If there were anything in Richard Clarke's classified congressional testimony from 2002 that could thoroughly discredit him, don't you think it would have been declassified as soon after his 60 Minutes interview as possible? Sorry, I don't buy this "We're looking into the declassification process" story -- after all, Bill Frist already seems to know what Clarke said, and what he's revealing ain't much, beyond praise for the Bushies, the same sort of praise for the "company" that any unhappy employee would feel compelled to offer in a work situation:

[Frist] quoted Clarke as telling Congress behind closed doors, "the administration actively sought to address the threat posed by al Qaeda during its first 11 months in office." --Reuters

[Frist] noted that Clarke's testimony in 2002 was "effusive in his praise for the actions of the Bush administration" and that Clarke had praised the administration's successes to reporters in 2002. --NewsMax

If there were a smoking gun in the testimony, we'd know. It would be declassified or someone in the right-wing media would have already gotten a leak -- bet on it. (Surely they know -- surely someone with a security clearance has picked over every word.)

Maybe I'm out on a limb here, but I think they've got nothing. They're just trying to keep the cloud of suspicion over Clarke through the weekend and the Sunday talk shows.

(Reuters link via Atrios and Hammerdown.)

Most U.S. Companies Plan More Outsourcing - Survey

Most U.S. companies plan to outsource more of its back-office functions overseas where labor is cheaper, despite a public relations backlash and weaker prospects for cost savings, according to a survey of 182 companies released on Friday.

About 86 percent of U.S. companies plan to increase the use of offshore outsourcing firms, according to a poll by Chicago-based management consulting firm DiamondCluster International.

But companies have lost the illusion of dramatic cost savings from outsourcing, the survey said, because managing far-flung international operations can be costly and difficult. They expect outsourcing to save only 10 percent to 20 percent of their costs, down sharply from 50 percent two years ago....

--Reuters

So it's full steam ahead, even though the benefits have been greatly hyped. Wake me when this starts leading to massive amounts of job creation in this country.

In New Hampshire [yesterday], ... Mr. Bush prefaced his remarks by pointedly noting that the commission was looking at "the eight months of my administration and the eight years of the previous administration."

--New York Times

I said this a couple of days ago and I'll say it again: The impact of what Richard Clarke is saying is blunted by the way the discussion is so often framed -- that Bill Clinton failed to capture or kill bin Laden for eight years, while George W. Bush failed for eight months. Framing the discussion this way glosses over the fact that (a) Bush hasn't been able to catch or kill bin Laden in more than three years, even with the world on his side now (which means it's not just a matter of boldness and lack of risk-aversion) and (b) we didn't have to catch or kill bin Laden to prevent 9/11 -- we just had to pay attention to the damn intelligence, and act accordingly.

Slate's William Saletan makes that point here.

The best shot at preventing 9/11 would have come not through a preconceived plan—Clarke's, Hadley's, or anyone else's—but through a process designed to pull together bits of useful information from various parts of the government. That process, as Clarke explained on 60 Minutes, was what President Clinton had ordered when faced with similar warnings of impending terrorism [prior to January 1, 2000]: a regular schedule of Cabinet-level meetings at which the attorney general, the CIA director, the secretary of defense, and other top officers of the government would have to explain what their agencies were doing to address the threat. To prepare for those meetings, the Cabinet members would have had to press their subordinates for regular updates, and so on, down the chain of command. Clarke and others call it "shaking the tree."

The most important thing isn't that prolonged development of a huge new global counterterrorism strategy made it impossible for the Bush administration to focus on destroying al-Qaeda -- it's that it seems to have made it impossible for the Bush administration to identify and arrest one or two guys, which could have ended 9/11 before it began.

Well, now we know where Robert Novak gets his ideas:

...chair-warmer Clarke claims that on the basis of Rice's "facial expression" he could tell she was not familiar with the term "al-Qaida."

Isn't that just like a liberal? The chair-warmer describes Bush as a cowboy and Rumsfeld as his gunslinger – but the black chick is a dummy. Maybe even as dumb as Clarence Thomas! Perhaps someday liberals could map out the relative intelligence of various black government officials for us.

--Ann Coulter column posted Wednesday, March 24

Robert Novak: Congressman, do you believe, you're a sophisticated guy, do you believe, watching these hearings, do you believe that Dick Clarke has a problem with this African-American woman, Condoleezza Rice?

Rahm Emmanuel: Say that again?

Robert Novak: Do you believe that Dick Clarke has a problem with this African-American woman, Condoleezza Rice?

Rahm Emmanuel: No. No. Bob, Bob, give me a break. No. No....

--Robert Novak on CNN, Thursday, March 25

(Thanks to Cursor for the Novak link.)

Via World O'Crap, I see that Bill O'Reilly is shocked, shocked, that some liberal pundits met with John Kerry a couple of months ago. O'Reilly writes:

According to an article in The New York Times Magazine, a non-publicized meeting was held in New York City early last December, attended by Senator John Kerry and a number of liberal leaning journalists including CNN's Jeff Greenfield, Newsweek's Jonathan Alter, Richard Cohen of the Washington Post and Frank Rich of the aforementioned New York Times....

Can you image if executives from The Fox News Channel, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Times had gathered at Camp David for a little slap and tickle with W? ...and nobody was told about it? And The New York Times found out about it? Can you say PAGE ONE BOLD FACE HEADLINE?

Yeah, can you imagine?

 Talk radio sets up shop on White House lawn

Originally published Thursday, October 31, 2002

Six days before Election Day, the White House opened its gates Wednesday to talk radio hosts, staging an invitation-only North Lawn gabfest that gave the select few direct access to Bush administration officials.

...About 50 radio talk shows and news programs participated in "Radio Day," held under a vast, heated tent just outside the White House's front door from 6 a.m. to 7:30 p.m. EST on a cold, rainy day. Most of the shows broadcast live from the North Lawn, with the rest using material from stringers or correspondents.

