More bloggers than I can count have latched onto this report--which indicates that the intelligence leading to the latest Homeland Security threat update--is three or four years old, and that as a result, it can plausibly be suspected that the Bush Administration is playing politics with terror threats. Jeff Goldstein has the roundup on the tinfoil hat brigade and their reactions on the issue.
Well, as usual, things are a bit more complicated than the X-Files fanatics would have you believe. Dan Drezner explains:
. . . However, both the Times account and this Chicago Tribune story make it clear that while most of the information was old, it was only in the past few weeks that it was obtained by U.S. intelligence. The Tribune report also states, "The senior official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that while much of the surveillance predated the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, some information about one of the targeted buildings was from 2004."
So despite the fact that the intelligence was dated, it was still necessary for the Administration to share it with the public, and they couldn't do it earlier because the intelligence was not collected until just recently. I'm sure that these and other facts will not prevent people from arguing that the Administration is manipulating security threats for political advantage--we are in an election cycle after all. But as facts are stubborn things, I hope that they can overwhelm and outlast the stubbornness of those who wish to twist or deny the facts.
Instead of strengthening the current intelligence system, the Bush Administration has decided to embrace the worst recommendation from the 9/11 Commission, and simply increase the bureaucracy:
President Bush on Monday will endorse the creation of a national intelligence director and broadly back other intelligence reforms recommended by the commission that investigated the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the White House said.But Bush would not locate the national intelligence director within the executive office of the presidency, as the commission had recommended, administration officials said. There have been bipartisan fears that putting the director in the White House could politicize the job.
Bush will also propose establishment of a national counter-terrorism center, and take temporary actions to enhance the authority of Acting CIA Director John McLaughlin pending creation of the national intelligence director, administration officials said.
I see no reason why the enhancement of the DCI's abilities is not sufficient. And I don't understand why the first resort of Washington must be to create a "czar" for just about every problem and simply create bureaucratic overlaps in the process.
Make no mistake: If there is a terrorist attack on American soil in the months running up to Election Day, there will be blame that falls on the shoulders of the Bush Administration. But if the Bush Administration warns about a terror threat, it is accused of playing politics:
"I am concerned that every time something happens that's not good for President Bush, he plays this trump card, which is terrorism," Howard Dean, a former rival of Mr. Kerry for the Democratic nomination, told Wolf Blitzer on CNN on Sunday."His whole campaign is based on the notion that 'I can keep you safe, therefore at times of difficulty for America stick with me,' and then out comes Tom Ridge," Mr. Dean, the former Vermont governor, added, referring to the homeland security secretary. "It's just impossible to know how much of this is real and how much of this is politics, and I suspect there's some of both in it."
White House officials denied that suggestion, and other Democrats and Mr. Kerry's advisers would not embrace it. "I certainly hope not," Steve Elmendorf, Mr. Kerry's deputy campaign manager, said. "You have to take them at their word."
Remember one thing as you go to vote in this election: You won't just be electing a President. You will be electing the people who will have that President's ear for the next four years. If the thought of having the likes of Howard Dean serve as consigliere to the occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is more than a little worrisome, then your choice in this election should be a clear one.
I'm still something of a strong anti-drug warrior, and I'm not quite sure where I stand on the issue of legalizing marijuana since I get conflicting information regarding its addictive properties and effects. But I do know that the war on terrorism is certainly more of a priority than the war on drugs--especially given the fact that the latter war is being so badly fought, as even many of its advocates will admit.
John Kerry's inner circle--and perhaps my extension, John Kerry--does not share my priorities. Asparagirl has the details.
Bryan Caplan reveals that yet another argument against terrorism futures markets has fallen by the wayside with the 9/11 Commission's finding that there was no stock market manipulation that occurred commensurate with the attacks. I hope this finding receives some publicity--especially given the hysterical manner in which the issue of terrorism futures markets was addressed.
More interesting information regarding Sandy Berger's adventures in the National Archives:
What was Sandy Berger up to when he "inadvertently" removed versions of a classified National Archives memo that critiqued Clinton administration intelligence and security efforts regarding the millennium celebrations? We still don't know. But a bigger question is being posed by some of the well-sourced wags with whom we regularly converse. In fact, one says the thrust of the federal investigation now looking into Mr. Berger's actions should center not necessarily on what was taken from the archived files but what was placed in them.Berger has acknowledged removing his handwritten notes taken during a review of classified documents. That's a violation of National Archives policy. And he says he mistakenly took the copies of the aforementioned memo, different drafts written by Bush-bashing anti-terrorism coordinator Richard A. Clarke. Some of those copies remain missing.
