egyptian Opposition

In a country where opposition historically brought oppression, even a moderate loosening of the autocratic controls on dissent has not kept an underground movement from forming in the blogosphere. Egypt has allowed for multi-party elections for the first time in decades and has even permitted some limited criticisms and demonstrations against Hosni Mubarak. However, in the growing Egyptian blogging community, the gloves come off and the real criticisms flow freely:

Baheyya is Egyptian, pillories President Hosni Mubarak and heaps scorn on his regime daily. But this fiery dissident who says aloud what others don't dare to think has no face: Baheyya is a blog.

In an Egyptian presidential campaign that has failed to generate much enthusiasm, one of the hottest debates is taking place online in the country's burgeoning political blogosphere.

"In every normal election, people have their eyes trained on the result: who wins, who loses, and how things will change. In this election, however, we all know Hosni Mubarak is going to 'win' barring some miraculous deus ex machina," writes Baheyya. ...

Her identity is shrouded in mystery and the subject of much speculation among the blogging community but her diatribes have earned a cult albeit restricted following.

In a country where most major newspapers are state-owned or affiliated to a party, the Internet is offering an unprecedented freedom and platform for an increasingly bold opposition to the regime.

The blogosphere offers enough anonymity for those who want it so that they can speak freely about their political frustrations. So far, this has not resulted in the kind of recriminations seen against Iranian bloggers, but the Iranians hardly have wanted to give the impression that they want free and open elections anyway. Mubarak faces more pressure along those lines, and he appears genuinely interested in some change. His effort to push for multi-party elections surprised people earlier this year, when it was widely considered an effort to get in front of a democratization wave while maintaining his power and legitimacy.

The result of Mubarak's changes have disappointed some who hoped for a more complete transformation of Egyptian politics. After so many years of political repression, it could be that the electorate does not trust Mubarak to remain true to his word not to retaliate against criticism. The campaign appears to reflect that reluctance; no great debates have taken place, and even the demonstrations that have occurred do not seem very noteworthy or effective. Only in the anonymity of the blogosphere have Egyptians allowed themselves the luxury of free political speech -- but whether people have read their on-line protests is another question entirely.

In this case, we hope the revolution will indeed be blogged.

Sunnis Gamble And Lose On Constitution

Despite two extensions and the outreach effort that allowed outsized representation on the drafting committee, in the end the Sunnis would not show enough flexibility to complete an agreement on the new Iraqi constitution. The National Assembly has decided to exercise democracy over consensus and send the draft to a vote, a decision that threatens once again to marginalize the Sunnis unless they participate in the electoral process:

Iraqi leaders completed a draft of a permanent constitution Sunday after three months of negotiations that left Sunni Arabs unsatisfied, setting up a potentially divisive nationwide referendum on the document to be held by Oct. 15.

Members of the committee that convened in May to write the document ended their official duties by signing the draft and sending it to the National Assembly, where it was read aloud to members. Some Sunnis, who had unsuccessfully sought the elimination of a clause allowing power to be devolved from the central government to autonomous regions, walked out while the draft was read.

The Kurds and Shiites attempted to compromise with the Sunnis, even going as far as an offer to reinstate the Ba'ath Party, minus any support for Saddam and his propaganda. They offered to postpone any motions for federalism, keeping the concept but not exercising it until the next Assembly could get elected, save for the Kurds' hard-fought autonomy. In return, the Sunnis submitted a new list of demands in the final hours, demonstrating their bad faith and determination to sink any agreement that did not restore them to power.

The American ambassador said he thinks most of the Sunnis supported the document but could not afford to say so. Zalmay Khalizad noted that the Sunnis have come under strong pressure from the terrorist groups to oppose any constitution that sets Iraq up as a democracy and that the politicians fear assassination if they do or say anything positive. Perhaps this could turn out to be true. Voter registration is up in the Sunni areas, ostensibly to defeat the draft referendum -- but it could lead to a popular revolt against the violence that has mostly marred Sunni areas, and the constitution might get enough of the vote to pass.

On the other hand, the Guardian reports that the Sunnis have asked other Arab nations to step in and block the draft from going to the voters, along with the UN and other international organizations. That end-run around democracy will not please their fellow Iraqis in the Kurdish and Shi'ite territories. The Kurds especially will resent Arab League interference, especially since they've run their own democracy in the north for over a decade while the Arab League tried to force the Coalition to leave Iraq to Saddam during the entire time since Gulf War I. No one in either group trusts the UN to do anything beneficial for anyone but the Sunni complainers, either, but the likelihood of UN action will remain nil with the US and UK pushing for a vote.