Made available to them for brief interviews: Cabinet secretaries, senior Bush administration officials and White House staff....

Now, of course, these broadcasters weren't "executives" -- O'Reilly complained about "executives" meeting with Kerry. But Greenfield, Cohen, Alter, and Rich aren't "executives" -- they're pundits. They're opinion-mongers. And they work for news organizations that also employ opinion-mongers on the GOP side -- who undoubtedly will be courted by GOP presidential candidates in 2008. And there won't be any PAGE ONE BOLD FACE HEADLINES when that happens.

By the way, here's the article O'Reilly's so worked up about. It's the New York Times Magazine cover story on Al Franken. O'Reilly avoids mentioning his arch-nemesis, but he mischaracterizes the gathering, which Franken organized. O'Reilly:

Now this pow-wow might have been just an innocent 'get to know you' soiree, but there are hints it might have been quite something else. One of the attendees, Jim Kelly, the managing editor of Time Magazine, was quoted as saying that Kerry was asked a number of times about his vote on Iraq and, according to Kelly, "by the third go-round the answer was getting shorter and more relevant." ...

There is nothing wrong with news organizations endorsing a candidate or a columnist writing about his or her political preferences. But actively participating in political campaigns by coaching candidates and strategizing with them is absolutely against every journalistic standard, and it is happening, usually under the radar.

But they weren't coaching him -- they were grilling him:

Last fall, when Dean seemed the inevitable nominee before a single primary vote had been cast, Franken was troubled that John Kerry was being written off. ''I liked Dean, but I also think Kerry is just a really smart, capable man,'' he told me. ''I'd noticed that he was very good in a small gathering, so I thought, What if I invite some opinion makers over to hear him?' On Dec. 4, an impressive collection of the media elite and assorted other notables -- Hendrik Hertzberg of The New Yorker, Frank Rich of The New York Times, Howard Fineman and Jonathan Alter of Newsweek, Jim Kelly of Time, Jeff Greenfield of CNN, Eric Alterman of The Nation, Richard Cohen of The Washington Post, Jacob Weisberg of Slate and others, including, as eminence grise, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. -- responded to his call and had a little powwow with Kerry at the Upper West Side apartment of Franken and his wife, Franni.

''The whole thing was odd, I would say, because people didn't know why they were there,'' Kelly said. ''But I think the idea was to put John Kerry into the belly of the beast. It may have been the actual beginning of the new approach he took -- 'I'm going to stay in this room and take every question you throw at me.''' Alterman grilled Kerry on his vote on Iraq, and he gave a long, tortured answer. Then he was asked about it a second time. ''By the third go-round, the answer was getting shorter and more relevant,'' Kelly said.

''It was a really interesting event,'' Alter said. ''A lot of these people hadn't actually met Kerry before. Al wanted them to get to know him. It was an example of him playing a sort of intermediary role in the nexus of politics, media and entertainment.''

Where does it say that the reporters were coaching Kerry to shorten his answer? The way I read it is that he was doing a better job of getting to the point as the evening wore on. This wasn't a coaching session -- it was an oral exam, and apparently he passed.

From Romesh Ratnesar's hatchet job on Richard Clarke in Time:

As for the President, Clarke doesn't even try to read Bush's body language; he just makes the encounters up. "I have a disturbing image of him sitting by a warm White House fireplace drawing a dozen red Xs on the faces of the former al-Qaeda corporate board.....while the new clones of al-Qaeda....are recruiting thousands whose names we will never know, whose faces will never be on President Bush's little charts, not until it is again too late."

If you haven't read the book, and you didn't see the 60 Minutes appearance, that image of Bush drawing X's on terrorists' faces sounds like wild, nasty, mean-spirited speculation -- no wonder Ratnesar's pissed!

Except that it's based on something Clarke says he actually experienced. From the book:

President Bush asked us soon after September 11 for cards or charts of the "senior AQ managers," as though dealing with them would be like a Harvard Business School exercise in a hostile takeover. He announced his intentions to measure progress in the war on terrorism by crossing through the pictures of those caught or killed. I have a disturbing image of [Bush] sitting by a warm White House fireplace drawing a dozen red Xs on the faces of the former AQ corporate board....

From 60 Minutes:

He asked us after 9/11 to give him cards with pictures of the major al Qaeda leaders and tell us when they were arrested or killed so he could draw X's through their pictures, and you know, I write in the book, I have this image of George Bush sitting by a warm fireplace in the White House drawing X's through al Qaeda leaders and thinking that he's got most of them...

Nice sleazy edit, Romesh.

More sandal-wearing peaceniks oppose Bush:

A group of 49 retired U.S. generals and admirals is urging President Bush to postpone the scheduled deployment this year of a multibillion dollar missile shield and spend the money instead on securing potential terror targets.

In a letter to be released at a news conference Friday, the officers, including retired Admiral William Crowe, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 1985 to 1989, described the complex technology as untested and a poor use of scarce defense dollars....

As the "militarily responsible course of action," the signers urged funds earmarked for missile defense go instead to bolster nuclear weapons depots and protect U.S. ports and borders against terrorists....

A spokeswoman for Bush, Claire Buchan, had no immediate comment on the letter, which included among its signers Gen. Joseph Hoar of the Marines, a former commander of the U.S. Central Command, and Gen. Alfred Hansen, who headed the Air Force's logistics command....

--Reuters

Fat lot of good it's going to do, of course, and no doubt they'll be subject to character assassination if they do anything beyond the letter (I hear General Hansen once said he didn't think Bill Clinton regularly ate babies for breakfast...).

Earlier today I criticized ABC's one-hour prime-time Rumsfeld profile. The online story made it look like an in-kind campaign contribution.

Well, I caught a bit of the show. Part of it was pure hagiography, but there was also a reasonably good airing of the case against Rumsfeld. It didn't fit together -- it was like a Morning Edition piece gene-spliced with a film Karl Rove would do for the convention. Odd, but not as bad as I expected.