But a new scenario has Berger, who only took notes on an initial visit last fall, placing material -- again, related to the millennium terrorists threats -- into the files on his second and third visits.
This has gotten very interesting indeed. I wonder what the next defensive round of spin from Berger's remaining advocates will be.
Tacitus continues to read the report and gives valuable commentary. His post is long, but it is well worth reading.
Via InstaPundit, I see that Tom Maguire has come up short in his efforts to achieve full-frothing status as a member of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy. You'll be surprised to learn who beat him out.
Also, be sure to read Glenn's post (like you haven't already), and find out how Joe Wilson slipped away into the memory hole. from aggrieved martyr to crazy aunt in the basement no one wants to acknowledge--it's been a wild ride for the former ambassador.
Am I enjoying all of this? Why, yes. Yes I am.
Both Jon Henke and Tacitus have reviewed the report of the 9/11 Commission and have summaries that you ought to peruse.
I have no idea. But listen to this question-and-answer session with Linda Chavez on her radio program, or read the following colloquy, and draw your own conclusions:
David: [a caller to the radio program] National Review is insinuating that the whole hoopla about who leaked this to the AP reporter could be settled by posing the question to Mr. Davis. They've suggested that since he cites the same reporter in his book and his articles about public relations . . .Davis: (laughter)
Chavez: I think we're getting a response, David.
David: . . . that he may be the one that may have leaked this, since this is his favorite reporter.
Chavez: . . . Lanny Davis, did you leak this?
Davis: Well first off, thank you caller for asking me that. I've heard about that. The caller is absolutely correct; I wrote a chapter in my book about one of the great reporters who covered the White House, John Solomon of the Associated Press. I always get him into trouble by saying he's a great reporter, because people think he treated us with a soft touch. In fact [he] killed us almost all the time. But I'm afraid that if I asked John Solomon "Who leaked it to you?" he would give me the same answer that he's always given me when I ask that question, which is, "None of your business."
Chavez: Well, OK, Lanny, but David was asking you; he wasn't asking John Solomon: Did you leak this information to John Solomon in order to get the bad news out first?
Davis: Oh, did I? (laughter) Well, let me put it this way: Had I been asked last October by my old friend Sandy Berger, who is a great man, an honest man, and has done something that he sincerely regrets--I would have suggested to Sandy that we call John Solomon and that he sit down with John Solomon and tell him the whole story and get the story out last October. Because sure as the sun rises in the east, Linda, there were enough people who knew about this that this particular week out of 52 weeks in 2004 is not surprising as the week that somebody chose to leak the story.
We really didn't get a "yes" or "no" answer, did we? (Thanks to James Taranto for the reference.)
So now the media has fully bought into the "what did the White House know and when did they know it" spin regarding the Berger pantscapades, even though the target of the criminal investigation concerning the pantscapades is not a White House official, and belongs to the other party. Tom Maguire is, of course, on the case, and tells you about how hard at work your media is.
Meanwhile, the real story continues to get ignored:
“In his meeting with Tenet, Berger focused most, however, on the question of what was to be done with Bin Ladin if he were actually captured. He worried that the hard evidence against Bin Ladin was still skimpy and that there was a danger of snatching him and bringing him to the United States only to see him acquitted,” the report says, citing a May 1, 1998, Central Intelligence Agency memo summarizing the weekly meeting between Messrs. Berger and Tenet.In June of 1999, another plan for action against Mr. bin Laden was on the table. The potential target was a Qaeda terrorist camp in Afghanistan known as Tarnak Farms. The commission report released yesterday cites Mr. Berger’s “handwritten notes on the meeting paper” referring to “the presence of 7 to 11 families in the Tarnak Farms facility, which could mean 60-65 casualties.”According to the Berger notes, “if he responds, we’re blamed.”
On December 4, 1999, the National Security Council’s counterterrorism coordinator, Richard Clarke, sent Mr. Berger a memo suggesting a strike in the last week of 1999 against Al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan. Reports the commission: “In the margin next to Clarke’s suggestion to attack Al Qaeda facilities in the week before January 1, 2000, Berger wrote, ‘no.’ ”
In August of 2000, Mr. Berger was presented with another possible plan for attacking Mr. bin Laden. This time, the plan would be based on aerial surveillance from a “Predator” drone. Reports the commission: “In the memo’s margin,Berger wrote that before considering action, ‘I will want more than verified location: we will need, at least, data on pattern of movements to provide some assurance he will remain in place.’ ”
In other words, according to the commission report, Mr. Berger was presented with plans to take action against the threat of Al Qaeda four separate times — Spring 1998, June 1999, December 1999, and August 2000. Each time, Mr. Berger was an obstacle to action. Had he been a little less reluctant to act, a little more open to taking pre-emptive action, maybe the 2,973 killed in the September 11, 2001, attacks would be alive today.