We won't know the results of that vote until mid-October, and we can expect plenty of campaigning in Central Iraq to convince the Sunni rank and file that this deal will be the best they can get. Had they voted in the last election, they could have had their own representatives in the negotiations to tell them that. Hopefully Sunni voters will have seen the idiocy of their boycott and what they lost as a result, and will not make the same mistake twice.

Katrina Weakening?

Katrina has shifted in the last hours before complete landfall and weakened slightly, perhaps giving New Orleans enough respite to survive its fury, according to the latest dispatches from the National Hurricane Center:

Hurricane Katrina edged slightly to the east early Monday as it bore down on the Gulf Coast, providing some hope that the worst of the storm's 150 mph winds might not directly strike this low-lying city.

Katrina, which weakened slightly overnight to a strong Category 4 storm, turned slightly eastward as it closed in on land, which would put the western eyewall — the weaker side of the strongest winds — over New Orleans.

"It's not as bad as the eastern side. It'll be plenty bad enough," said Eric Blake of the National Hurricane Center in Miami.

Mayor Ray Nagin said he believed 80 percent of the city's 480,000 residents had heeded an unprecedented mandatory evacuation as Katrina threatened to become the most powerful storm ever to slam the city.

"It's capable of causing catastrophic damage," said National Hurricane Center Director Max Mayfield. "Even well-built structures will have tremendous damage. Of course, what we're really worried about is the loss of lives.

"New Orleans may never be the same."

The city's mayor believes that 80% of the residents obeyed a mandatory evacuation order, but the damage will still be immense even if the loss of life remains low. Weather services predict most houses will not survive the storm, and that even stronger structures will suffer major damage. Some predict that over a million people could be made homeless, despite the storm's weakening condition.

Oil prices, meanwhile, have spiked in the Far East in the first market action since close of business Friday, when predictions had Katrina landing elsewhere. Crude futures have gone above $70, but the real problem in the US will not come from crude supply but from the loss of refining capacity in the Gulf area. We could easily see a large price spike as refineries shut down -- refineries that already have to operate at 97% capacity to keep up with demand. That means we do not have the spare capacity to take over and keep the supply level, which will create a terrible market distortion if it goes on too long. The region hardest hit by this imbalance will be the same hit by Katrina, but it will ripple throughout the national economy as well.

We'll keep praying for New Orleans and the Gulf region that Katrina weakens and keeps shifting for the least possible effect once it hits.

Keep checking with Michelle Malkin for updates and the best links.

Fritz Hollings Connected Iraq To 9/11

Perhaps Senator Fritz Hollings cannot claim to have first connected Iraq to 9/11, but he did point out for the record an odd literary coincidence in a speech on the Senate floor on September 12, 2002, the day after the first anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. Hollings entered an editorial into the Congressional record from the Iraqi newspaper Al-Nasiriyah, which he noted appears curious for its eerily prescient language:

America says, admitting just like a bird in the midst of a tornado, that Bin Ladin is behind the bombing of its destroyer in Aden. The fearful series of events continues for America and the terror within America gets to the point that the Governor of Texas increases the amount of the award, just as the stubbornness of the other man and his challenge increases. This challenge makes it such that one of his grandchildren comes from Jeddah traveling on the official Saudi Arabia airlines and celebrates with him the marriage of one of the daughters of his companions. Bin Ladin has become a puzzle and a proof also, of the inability of the American federalism and the C.I.A. to uncover the man and uncover his nest. The most advanced organizations of the world cannot find the man and continues to go in cycles in illusion and presuppositions. They still hope that he could come out from his nest one day, they hope that he would come out from his hiding hole and one day they will point at him their missiles and he will join Guevara, Hassan Abu Salama, Kamal Nasser, Kanafani and others. The man responds with a thin smile and replies to the correspondent from Al Jazeera that he will continue to be the obsession and worry of America and the Jews, and that even that night he will practice and work on an exercise called ``How Do You Bomb the White House.'' And because they know that he can get there, they have started to go through their nightmares on their beds and the leaders have had to wear their bulletproof vests.

Meanwhile America has started to pressure the Taliban movement so that it would hand them Bin Ladin, while he continues to smile and still thinks seriously, with the seriousness of the Bedouin of the desert about the way he will try to bomb the Pentagon after he destroys the White House .....

The phenomenon of Bin Ladin is a healthy phenomenon in the Arab spirit. It is a decision and a determination that the stolen Arab self has come to realize after it got bored with promises of its rulers: After it disgusted itself from their abomination and their corruption, the man had to carry the book of God and the Kalashnikov and write on some off white paper ``If you are unable to drive off the Marines from the Kaaba, I will do so.'' It seems that they will be going away because the revolutionary Bin Ladin is insisting very convincingly that he will strike America on the arm that is already hurting. That the man will not be swayed by the plant leaves of Whitman nor by the ``Adventures of Indiana Jones'' and will curse the memory of Frank Sinatra every time he hears his songs.