And it didn't really matter, because everyone in America was watching Friends or the NCAA.

"Our war on terrorism is not a war against Islam." --Condoleezza Rice, 10/15/01

"This is not a fight against Islam." --Tony Blair, 9/28/01

"I also want to speak tonight directly to Muslims throughout the world.  We respect your faith." --George W. Bush, 9/20/01

Apparently, political affiliates of one of our fine coalition partners still haven't received the memo:

Allies of Premier Silvio Berlusconi are pushing for a law that would require referendums on requests to build mosques in Italy, contending that Islamic culture is "historically antithetical" to Italian culture.

The Northern League, one of the parties in Berlusconi's conservative government coalition, unveiled the legislation being proposed in the Chamber of Deputies at a news conference in Rome Wednesday.

..The presence of "foreign workers on our territory has opened a debate on how to update, or, better, to regulate the presence of communities with cultures historically antithetical to ours," the text of the proposed law says. "The mosque is a political place and is symbolic of a civilization that has run a 1,400-year-long path in antithesis of Western culture." ...

--Dow Jones

"Cultures historically antithetical to ours" -- gee, wasn't some other group of people described that way in various European countries, oh, about 60 or 70 years ago?

The Bushies have a gazillion dollars in the campaign war chest, yet ABC is making free long-form TV ads for them:

Watch ABCNEWS' John McWethy's hourlong special on Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on Primetime tonight at 10 p.m.

...He wears a pedometer on his belt — to count every step he takes. He tries to walk 10,000 paces a day, about five miles.

The pedometer is part of Rumsfeld's extreme attention to detail: counting, obsessing, analyzing. It's how he solves problems. That devotion also frames how he lives his life....

At his Senate confirmation hearing on Jan. 11, 2001, he talked about the lessons of Pearl Harbor.

"There were plenty of signals, plenty of warnings, plenty of cautions, but they weren't taken on board. They didn't register," Rumsfeld said. "We've got to be wiser than that."

Then, eight months to the day after his warning of a surprise attack, Rumsfeld's fears became reality with the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

The months that followed sent his popularity and influence soaring. He was videotaped helping move the injured from the stricken Pentagon. The war in Afghanistan was widely supported. Bush called Rumsfeld "my administration's matinee idol for seniors."

His profile was raised so high that intelligence sources say he and his family were stalked by terrorists who at least once tried to kill him.

So it was hard to argue with the defense secretary when he began to make the case for war against Iraq....

Feh -- this is disgusting. This is your "liberal media."

Do you remember anything like this in, say, the spring of 1996?

Rape isn't legal yet in Colorado for athletes. Apparently that's an intolerable situation for a lot of people:

The parents of the alleged rape victim whose lawsuit sparked the University of Colorado's football-sex scandal broke two years of silence Wednesday to blame CU for leaking excerpts from their daughter's diary.

Lisa Simpson wrote that she wanted to "ruin the lives" of several CU football players she says were present when she was allegedly gang-raped, according to diary excerpts mentioned in an unredacted copy of Simpson's deposition that was obtained by the Rocky Mountain News and Longmont Daily Times-Call.

It's unclear who gave the documents to the newspapers, but Simpson's parents, Rick and Karen Burd, said the leak of diary excerpts sealed under court order "is another in a series of unconscionable acts" by CU....

Seven women say they were raped by football players or recruits since 1997, and three have sued the university, claiming that it fostered an environment of sexual harassment....

--Boulder Daily Camera

A ruling supported by the Colorado Supreme Court that allows Kobe Bryant's defense lawyers to question the woman accusing him of rape about her sexual history prompts questions about the future of the state's Rape Shield Law....

...the troubling element in the judge's decision is that it did not limit questioning by defense lawyers to concerns related to Bryant's defense. Instead, the alleged victim could have been required Wednesday to answer questions about her sexual history years prior to meeting Bryant. Bryant's lawyers can use the opportunity not only to address whether there were other partners close to the time of the incident, but also to create the impression that the woman was sexually promiscuous and could not have been forced into sex....

An estimated 16 percent of sexual assault victims report their cases to law enforcement, according to the Colorado Coalition Against Sexual Assault. The low rate is attributed to women who fear their privacy would be invaded or that the public would "blame" them for the assaults....

--Fort Collins Coloradoan

Look -- I don't know the truth in these cases. What I do know is that it's perfectly logical that someone who's actually been raped wants the rapist, and other rapists, to suffer. And I know that the interests of a pro-sports god have been weighed against those of all rape victims in Colorado, and the sports god's interests have won.

Back in the days of Bush the Elder, reporters used to like to talk about how absurdly competitive Poppy was -- how seriously, for instance, he would take a game of horseshoes. This was seen as comical, but also useful -- the guy who treated a simple backyard recreation like the seventh game of the World Series was the same guy who overcame a 17-point opinion-poll deficit against Michael Dukakis in a matter of months, in a presidential campaign that's still regarded, three full election cycles later, as the most vicious in modern history.

We tend to forget this whenever somebody decides to get in a Bush's face. We expect a big triumph. We overlook the fact that part of the horseshoe story is that the deep need to crush an opponent is a Bush family trait.

It's hard to beat one of the Bushes with a frontal assault. When directly confronted, Bushes turn vicious, like cornered rats. Richard Clarke tried, and they beat him until he was unrecognizable.

In big contests, two people managed to beat Poppy Bush -- Reagan in the '80 GOP primaries and Clinton in '92. Each of them did it with a smile. Neither one got really down and dirty with George.

There may be a lesson here for Kerry.

It's bizarre, but economists think we've been having a rip-snorting recovery for a while now. Ordinary citizens don't get it. Apparently we may be right:

U.S. Economy Recovering at Only Half Official Rate, Research Shows

America's buoyant economic recovery could largely be a statistical illusion, according to research released this weekend....