To be fair, if I had that kind of record on my hands, I would want to abscond with the documents proving it as well.
UPDATE: Over at Red State, Augustine offers his preliminary observations on the 9/11 Commission Report. He notes the passage from the report discussing Berger's timidity in going after the terrorists, as well as other very interesting information. Be sure to give his post a read.
More information is coming to light regarding l'affaire Berger, including this story, which indicates that staff at the National Archives were quite suspicious of what Berger was doing there:
Last Oct. 2, former Clinton national security adviser Samuel R. "Sandy" Berger stayed huddled over papers at the National Archives until 8 p.m.What he did not know as he labored through that long Thursday was that the same Archives employees who were solicitously retrieving documents for him were also watching their important visitor with a suspicious eye.
After Berger's previous visit, in September, Archives officials believed documents were missing. This time, they specially coded the papers to more easily tell whether some disappeared, said government officials and legal sources familiar with the case.
The notion of one of Washington's most respected foreign policy figures being subjected to treatment that had at least a faint odor of a sting operation is a strange one. But the peculiarities -- and conflicting versions of events and possible motives -- were just then beginning in a case that this week bucked Berger out of an esteemed position as a leader of the Democratic government-in-waiting that had assembled around presidential nominee John F. Kerry.
As his attorneys tell it, Berger had no idea in October that documents were missing from the Archives, or that archivists suspected him in the disappearance. It was not until two days later, on Saturday, Oct. 4, that he was contacted by Archives employees who said that they were concerned about missing files, from his September and October visits. This call -- in Berger's version of the chronology, which is disputed in essential respects by a government official with knowledge of the investigation -- was made with a tone of concern, but not accusation.
Berger, his attorney Lanny Breuer said, checked his office and realized for the first time that he had walked out -- unintentionally, he says -- with important papers relating to the Clinton administration's efforts to combat terrorism.
Berger alerted Archives employees that evening to what he had found. The classified documents were sensitive enough that employees arrived on a Sunday morning to pick them up.
Several days later, after he had retained Breuer as counsel, Berger volunteered that he had also taken 40 to 50 pages of notes during three visits to the Archives beginning in July, the lawyer said. Berger turned the notes over to the Archives. He has acknowledged through attorneys that he knowingly did not show these papers to Archives officials for review before leaving -- a violation of Archives rules, but not one that he perceived as a serious security lapse.
By then, however, Archives officials had served notice that there were other documents missing. Despite searching his home and office, Berger could not find them. By January, the FBI had been brought in, and Berger found himself in a criminal investigation -- one that he chose not to tell Kerry's campaign about until this week.
And this report indicates even more potential wrongdoing on Berger's part:
Former national security adviser Sandy Berger repeatedly persuaded monitors assigned to watch him review top-secret documents to break the rules and leave him alone, sources said Wednesday. Berger, accused of smuggling some of the secret files out of the National Archives, got the monitors out of the high-security room by telling them he had to make sensitive phone calls.Guards were convinced to violate their own rules by stepping out of the secure room as he looked over documents and allegedly stashed some in his clothing, sources said.
"He was supposed to be monitored at all times but kept asking the monitor to leave so he could make private calls," a senior law enforcement source told the Daily News.
Needless to say, Berger is innocent until proven guilty in the eyes of the law. But this episode stinks to high heaven. The notion that Berger's violations of law and procedure were "inadvertent" is becoming harder and harder to believe.
Manwhile, as Tom Maguire points out, the New York Times is seeking to "define deviancy up." Both Maguire and Greg Djerejian point out the obvious fact that the Times is engaged in yet another round of incredibly shoddy reporting. I'll just add that it is amusing to see so many people focus not on the potential crime that Sandy Berger committed, but instead on the viewpoint that somehow, we are supposed to be outraged if Berger's alleged transgressions come to light.
But this excuse is just absurd:
Bill Clinton defended his embattled national security adviser Tuesday as a man who "always got things right," even if his desk was a mess."We were all laughing about it on the way over here," the former president said of the investigation into Samuel "Sandy" Berger on classified terrorism documents missing from the National Archives. "People who don't know him might find it hard to believe. But ... all of us who've been in his office have always found him buried beneath papers."
So, let's recap: The Berger issue is not a big deal because (1) the timing is suspicious (though of course, no matter when people find out about Berger's pantscapades, the timing will be denounced as "suspicious") and (2) he's messy by nature.