In one editorial, two months before the attack, al-Nasiriyah -- a state-run newspaper for the Saddam regime -- managed to name all three attack targets for 9/11. They said that bin Laden had spent his time trying to work out how to bomb the White House, which would happen shortly before destroying the Pentagon. Then, in typically flowery Arabic fashion, the author claims that Americans will "curse the memory of Frank Sinatra", an odd reference -- unless one remembers that "New York, New York" remains Sinatra's signature song. In the event, the attack followed precisely this plan, except in reverse order: the World Trade Center went first, then the Pentagon, and the White House would likely have followed if the heroes of Flight 93 had not caused the terrorists to down the plane in Pennsylvania.

Even beyond that, the fawning tone and obvious support for Osama bin Laden in one of Saddam's newspapers belies any suggestion that the two could not find common ground for operations against their common enemy. Saddam wanted Iraqis to stand behind Osama and al-Qaeda and cheer on their attacks on the US. The author states: "This new awareness of the image that Bin Ladin has become gives shape to the resting areas and stops for every Arab revolutionary. It is the subject of our admiration here in Iraq because it shares with us in a unified manner our resisting stand, and just as he fixes his gaze on the Al Aqsa we greet him."

Let's take another look at the timeline to see where July 21, 2001 fits into it. At that point, Mohammed Atta has just met with Ramzi Binalshibh in Madrid, discussing the need to set a date for the attacks. Binalshibh claims that Atta did not do so at that meeting, but Binalshibh provides the only evidence of Atta's demurral. Five days later, Hamid Zakeri would walk into an American embassy and tell the CIA that Osama bin Laden would launch a massive attack the US on September 11, and that the attack would involve six pilots -- an attack about which he learned through his Iranian contacts.

It certainly seems that Binalshibh has created quite a disinformation campaign, and that American officials appeared determined to swallow it. In case you wondered, the 9/11 Commission makes no mention of the Iraqi predictions in its final report, to no one's great surprise.

UPDATE: The Hollings link came from a Thomas search, which apparently didn't deliver a permanent URL. I didn't notice it at the time. It han also be found here. I'll try to find a permanent Thomas URL.

UPDATE II: The relevant pages of the Congressional Record can be found in these two PDF files.

A Parting Gift For The Israelis

If people expected that the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, during which they used armed force to send their citizens back into Israel in order to leave the territory to the Palestinians, would result in a gesture commensurate with the Palestinian desire for peace, today's news confirms this. A Palestinian bomber wounded 21 Israeli civilians in Beersheba, near Gaza, in a suicide-bomb attack on a bus this morning:

Twenty-one people were wounded Sunday, two seriously, in a suicide bombing at a central bus station in the southern Israeli town of Beersheba, Israeli officials said. ...

There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the blast, which took place three days after Israeli troops killed five Palestinians. The Palestinian militant group Islamic Jihad has vowed retribution for that incident. ...

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas condemned what he called a "terrorist attack" and called for "calm and restraint in spite of the Israeli provocations, the most recent being the killing of five Palestinians," in a statement carried by Wafa, the official news agency of the Palestinian Authority.

The "Israeli provocation", which CNN doesn't even bother to describe in its report, was the killing of an Islamic Jihad leader who had orchestrated two suicide bombings of Israeli civilians. The Islamic Jihad has yet to honor the cease-fire that Abbas has proclaimed, allowing them maximum flexibility for their attacks while hiding behind the skirts of Abbas and the two-thirds cease fire coming from Abbas' territories. The assault on the terrorist resulted in five deaths, and while it's unclear whether all five had ties to Islamic Jihad, it is clear that the Israelis clearly targeted the terrorist leader and not civilians on civilian transports. Also, even more clearly, Islamic Jihad and the other terror groups working in Abbas' regions of responsibility deliberately hide themselves in civilian areas while plotting and conducting their terror campaigns.

This puts the responsibility on Abbas, not the Israelis, to do something about disarming the militias and the terrorists. The Israelis have the right to respond to attacks, and for Abbas to claim that the Israelis have broken a cease-fire in those responses to attacks is absurd. It provides yet another example of the Palestinian triangle offense, as I have often commented here, and the ludicrous credulity of the West in accepting Abbas' claims of supporting peace.