The latest analysis from Goldman Sachs suggests that the US economy may have grown by only about 2.2 percent in the year to the fourth quarter of 2003, considerably less than the official 4.3 percent....

Big flaws in the manufacturing data are responsible, according to the Goldman research. Real GDP for goods, which accounts for 33 percent of total GDP, has surged by 8 percent over the past year, the official figures say, more than double its 3.6 percent long-term trend. But these figures are in complete contradiction with the standard data for industrial production, a closely-related and far more reliable measure calculated using separate data.

Industrial production increased by only 1.4 percent in the fourth quarter of 2003, compared with the same quarter of 2002. In February, production was up a mere 2.7 percent year on year, revealing a huge flaw in the US GDP figures....

Another reason why the US official growth rate may have over-stated growth is because of its use of "hedonic pricing", a method which adjusts inflation for quality, other economists say....

Because computers purchased today are more powerful that computers bought a year ago, a similar level of cash spending on IT would automatically be translated into strong growth in the GDP numbers, even if there has been no increase at all in the number of dollars spent by US companies or consumers from one year to the next....

Kurt Richbacher, editor of an eponymous investment letter, said: "These particular dollars are fictitious dollars that nobody has paid and nobody received. Obviously, such dollars inherently add nothing to profits...."

--Kinight Ridder's Sunday Business, London, via Miami Herald

Yesterday we had this:

The White House, seeking to cool criticism from a former top anti-terror adviser, said Tuesday that Richard Clarke's resignation letter praised President Bush's "courage, determination, calm and leadership" on Sept. 11, 2001.

"It has been an enormous privilege to serve you these last 24 months," said the Jan. 20, 2003, letter from Clarke to Bush. "I will always remember the courage, determination, calm, and leadership you demonstrated on September 11th." ...

White House spokesman Scott McClellan suggested Clarke's praise belies his later criticism of Bush's handling of the crisis....

This was absurd. If you want to know how seriously to take the praise in letters like these, aske Paul O'Neill and Ron Suskind:

O'Neill gave [his press secretary, Michelle] Davis [a former aide to Dick Armey] his resignation letter. "I hereby resign the office of the Secretary of the Treasury." One sentence.

"You can't do this," she said, getting over her tears from a moment before. "It's an affront. There is a way this is done. There are certain things you have to say, or their absence will create news."

"I refuse to say I'm leaving to spend more time with my family," O'Neill said, "or any of that bullshit."

She drafted a resignation letter. It was filled with standard resignation prose -- about what an honor it has been to serve this President, and how hopeful he was about the country's future, what a great team he'd been a part of -- four paragraphs of the stuff. "I'm not doing that," O'Neill said. "Makes me gag."

They compromised.

Dear Mr. President,

I hereby resign my position as Secretary of the Treasury.

It has been a privilege to serve the nation during these challenging times. I thank you for that opportunity.

I wish you every success as you provide leadership and inspiration for America and for the world.

Respectfully,

Paul O'Neill

--Ron Suskind, The Price of Loyalty, p. 315

O'Neill refused to participate in the ritual. Obviously Clarke just went along with it.

Kim McFerrin was in seventh grade when she had her first asthma attack on the soccer field at her school in Northeast Salem, Ore.

"I kept sneezing and the more I kept sneezing, the harder it was getting for me to breathe and it got to the point where I couldn't breathe at all and I knew my inhaler was across the street and on the other side of the school," Kim recalled.

Kim's inhaler was locked in the principal's office, because even though the school knew about her illness, it was against school policy for her to carry an inhaler with her.

"I was actually afraid for my life. I didn't know if I would get back in time to be able to use my inhaler, or to be able to do anything to help me breathe," Kim said. "When you can't breathe you never know what can happen."

Eventually, Kim's mother encouraged her daughter to sneak her medicine into class with her, which she did until she graduated from high school in the spring of 2003.

...Across the United States, many schools have a strict "zero tolerance" policy toward all drugs, even prescription medication....

--ABC

Are we living in the stupidest country in the developed world?

Richard Clarke and others say that the Bushies, entering office amid warnings about al-Qaeda, were fixated on Iraq. Clarke says that the fixation remained even after 9/11. Why would that have been the case? Tony Karon of Time magazine may have answered this question last summer:

One reason so many hawks seemed ready to make the case for retaliating against Saddam as well as bin Laden may have been the influence of Laurie Mylroie, a conservative scholar who had convinced herself and a number of influential conservatives, although not the U.S. intelligence community, that Iraq had been behind the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, and was very likely behind 9/11, too. But as eccentric as her argument was to the U.S. intelligence community, it was hailed by Wolfowitz, who wrote in a blurb to her book that it "argues powerfully that the mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing was actually an agent of Iraqi intelligence." And invade-Iraq cheerleader Richard Perle, formerly head of Rumsfeld's Defense Policy Board, wrote in his own blurb: "Laurie Myroie has amassed convincing evidence of Saddam Hussein's involvement in the first attempt to blow up the World Trade Center. If she is right, and there are simple ways to test her hypothesis, we would be justified in concluding that Saddam was probably involved in the September 11, 2001, attacks as well."

Digby at Hullaballoo quotes that here, and has a lot more to say about Mylroie, as does Matthew Yglesias at The American Prospect. Oh, and while you're at it, you might want to read Peter Bergen's Washington Monthly profile of Mylroie.

I invoke Ms. M. on a regular basis, but the influence of her ideas still isn't widely recognized. It might be an oversimplification to say that Mylroism made 9/11 possible. Then again, it might be pretty close to the truth.

Newsweek reports that in a new poll of young voters,

12 percent of young voters said they favored Nader over the Republican and Democratic Party candidates.

Yikes.

The poll is conducted by Ipsos-Public Affairs; an early-March Ipsos poll of voters of all ages found that Nader got 6% of the vote -- and Bush was beating Kerry by 1%. Results of a newer Ipsos poll has Bush 46%, Kerry 43%, Nader 5%.