Raise your hands if this convinces you in any way.
UPDATE: Byron York gives us the logistics of the alleged pantscapades:
Berger, who yesterday quit his position as an informal adviser to the Kerry campaign, was appointed by former President Clinton to vet Clinton-administration documents before those documents were turned over to the September 11 investigating commission. Berger claims that as he went through a large number of documents last fall, he inadvertently put a few in his briefcase and took them home. "In the course of reviewing over several days thousands of pages of documents on behalf of the Clinton administration in connection with requests by the September 11 commission, I inadvertently took a few documents from the Archives," Berger said in a written statement. "When I was informed by the Archives that there were documents missing, I immediately returned everything I had except for a few documents that I apparently had accidentally discarded."But it appears that some of the evidence in the case casts doubt on Berger's explanation. First, Berger has reportedly conceded that he knowingly hid his handwritten notes in his jacket and pants in order to sneak them out of the Archives. Any notes made from classified material have to be cleared before they can be removed from the Archives — a common method of safeguarding classified information — and Berger's admission that he hid the notes in his clothing is a clear sign of intent to conceal his actions.
Second, although Berger said he reviewed thousands of pages, he apparently homed in on a single document: the so-called "after-action report" on the Clinton administration's handling of the millennium plot of 1999/2000. Berger is said to have taken multiple copies of the same paper. He is also said to have taken those copies on at least two different days. There have been no reports that he took any other documents, which suggests that his choice of papers was quite specific, and not the result of simple carelessness.
Third, it appears that Berger's "inadvertent" actions clearly aroused the suspicion of the professional staff at the Archives. Staff members there are said to have seen Berger concealing the papers; they became so concerned that they set up what was in effect a small sting operation to catch him. And sure enough, Berger took some more. Those witnesses went to their superiors, who ultimately went to the Justice Department. (There was no surveillance camera in the room in which Berger worked with the documents, meaning there is no videotape record of the incidents.)
The documents Berger took — each copy of the millennium report is said to be in the range of 15 to 30 pages — were highly secret. They were classified at what is known as the "code word" level, which is the government's highest tier of secrecy. Any person who is authorized to remove such documents from a special secure room is required to do so in a locked case that is handcuffed to his or her wrist.
It is not clear why Berger would focus solely on the millennium-plot report. But it is clear that the report has been the object of intense discussions during the September 11 investigation.
The report was the result of a review done by Richard Clarke, then the White House counterterrorism chief, of efforts by the Clinton administration to stop terrorist plots at the turn of the year 2000. At several points in the September 11 commission hearings, Democrats pointed to the millennium case as an example of how a proper counterterrorism program should be run. But sources say the report suggests just the opposite. Clarke apparently concluded that the millennium plot was foiled by luck — a border agent in Washington State who happened to notice a nervous, sweating man who turned out to have explosives in his car — and not by the Clinton administration's savvy anti-terrorism work. The report also contains a number of recommendations to lessen the nation's vulnerability to terrorism, but few were actually implemented.
The after-action review became the topic of public discussion in April when Attorney General John Ashcroft mentioned it in his public testimony before the September 11 commission. "This millennium after-action review declares that the United States barely missed major terrorist attacks in 1999 and cites luck as playing a major role," Ashcroft testified. "It is clear from the review that actions taken in the millennium period should not be the operating model for the U.S. government."
ANOTHER UPDATE: I've waited a long time to say this: Even the liberal Kevin Drum doubts the Democratic talking points raised to defend Berger:
Oh, and this: despite dark allegations that the investigation into Berger was leaked by Republicans to take attention off the upcoming 9/11 report, I think it must have actually been a Democrat who leaked it. Frankly, if I were a Republican, I would have waited until around the last week of October or so. My guess is that some sharp Democratic operative figured out that this wasn't going to stay a secret forever and decided (correctly) that it was better to get it into the open now rather than later.
A THIRD UPDATE: And maybe we know who the Democratic leaker was:
Like others, I'm pretty puzzled by this whole thing, which seems motiveless and self-destructive. Maybe Dick Holbrooke set him up. Who knows?
A FOURTH UPDATE: Kate O'Beirne also believes that the Democrats were behind the Berger leak. She details the excuses used to defend Sandy Berger, and then sums those excuses up quite well:
Anyone who doesn't appreciate how the Berger bunch has used the fortuitous timing to their advantage must have slept through the Clinton years. The defense is classic. First, the mean Republicans, then the meaningless personal testimonials--"if you knew Sandy Berger like I know Sandy Berger (or Betty Currie). . .," then the irrelevant--he is an extremely hardworking guy who was only trying to help the Commission (we're working, working, working here at the White House), and finally (the political use of FBI files, the lost billing records) the removal of the classified documents was "inadvertent."