The Israelis performed a concrete act of compromise in abandoning the Gaza settlements this week. All they got in return is more attacks. Abbas and the appeasers at State had better start thinking what lesson that will teach the Israelis. They will not allow themselves to get pushed into the Mediterranean just to satisfy the moral relativists in the West, and their patience may soon run out. Binyamin Netanyahu stands ready in the wings to change the entire military strategy of the Israelis regarding the Palestinians. If the US wants to avoid anyone getting pushed into a body of water, then they had better tap Abbas on the shoulder and remind him of the proximity of the Jordan River.

Posted by Ed Morrissey at 8:45 AM | TrackBack

Releasing Terrorists From Abu Ghraib, Killing Their Travel Agent

CNN reports that the Coalition appears quite proud to announce that they have released over 1,000 detainees from Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad at the request of the Iraqi government. The statement from the Multi-National Forces sound all the right themes about sovereignty and cooperation while ignoring the risk to their soldiers that such releases have caused. However, CNN uses the announcement to bury the lead, as it appends yesterday's Centcom announcement that American forces killed a major figure assisting the movement of terrorists to the end of the article (and Confederate Yankee scooped CNN on this development yesterday):

Meanwhile, a man described as a "major facilitator of foreign fighters and suicide bombers into northern Iraq" was killed by coalition forces Thursday in Mosul, the U.S. military said Saturday.

Abu Khallad, a Saudi national, was found after intelligence sources and tips led Multi-National Forces to his location in Mosul.

"Upon arrival at that location, multi-national forces stopped his vehicle, a gunfight immediately ensured and Khallad and an unidentified terrorist were shot and killed," the military said in a written statement.

Recent detainees have said Khallad contacted recruiters in Saudi Arabia to coordinate the movement of foreign fighters and suicide bombers into northern Iraq, the military said.

This Khallad is not the same as the 9/11 and USS Cole Khallad, whose real name is Tawfiq bin Attash and has been in US custody since 2003. However, he played a key role in maintaining the flow of recruits for suicide missions in northern Iraq, causing as much havoc for our troops and recruits for the new Iraqi army as possible. Eliminating Abu Khallad removes a key node on the network, making transit more difficult for the Zarqawi network and further reducing the number of suicide attackers. That will force Zarqawi to rely even less on the one mostly-indefensible tactic that he has and require more traditional tactics -- where the better trained, better disciplined American Army and Marines can chew them to pieces.

The terrorists may find another flow of recruits, unfortunately this time brokered by the Coalition itself. They opened the gates at Abu Ghraib and over a thousand men now have the opportunity to either live law-abiding lives, or to get even for their detention:

Nearly 1,000 detainees at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison were released this week at the request of the Iraqi government, Multi-National Forces said Saturday. ...

Those chosen for release were not convicted of violent crimes, the statement said, "and all have admitted their crimes, renounced violence and pledged to be good citizens of a democratic Iraq."

Each individual case was reviewed by a combined board of Iraqi and Coalition officials, the statement said, "and decided in the light of Iraq's ongoing efforts to create peace and stability and build a brighter future for its citizens."

Let's hope that the board did its job and saw perfectly into the souls of the lucky Iraqi detainees. If they failed, then we can expect more action for our troops in recapturing the fanatics that they have already sent into captivity at least once. Lt. Colonel Eric Kurilla can give us chapter and verse on this, as Michael Yon noted earlier this week:

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.

Kurilla ended up with several bullet wounds in the firefight, including a disabling broken femur that could have killed him. It likely means that the Army has lost Kurilla's fine services for the rest of the war, having to replace him with another commanding officer. While the specifics of that particular command transfer are unknown, the overall result usually means that command officers get progressively less experienced, on average, and that affects combat readiness.

The American armed forces train well and produce the finest officer and enlisted corps in the world, but nothing substitutes for field experience -- and Yon writes that LTC Kurilla had an uncanny sense for danger and instinctive grasp of the best tactics to apply in those situations. Those skills will be missed, and we threw them away by allowing the Iraqis to release someone we knew to be a danger to Kurilla and his men. Coming in the same week that Kurilla recovers from his serious wounds, I don't think this mass release gives us much cause to celebrate.

UPDATE 8/29: This caught the eye of our forces at Abu Ghraib. One of them, a CQ reader, responded:

Most of our guys are pure detainees…caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. In Iraq, it is also legal to detain witnesses to keep them from disappearing so some of our guys are in that category. Its not like we released 1000 proven killers.

I agree -- most of them are probably releasable. My concern is that we do not allow American domestic politics to affect military decisions on releasing prisoners in Iraq, where (as LTC Kurilla found out) those decisions have life-changing potential. The men and women in charge at Abu Ghraib cannot hope to control policy and therefore have to do the best with what they have -- which they continue to do, magnificently.