OK -- how do I put this without putting twists in Naderite knickers? I mustn't talk about Nader "taking votes away from" Kerry, because I don't need a lecture about daring to presume that anyone owes Kerry a vote. Fair enough. So let me try this: Naderites, do you really think it's such a brilliant frigging idea to have two nationally prominent candidates splitting the anti-Bush vote? There aren't two nationally prominent candidates splitting the pro-Bush vote. Until Bush clones himself and declares that his clone is a candidate to defeat himself, don't you think it just might be a good idea to rally around one electoral Bush slayer?

Oh well -- the news isn't all bad. Young people don't like Bush: Even with Nader in the race, Bush loses to Kerry, 47% - 38%. And

Just 44 percent of young voters approve of the president’s performance in office while 54 percent disapprove.

(Gosh, that's odd -- it wasn't long ago that Newsweek favored us with an article titled "Bush's Secret Weapon: Young Voters," which told us that, according to the same poll in January, 54% of youths approved Bush's job performance.)

The new poll also notes that young people don't get the vapors from on-screen raciness and don't think "politically-active religious groups have too little influence over public policy in the United States."

Also in that New York Observer article, Gail Sheehy reports that the "Four Moms from New Jersey" -- all 9/11 widows -- want this question pondered: Where was Rummy?

It is still incredible to the moms that their Secretary of Defense continued to sit in his private dining room at the Pentagon while their husbands were being incinerated in the towers of the World Trade Center. They know this from an account posted on Sept. 11 on the Web site of Christopher Cox, a Republican Congressman from Orange County who is chairman of the House Policy Committee.

"Ironically," Mr. Cox wrote, "just moments before the Department of Defense was hit by a suicide hijacker, Secretary Rumsfeld was describing to me why … Congress has got to give the President the tools he needs to move forward with a defense of America against ballistic missiles."

At that point, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, the Secret Service, the F.A.A., NORAD (our North American air-defense system), American Airlines and United Airlines, among others, knew that at least three planes had been violently hijacked, their transponders turned off, and that thousands of American citizens had been annihilated in the World Trade Center by Middle Eastern terrorists, some of whom had been under surveillance by the F.B.I. Yet the nation’s defense chief didn’t think it significant enough to interrupt his political pitch to a key Republican in Congress to reactivate the Star Wars initiative of the Bush I years....

"Why did it take Condi Rice nine months to develop a counterterrorism policy for Al Qaeda, while it took only two weeks to develop a policy for regime change in Iraq?"

--Mindy Kleinberg, 9/11 widow, quoted by Gail Sheehy in this week's New York Observer

Did Bush actually capture or kill bin Laden when I wasn't looking?

Obviously he didn't -- I ask, though, because all the stories and opinion pieces about yesterday's hearings seem to contain the message that Bill Clinton is largely responsible for 9/11 (entirely responsible, in conservatives' eyes) because he never killed Osama or brought him into custody. The suggestion is that Clinton would have caught or killed Osama if he'd been competent and if he'd had the manliness and will; yes, the same thing is said about pre-9/11 Bush, but Clinton, of course, had eight years to do it, while Bush had eight months.

Except that Bush didn't have eight months. Bush has had three years and two months. And for more than two years of that time, Bush has had the unqualified support of most of the world in his pursuit of Osama. Yet he's failed. And he continues to fail.

By the way, I turned on the Atom feed of this blog a couple of days ago -- the link is

http://nomoremister.blogspot.com/atom.xml

(There's also a link at right.) I'm still not doing the RSS/Atom/newsreader thing myself, but I've been told the feed is working.

(Oh, and I've also moved the e-mail link to the top of the link pile. Now if I could only get around to answer some of your e-mails....)

Well, forget it. It's over. I say this even though I didn't watch the hearings, I haven't read the transcripts, and I haven't even read a real news story on the hearings. Does that matter? I've watched a national news story and a local news story on the hearings today, which means that I'm now about as well informed on this subject as most Americans will ever be, and I know what the short version is: Clinton screwed up, Bush screwed up, everybody who testified today passed the buck, they're all bums. That's such a nice, easy-to-swallow conclusion that I'll be really surprised if it's ever supplanted as conventional wisdom.

Clinton didn't kill him, so Bush couldn't have prevented 9/11. And Rumsfeld, using that weird pronunciation of "bin Laden" with the long a, says that even if Clinton had killed him, or Bush had, it might not have prevented 9/11. Well, bin Laden was alive on 1/1/00 and Clinton's people prevented millennium terrorism -- what did the Clintonites do right that the Bushies did wrong? But I'm beating my head against a wall. Show's over, folks. Nothing to see here. Move along.

Apparently I was wrong last night when I said Bob Woodward regularly plugs his books on Dateline NBC even though his publisher, Simon & Schuster, is owned by CBS's parent company, Viacom. Woodward did appear on CBS's 60 Minutes to promote his last book, Bush at War. But he went to Dateline NBC on June 23, 1996, for The Choice and on June 16, 1999, for Shadow; also, here's an ABC News online chat he did in 2000 for Maestro. And, of course, he's a semi-regular on Larry King Live on CNN (owned by Time Warner, parent company to Warner Books and Little, Brown).

Drudge won't let this go (see links below left), but it's absurd: If it's all about synergy, why was Al Gore on 60 Minutes when he was promoting a non-S&S; book, or Michael Moore as he was just releasing his Bowling for Columbine DVD (MGM) and a new book (Warner Books)? Why does Andy Rooney write books for the non-Viacom PublicAffairs?

I'm not saying synergy didn't cross anyone's mind -- but if CBS hadn't done a story on Clarke, another network would have.