A FIFTH UPDATE: Jane Galt travels down memory lane:
. . . I recall that someone, who shall remain nameless, was unfairly subject to a similar investigation while we were in high school. This person had, entirely inadvertently, stuffed some things into their trousers while browsing in their local supermarket. Unfortunately, they forgot to take them out again to pay, resulting in the sort of grossly unfair investigation that Mr Berger is now suffering, although in their case it was conducted by a bystander who turned out to be an agent of the NYPD. The story was then "maliciously leaked" to our hapless victim's parents, resulting in much embarassment as they attempted to explain how they had 'forgotten about" a pack of bologna, two one liter bottles of soda, one jar of Vlasic Extra Large Dill Sandwich Pickles, and a can of whipped cream. The years have not dimmed the fallout from this malicious smear, perpetrated by a store owner who was no doubt a member of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy. As this stories develop, we need to keep in mind that many Americans use their underwear to store things when they have too much to carry. Innocent until proven guilty ain't just a river in Egypt.
There really is nothing new under the sun.
A SIXTH UPDATE: Virginia Postrel weighs in.
A SEVENTH UPDATE: I see that Berger is making amends. That might help mitigate whatever prison sentence he may receive.
AN EIGHTH UPDATE: For whatever it is worth, this report indicates that stockings may indeed have been involved:
Law enforcement officials are contradicting denials from Sandy Berger's lawyer and two friends who say the former national security adviser never stuffed super-secret 9/11 documents into his socks during three or more visits to the National Archives last fall.Reports CNN's Bob Franken: "Three law enforcement sources talking to CNN's Justice Department correspondent Kelli Arena [say] they saw him, or that he had been seen, putting documents in his socks."
The authoritative discussion can be found here. Check the comments for bonus Star Wars pants humor.
Removing classified documents from a secure room is a crime:
President Clinton's national security adviser, Sandy Berger, is the focus of a Justice Department investigation after removing highly classified terrorism documents and handwritten notes from a secure reading room during preparations for the Sept. 11 commission hearings, The Associated Press has learned.Berger's home and office were searched earlier this year by FBI agents armed with warrants after he voluntarily returned documents to the National Archives. However, still missing are some drafts of a sensitive after-action report on the Clinton administration's handling of al-Qaida terror threats during the December 1999 millennium celebration.
Berger and his lawyer said Monday night he knowingly removed handwritten notes he had made while reading classified anti-terror documents at the archives by sticking them in his jacket and pants. He also inadvertently took copies of actual classified documents in a leather portfolio, they said.
"I deeply regret the sloppiness involved, but I had no intention of withholding documents from the commission, and to the contrary, to my knowledge, every document requested by the commission from the Clinton administration was produced," Berger said in a statement to the AP.
Lanny Breuer, one of Berger's attorneys, said his client has offered to cooperate fully with the investigation but had not yet been interviewed by the FBI or prosecutors. Berger has been told he is the subject of the criminal investigation, Breuer said.
Berger served as Clinton's national security adviser for all of the president's second term and most recently has been informally advising Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry. Clinton asked Berger last year to review and select the administration documents that would be turned over to the commission.
The FBI searches of Berger's home and office occurred after National Archives employees told agents they believed they saw Berger place documents in his clothing while reading sensitive Clinton administration papers and that some documents were then noticed missing, officials said.
When asked, Berger said he returned some classified documents that he found in his office and all of the handwritten notes he had taken from the secure room, but could not locate two or three copies of the highly classified millennium terror report.
"In the course of reviewing over several days thousands of pages of documents on behalf of the Clinton administration in connection with requests by the Sept. 11 commission, I inadvertently took a few documents from the Archives," Berger said.
"When I was informed by the Archives that there were documents missing, I immediately returned everything I had except for a few documents that I apparently had accidentally discarded," he said.
And if you think this story sounds familiar . . . well . . . you're right:
Former CIA Director John Deutch was pardoned by Clinton just hours before Clinton left office in 2001 for taking home classified information and keeping it on unsecured computers at his home during his time at the CIA and Pentagon. Deutch was about to enter into a plea agreement for a misdemeanor charge of mishandling government secrets when the pardon was granted.
UPDATE: More here.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Still more here.
A THIRD UPDATE: Are those classified documents in your pants and socks, or are you just happy to see me?
Berger and his lawyer said Monday night he knowingly removed the handwritten notes by placing them in his jacket, pants and socks, and also inadvertently took copies of actual classified documents in a leather portfolio.