Jerry Falwell is welcome to believe all the fairy tales he wants -- that non-churchgoer Ronald Reagan made incidental allusions to God out of a deep spirituality rather than a desire to please his base, that "the majority of [Reagan's] supporters voted for him because of his confident foundation of personal faith," even that "it's not accepted these days to live out one's faith in the public spotlight" (gee, Jerry, you've been in our faces for a couple of decades now and I don't even think we've so much as hit you in the puss with a pie). But check out the title of Falwell's WorldNetDaily article on the Gipper:

The Passion of Ronald Reagan

Er, isn't that a bit close to idolatry? Isn't he implying that Reagan is both man and God?

I don't know what's with Republicans these days. It's not just this article -- remember when Bush's people were organizing photo ops so that photographers would get pictures like this? Is there a new translation of the Bible I don't know about, one that says, "I am the Lord thy God; thou shalt have no other gods before Me -- unless it's a Republican who really loves missile defense and tax cuts"?

Asia Times reporter Pepe Escobar is a tad cynical about the big campaign-event-with-real-bullets on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border:

Any remaining "high value target" in Wana may have escaped by now - in a scheme not totally dissimilar to bin Laden's spectacular escape from Tora Bora in December 2001. At that time, hundreds of Arab and Chechen mujahideen put up very strong resistance in the frontline, while the "Sheikh" escaped to the Pakistani tribal areas using, among other means, a few tunnels. So it's no surprise that the Pakistanis have now also "discovered" a two kilometer long tunnel under the houses of the most-wanted tribal, Nek Muhammad. The tunnel may be instrumental in covering the Pakistani army's backs.

Apparently, this wasn't much of a "siege" -- anyone we would consider a "high-value target" knew it was coming and hightailed it out of the area a while ago:

It now appears that world public opinion fell victim to a Musharraf-inspired web of disinformation. In the early stages of the battle west of Wana in South Waziristan, Taliban spokesman Abdul Samad, speaking by satellite telephone from Kandahar province in Afghanistan, was quick to say that talk of al-Zawahiri being cornered was "just propaganda by the US coalition and by the Pakistani army to weaken Taliban morale"....

Sources in Peshawar ... confirm the Taliban claim that al-Zawahiri may have left South Waziristan as early as January and no later than early February, when word was rife all over the tribal areas about the upcoming spring offensive....

Former prime minister Benazir Bhutto, chairperson of the Pakistan People's Party, grumbled that elected tribal leaders were not consulted about an operation which had been planned for three months: "Every high value target was allowed to escape months in advance while the tribal population was used as a sacrificial lamb to satisfy the power lust of the regime."

Escobar notes that

al-Qaeda jihadis who settled in Waziristan have managed to seduce tribals young and old alike with an irresistible deluge of Pakistani rupees, weapons and Toyota Land Cruisers.

From the Pakistani troops, by contrast, they get this:

Local trucks and minibuses have been nowhere to be seen for days. The roads are sealed. Electricity has been cut off. Families fled heavy bombing of "strategic targets" - on foot for dozens of kilometers. Villagers were hit by mortar fire. The Pakistani army used 15 Cobra helicopters, two F-17 fighters and dozens of artillery batteries.

All so Musharraf could pretend to be on our side in the terror war.

A big reason that it's harder to run against Bush '04 than against Bush '92 is, paradoxically, the fact that what we're charging Bush '04 with is so appalling: We're saying that he shed U.S. soldiers' blood in an utterly unnecessary war while pulling resources from the fight he should have been fighting -- that he took his eye off the ball and effectively suspended the fight against the mass murderers who should have been our prime target.

People can accept that their president, their commander in chief, their daddy, might be, you know, a bit of a screw-up -- that he might be tooling around cluelessly in a cigarette boat while the economy tanks. It's harder for most people to accept that he might duck into the Situation Room and send soldiers to die in the wrong country.

A crummy economy is frustrating and infuriating but not deeply frightening; in truly frightening times, an awful lot of us just want to believe that the guy in the Oval Office must know what he's doing and must be giving it his best shot.

Bush stumbled through September 11, 12, and 13, 2001, and we all noticed it -- but when he successfully delivered one effective sound bite through a bullhorn at Ground Zero on the Friday after the attacks, he was hailed as the second coming of Churchill; a merely competent speech a week later was praised as soaring and inspirational. Those three days when Rudolph Giuliani seemed like the leader our president should have been are now all but banished from the official narrative of what Bush did after 9/11 -- the official line is that we are grateful for Bush's steady leadership after 9/11. ("Don't you think he handled himself and hit all the right notes after 9/11, showed strength, got us through it, you don't give him credit for that?" --Lesley Stahl to Richard Clarke on 60 Minutes.)

Remember the situation when Kerry was starting to top Bush in the polls: The Madrid bombings hadn't happened yet; Iraq was clearly a quagmire that was continuing to cost lives of Americans and others -- but none of this was truly frightening to stateside Americans. It seemed to Americans that the violence was "over there." Now we have al-Qaeda back in business and scare headlines about possible Hamas attacks on the U.S.

Even if we weren't starting to get scared again, Richard Clarke's charges would remind us of the days when we were deeply scared. That's why I don't think Clarke's book and the 60 Minutes interview will lead to much voter disillusionment: Fence-sitting voters just don't want to go there. They don't want to remember their fear and think that the guy with his hand on the tiller didn't know which way to steer the boat. They certainly don't want to think that now, when they're getting scared again. They'd prefer any other version of the story.

If America is actively frightened on election day 2004, I think Bush wins. The more frightened Amertica is, the bigger his margin of victory. Unless there's an unambiguous smoking gun tying the administration directly to whatever is making America afraid, I don't think Bush's failings and shortcomings will matter -- most Americans will cleave to him if they're afraid. We aren't the Spanish.

I hope the Kerry campaign proves me wrong. I'm afraid it will need to -- I expect at least an orange alert, if not war drums (Syria! Iran!), come October and November. And if terrorists do strike, bizarre as it may seem, I think Bush wins in a landslide.

Anyone tempted to fall for the Matt Drudge line on Richard Clarke and his 60 Minutes interview -- namely that Viacom-owned CBS was shilling for a Viacom (Simon & Schuster/Free Press) book -- ought to know that Bob Woodward, who's also published by Simon & Schuster, has consistently shunned 60 Minutes over the last few years. Dateline NBC has done the first feature story about each of Woodward's most recent books.

Lovely:

The United States is secretly training several senior former Iraqi army officers to advise Iraq's nascent postwar military establishment, former Iraqi officers and a politician said on Sunday.

U.S. army spokesman Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt said he had "no information" about such a training program.

The politician, who refused to be named, said six major-generals and 11 other senior officers active in the Iraqi army until last year's U.S.-led invasion to topple Saddam Hussein were being trained, mostly in the United States....

--Reuters

We're assured, however, that these are nice, apolitical Saddam-era officers, not nasty ones.

(Link via INTL-News.)

Three British citizens just released from Guantanamo have said they almost died in November 2001 in a mass slaughter of prisoners by the Northern Alliance. Their story jibes with the findings of a forensic anthropologist who's investigated the deaths. The Observer reports:

...Asif Iqbal, Shafiq Rasul and Ruhal Ahmed, from Tipton in the West Midlands, told in their interviews how weeks before they were handed over to the Americans, they were captured by Northern Alliance forces led by General Abdurrashid Dostum in November 2001, as they tried to flee war-torn Afghanistan.

At Shebargan, they were herded into two of several truck containers. Then, Iqbal said, the doors were sealed. He and the others lost consciousness, and when he came to he was 'lying on top of dead bodies, breathing the stench of their blood and urine'.

'We lived because someone made holes with a machine gun, though they were shooting low, and still more died from the bullets. When we got out, about 20 in each container were still alive.' ...

The article quotes forensic anthropologist William Haglund and a colleague from a Physicians for Human Rights investigative team, John Heffernan.

...Heffernan said: 'After taking into account the thousands crowded into the dilapidated prison, the whereabouts of many taken captive remained unknown. We began to suspect some might have met their fate on the way there. After we left the prison and travelled down the road a few miles into the desert, we smelled the unmistakable odour of decaying flesh and soon found bulldozer tracks and skeletal remains.' Haglund came back under United Nations auspices a few months later.

By chance, on the day he arrived at Shebargan, Dostum had gone into the mountains, he said, leaving behind a military escort which allowed him to open the grave. 'I uncovered one small corner, exposing 15 remains which were quite complete, and did autopsies on three. There were no signs of trauma and these were all young men. This is consistent with death by asphyxiation.

'I told Dostum's security chief that they had died from suffocation, and there was this big silence hanging over the desert.' ...

The atrocities were reported at the time, you may recall. They didn't get much attention then and they're not getting much now.

(Observer link via INTL-News.)

Condoleezza Rice has responed to Richard Clarke's 60 Minutes interview and book, and here's the ABC News headline:

He Said, She Said

There it is -- the last word on the subject. Obviously I don't mean the last word chronologically, but trust me, this is going to be the consensus version of the Clarke story once it's all been hashed out: He says this, she says that, who the hell knows? The American people (including even some who plan to vote for Kerry) think Bush is doing a good job in the war on terror (whatever that may or may not encompass), and there isn't a smoking-gun memo, so it's just going to be seen as a politicized Beltway dust-up, something we can't possibly get to the bottom of.

A full transcript of Richard Clarke's 60 Minutes appearance is here (plain text file here).

Even though I'm pleased to see Clarke blowing the whistle on the Mayberry Machiavellis, I think what he's doing would have a lot more impact if a majority of Americans realized that Iraq and Afghanistan are separate countries. This is fun for now, but let's not get our hopes up -- it's not going to turn the tide.

Incidentally, in the post below I linked the printer-friendly version of Elisabeth Bumiller's New York Times article. Here's the version with full graphics.

Now remember, the story in question is about Bush liking his own comfy bed and a nice ballgame from ESPN on Air Force One -- so why is it illustrated with a flag-drenched Leni Riefenstahl photo of Bush?

The same photo tops today's "Campaign 2004" page at the Times site, and it accompanies the Bumiller story in the print Times.

I think Kerry needs to increase the number and size of flags at his rallies, so photographers have ample opportunity to get shots like this. But will newspapers run them? Or is visually equating politicians with America just reserved for Republicans?

The obvious conclusion to be drawn from Elisabeth Bumiller's "White House Letter" in today's New York Times is that Bush is an overgrown brat -- here's Bush, attempting to tune in a basketball game on Air Force One's newly installed big-screen TV and just plain whining:

Once on board, though, Mr. Bush had a little trouble with the controls. "He gets the remote and nothing's happening," [Representative Peter] King recounted. "He calls the steward and says, 'What's wrong with my television?' The look on his face was, 'I'm the most powerful guy in the world and I can't get my television to work.' And the guy comes back and says, 'It takes seven minutes to warm up.' "

Mr. Bush, Mr. King said, seemed amused, but threw a mock tantrum. "He said, 'Seven minutes!' " Mr. King recalled. " 'The game could be going into overtime! Anything could happen in seven minutes!' "

But what strikes me is the control-freak aspect of the TV incident:

Representative Peter T. King, a New York Republican who spent eight hours with Mr. Bush on a trip to Long Island this month, said the president insisted that he and Representative Vito J. Fossella, another New York Republican, watch sports on the trip back to Washington.

"Coming back in the car," Mr. King said, "he's telling us: 'We're going to relax on the way back. You guys are going to watch the basketball game.' He was telling us about this new screen he has, how you can get ESPN."

"You guys are going to watch the basketball game." Not "You guys can watch the basketball game." It's an order.

It reminds me a little of the bullying Bush revealed in the bizarre New Mexico diner appearance back in January:

...Q Sir, on homeland security, critics would say you simply haven't spent enough to keep the country secure.