Michael Barone calls out the real fabulists in our body politic. I suspect that nothing can keep these people from lying, but it is continually appalling to see just how many people pay attention to, and believe the lies.
The New York Times finally appears (remarkably) to be acknowledging the credibility problems of Joseph Wilson:
Were those infamous 16 words correct after all?It has been a year and a half since President Bush's 2003 State of the Union address, in which he suggested in a single sentence that Iraq might have been trying to acquire uranium in Africa for its nuclear weapons program. And it has been a year since the White House and the C.I.A. acknowledged that the evidence behind that assertion was flawed, opening Mr. Bush to a torrent of criticism about the credibility and reliability of the intelligence he used to justify toppling Saddam Hussein.
But now two new reports have reopened the question of whether Mr. Bush was indeed correct when, on Jan. 28, 2003, he told the nation and the world, "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."
One of the reports was released on Wednesday by a British commission reviewing the intelligence used by Prime Minister Tony Blair in making the case for war. The report stood by the British intelligence assessments that were the foundation for Mr. Bush's statement. Though it did not explain in any detail how or why it judged the intelligence to be sound, the report concluded that the assertions by Mr. Bush and Mr. Blair about Iraq's attempts to acquire uranium were "well founded."
The other report came from the Senate Intelligence Committee. It generally found extensive problems with the prewar intelligence assessments about Iraq's weapons programs and in particular documented a long chain of problems in the way the intelligence agencies dealt with suspicions about Iraq's interest in acquiring uranium.
But it also contained some information that tended to bolster the view that Iraq had tried to acquire uranium from Niger and possibly one or two other African nations. It cited a statement by a French official to the State Department in late 2002 that France, which was resisting Mr. Bush's efforts to make an urgent case for war, "believed the reporting was true that Iraq had made a procurement attempt for uranium from Niger." Neither report, however, found evidence that Iraq had actually purchased any uranium from Niger.
The new reports also raised questions about one of the White House's chief critics over the issue, Joseph C. Wilson IV, a former ambassador sent to Niger in 2002 to investigate whether Iraq had tried to purchase uranium there. Among other things, the report pointed out that Mr. Wilson's official account to the C.I.A. noted that a former prime minister of Niger had told him that he had been approached in 1999 about meeting with an Iraqi delegation interested in "expanding commercial relations" between Niger and Iraq. The former prime minister told Mr. Wilson that he interpreted the approach to mean the Iraqis were interested in acquiring a form of uranium.
The White House response to the reports has been muted. "I think those reports speak for themselves on that issue," said Scott McClellan, Mr. Bush's spokesman.
Of course, the Times--being what it is--appears still to have missed some key issues in the story. As such, for more information, we of course go to Tom Maguire.
UPDATE: Contra the Times, USA Today appears to be on the ball when it comes to the Wilson story:
But now that the Wilson case has been debunked, it is interesting to note that the news media, so eager to build him up, and tear Bush down, now seem reluctant to tell the rest of the story, or at least the next chapter. Wilson, who had been a fixture on television, now seems to have disappeared. Democrats are silent.Why were the media so willing to believe Wilson when he was an obvious Democratic partisan? He not only worked for the National Security Council in the Clinton White House, he also is a foreign policy adviser to the Democratic presidential campaign of John Kerry. Why, indeed?
ANOTHER UPDATE: "A little literary flair"? Is that any excuse for Wilson's lies?
There. I just saved you the time you might have taken instead to read this.
UPDATE: I won't give you a "shorter Tom Maguire." Unlike Rutten, Tom Maguire is always worth reading at length.
Mark Steyn gives Joe Wilson the what-for:
Well, the week went pretty much as I predicted seven days ago:BUSH LIED!! Not.
BLAIR LIED!!! Not.
But it turns out JOE WILSON LIED! PEOPLE DIED. Of embarrassment mostly. At least I'm assuming that's why the New York Times, MSNBC's Chris Matthews, PBS drone Bill Moyers and all the other media bigwigs Joseph C. Wilson IV suckered have fallen silent on the subject of the white knight of integrity they've previously given the hold-the-front-page treatment, too.
And what about John F. Kerry? Joe Wilson campaigned with Kerry in at least six states, and claims to have helped with the candidate's speeches. He was said to be a senior foreign policy adviser to the senator. As of Friday, Wilson's Web site, restorehonesty.com, was still wholly paid for by Kerry's presidential campaign.