THE PRESIDENT: My job is to secure the homeland and that's exactly what we're going to do. But I'm here to take somebody's order. That would be you, Stretch -- what would you like? Put some of your high-priced money right here to try to help the local economy. You get paid a lot of money, you ought to be buying some food here. It's part of how the economy grows. You've got plenty of money in your pocket, and when you spend it, it drives the economy forward. So what would you like to eat?

Q Right behind you, whatever you order.

THE PRESIDENT: I'm ordering ribs. David, do you need a rib?

Q But Mr. President --

THE PRESIDENT: Stretch, thank you, this is not a press conference. This is my chance to help this lady put some money in her pocket. Let me explain how the economy works. When you spend money to buy food it helps this lady's business. It makes it more likely somebody is going to find work. So instead of asking questions, answer mine: are you going to buy some food? ...

I see a little of this desire to bully and control in Bush's speech last Friday:

Today, as Iraqis join the free peoples of the world, we mark a turning point for the Middle East, and a crucial advance for human liberty.

There have been disagreements in this matter, among old and valued friends. Those differences belong to the past.

Obviously those differences don't just belong to the past, but it's as if Bush is trying to will the statement to be true -- and is daring anyone to disagree.

Does anybody really want to catch bin Laden and Zawahiri? Noor Khan reports for AP from Shkin, an Afghan village on the border with Pakistan:

...The elders repeat a common complaint of Afghans here in Paktika province — that neither side, Pakistani or Afghan, does anything to close the frontier.

In two days in the border mountains of Paktika, an Associated Press reporter saw no Afghan troops in the countryside, and only a few American soldiers.

Afghans here insist they welcome the U.S. forces, seeing them as the promise of reconstruction, aid and security. But they said the Americans have not sought help from locals who know the hundreds of cross-border trails.

"If they want to stop al-Qaida, they have to get support of the local people living and belonging to this area. They know all the ways," [tribal elder Mohammad] Safai said.

Pakistan, meanwhile, says it is confident that its paramilitary and soldiers can track down militants.

"Our people who are guarding the border know these tribesmen very well," Abdul Rauf Chaudhry, spokesman for Pakistan's Interior Ministry, said in Islamabad, the Pakistani capital.

Looking at Salor Gai mountain, Safai scoffed.

"If you wanted to, you could walk from there to Kabul, and not hit a single checkpoint," he said.

'Dawn of the Dead' Debut Tops 'Passion'

Audiences feasted on zombies as the fright flick "Dawn of the Dead" ruled the box office, debuting with $27.3 million and bumping "The Passion of the Christ" from the top spot.

Mel Gibson's "The Passion" took in $19.2 million, slipping to second place after three straight weekends on top, according to studio estimates Sunday....

--AP

Hmmm ... The Passion ... Dawn of the Dead ... in some ways they're the kind of the same movie, aren't they?

INVERTED PYRAMID

You have to read to the 25th paragraph of this New York Times story to get the point. Here are paragraphs 1 and 2:

Senior American commanders in Iraq are publicly complaining that delays in delivering radios, body armor and other equipment have hobbled their ability to build an effective Iraqi security force that can ultimately replace United States troops here.

The lag in supplying the equipment, because of a contract dispute, may even have contributed to a loss of lives among Iraqi recruits, commanders say. A spokesman for the company that was awarded the original contract said much of the equipment had already been produced and was waiting to be shipped to Iraq.

Paragraph 10 explains that

The first batch of equipment for the Iraqis has been paid for and was to have been delivered under a $327 million contract to a small company, Nour USA Ltd., of Vienna, Va. But the Pentagon canceled that deal this month after protests by several competing companies led to a determination that Army procurement officers in Iraq botched the contract.

Now, here's the first sentence of paragraph 25:

Nour USA's president, A. Huda Farouki, is a friend of Ahmad Chalabi, a member of the Iraqi Governing Council who has close ties to several senior Pentagon officials.

Oops -- sorry, almost forgot to mention that. But hey -- it's really OK!

But Nour executives and senior Army officials say that relationship played no role in awarding the contract to Nour.

Do they really think anyone on the planet is going to read that sentence without bursting out laughing?

Reuters headline:

Yasser Arafat Says Gibson Film Not Anti-Semitic

I love it.

BUSH CAMPAIGN EVENT APPARENTLY A FRAUD

Those rumors of the imminent capture of al-Qaeda's #2 were a lot of malarkey:

Terror Group Unlikely Harboring Al-Zawahri

The hunt for terrorists on Pakistan's frontier appears to be narrowing on an Uzbek terror group that once trained in Afghanistan, but experts said it was unlikely to be sheltering al-Qaida commander Ayman al-Zawahri.

The Pakistani army said Saturday that amid an offensive in South Waziristan, they have intercepted radio conversations mostly in Uzbek and Chechen.

The region is the last believed refuge of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, or IMU, which seeks to overthrow the secular government of the former Soviet republic....

[Ahmed] Rashid [author of Taliban] said Osama bin Laden and his deputy Ayman al-Zawahri don't use non-Arabs to protect them — making it unlikely that al-Zawahri is in the area, as Pakistani officials had earlier claimed.

Instead, Rashid said it was more likely that the "high-value" target Pakistanis said they are pursuing is Tahir Yuldash, the 30-something political leader of the IMU....

--AP

I expressed skepticism about this siege a couple of days ago. I don't think I expressed enough skepticism. I think this was a fraud from the word go -- either Pakistan was fooling the world about the possible "high-value target" or Pakistan and the Bushies were doing it in sync. Either way, Pakistan clearly agreed to coordinate this with a flightsuit-filled week in the Bush campaign, a week of macho talk about Iraq and 9/11 and so on, and I bet the Bushies think it was a net gain for them in either case. And it sure was for Musharraf, who lost a few troops and is going to get lots of neat U.S. weapons.