Heigh-ho. It would be nice to hear his media boosters howling en masse, "Say it ain't so, Joe!" But Joe Wilson's already slipping down the old media memory hole. He served his purpose -- he damaged Bush, he tainted the liberation of Iraq -- and yes, by the time you read this the Kerry campaign may well have pulled the plug on his Web site, and Salon magazine's luxury cruise will probably have to find another headline speaker, and he won't be doing Tim Russert again any time soon. But what matters to the media and to Senator Kerry is that he helped the cause of (to quote his book title) The Politics Of Truth, and if it takes a serial liar to do that, so be it.
Having met Kevin Drum, I certainly won't call him "dense" (he's far from it), but he continues to recycle the old conventional wisdom regarding the Wilson/Plame story. Kevin cites this story and the following excerpt as supposedly exculpating Wilson regarding the issue of whether Valerie Plame recommended him for the Niger fact-finding trip:
"That's just false," Wilson said in a telephone interview Wednesday. He said he was preparing a written rebuttal to the Senate report.A senior intelligence official said the CIA supports Wilson's version: "Her bosses say she did not initiate the idea of her husband going…. They asked her if he'd be willing to go, and she said yes," the official said.
But as this editorial makes clear, even if we accept this latest version of how Wilson got to go to Niger, it represents a major backtracking from his earlier claims that Valerie Plame was not involved at all in the decision to send Wilson to Niger:
After the Novak column appeared, Mr. Wilson charged that his wife was outed solely as punishment for his daring dissent from White House policy. To that end, he has repeatedly denied that his wife played a role in his selection for the mission. "Valerie had nothing to do with the matter," he wrote in his book "The Politics of Truth." "She definitely had not proposed that I make the trip." A huge political uproar ensued.But very little of what Mr. Wilson has said has turned out to be true. For starters, his wife did recommend him for that trip. The Senate report quotes from a February 12, 2002, memo from Ms. Plame: "my husband has good relations with both the PM [prime minister] and the former Minister of Mines (not to mention lots of French contacts), both of whom could possibly shed light on this sort of activity."
Note the categorical language that Wilson used to deny his wife's involvement. And note that Plame's own words go beyond even the concession found in the Los Angeles Times regarding her involvement. Kevin asks how this matters, and the editorial helpfully supplies the answer:
. . . There's a big difference both legally and ethically between revealing an agent's identity for the revenge purpose of ruining her career, and citing nepotism (truthfully!) to explain to a puzzled reporter why an undistinguished and obviously partisan former ambassador had been sent to investigate this "crazy report" (his wife's words to the Senate). We'd argue that once her husband broke his own cover to become a partisan actor, Ms. Plame's own motives in recommending her husband deserved to become part of the public debate. She had herself become political.
Now, again, I'm prepared to believe that there may still have been a legal violation here. But when we discuss the politics of the issue, recall that Kevin and others were attacking the Bush Administration for having revealed Plame's identity supposedly in order to "smear" her. The revelation may be illegal in any case, but it seems clear that it was not done to smear Plame. Rather, it was done to explain how it was that Wilson got the Niger assignment in the first place. That explanation may have included a revelation regarding Plame's identity--which may have been illegal. But it is not the same as revealing her identity for the purpose of "smearing" Valerie Plame.
Let's recap all that we know thus far:
We have Susan Schmidt, Matt Kelley and the Butler report confirming that Iraq sought uranium from Niger; The Senate report confirming that the information regarding the attempt at uranium purchase was relayed to the President without the "qualms" that Wilson said was attached to the report; Information that Wilson lied in stating that Plame did not recommend him for the Niger factfinding mission--a lie which might alter the issue of intent when it comes to the revelation of Plame's identity (which might still be a crime, but would take it out of the realm of vengeance that Wilson attributed to the Administration); Clear information that Wilson either lied or was woefully misinformed about the forging of documents; The Butler Report still finding that (a) Iraq "Had the strategic intention of resuming the pursuit of prohibited weapons programmes, including if possible its nuclear weapons programme, when UN inspection regimes were relaxed and sanctions were eroded or lifted", (b) Iraq " was carrying out illicit research and development, and procurement, activities, to seek to sustain its indigenous capabilities," and (c) Iraq "Was developing ballistic missiles with a range longer than permitted under relevant United Nations security council resolutions."
But yeah, other than all that, Wilson and his story are in great shape.
UPDATE: In related news, Tom Maguire is taunting now. If there is a Heaven, I imagine that Tom wants it to be a place where he can blog about the Wilson/Plame blowback until the Day of Wrath itself.
Not that I blame him.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Patterico points out that the Los Angeles Times story above is yet another example of shoddy journalism. What a shock.
I usually don't trust Robert Novak as far as I can throw him. His columns appear too gossipy for me, and promise big revelations that sometimes never materialize. (His views on a number of issues--including Israel--are also anathema to me, but that may be a different story.) That's why I read over his latest on the Plame affair with a particular amount of care and attention.
What is noteworthy is that this isn't the gossipy kind of column that Novak usually writes. Instead, it refers to the Senate Intelligence Report and the Wilson/Plame affair, in which Novak played such a big role. Among the findings in the column:
Wilson's activities constituted the only aspects of the yearlong investigation for which the committee's Republican chairman, Sen. Pat Roberts, was unable to win unanimous agreement. . . .[. . .]
The unanimously approved report said, "interviews and documents provided to the Committee indicate that [Wilson's] wife, a CPD (CIA counterproliferation division) employee, suggested his name for the trip." That's what I reported, and what Wilson flatly denied and still does.
Plame sent out an internal CIA memo saying that "my husband has good relations with both the PM [prime minister] and the former Minister of Mines (not to mention lots of French contacts), both of whom could possibly shed light on this sort of activity." A State Department analyst told the committee about an inter-agency meeting in 2002 that was "apparently convened by [Wilson's] wife who had the idea to dispatch [him] to use his contacts to sort out the Iraq-Niger uranium issue."
The unanimous Intelligence Committee found that the CIA report, based on Wilson's mission, differed considerably from the former ambassador's description to the committee of his findings. That report "did not refute the possibility that Iraq had approached Niger to purchase uranium." As far as his statement to The Washington Post about "forged documents" involved in the alleged Iraqi attempt to buy uranium, Wilson told the committee he may have "misspoken." In fact, the intelligence community agreed that "Iraq was attempting to procure uranium from Africa."
"While there was no dispute with the underlying facts," Chairman Roberts wrote separately, "my Democrat colleagues refused to allow" two conclusions in the report. The first conclusion merely said that Wilson was sent to Niger at his wife's suggestion. The second conclusion is devastating:
"Rather than speaking publicly about his actual experiences during his inquiry of the Niger issue, the former ambassador seems to have included information he learned from press accounts and from his beliefs about how the Intelligence Community would have or should have handled the information he provided."
The normally mild Pat Roberts is harsh in his condemnation: "Time and again, Joe Wilson told anyone who would listen that the President had lied to the American people, that the Vice President had lied, and that he had 'debunked' the claim that Iraq was seeking uranium from Africa . . . [N]ot only did he NOT 'debunk' the claim, he actually gave some intelligence analysts even more reason to believe that it may be true." Roberts called it "important" for the Intelligence Committee to declare much of what Wilson said "had no basis in fact." In response, Democrats were silent.
What gives this column credibility is that Novak is quoting the words of others out in the open, rather than simply repeating backroom whispers. And the words do indeed further devastate and destroy Joseph Wilson's story. The conclusion that Wilson's credibility has been shattered is nearly inescapable.
The attempt to salvage Joe Wilson's reputation and the political benefits of the Plame scandal on the side of the Democrats is getting rather fast and furious. Unfortunately, it is also bereft of any intellectual honesty.
Why do I believe this? Click here for my argument.
UPDATE: Amazingly, we continue to have spinning. Kevin Drum earnestly relies on George Tenet, who said that "These 16 words [regarding Iraqi attempts to buy uranium from Niger] should never have been included in the text written for the president....and CIA should have ensured that it was removed." Based on simply repeating Tenet's words, Kevin concludes that "[Joe] Wilson's credibility doesn't matter. Tenet has long since admitted that he was right [to deny that Iraq sought to buy uranium from Niger]".
And this is after Kevin purportedly read the Butler Report. And its summary (as noted in the Red State link provided above) said the following:
We conclude that, on the basis of the intelligence assessments at the time, covering both Niger and the Democratic Republic of Congo, the statements on Iraqi attempts to buy uranium from Africa in the government's dossier, and by extension the prime minister in the House of Commons, were well founded. By extension, we conclude also that the statement in President Bush's state of the union address of 2003 that "the British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa" was well founded.
(Emphasis mine.) So contra Kevin, Wilson was completely wrong, as was Tenet's revision. There was an attempt by Iraq to purchase uranium from Niger, as the Butler report found, as Susan Schmidt found, and as Matt Kelley found as well. How many more such findings are necessary before we finally bow to the obvious?
Josh Marshall continues to try to make lemonade out of the lemon that the Valerie Plame affair has become for the Bush-bashing brigade. Leave it to Stuart Buck to offer him a much-needed reality check.
Like Christopher Hitchens enraged:
Two recent reports allow us to revisit one of the great non-stories, and one of the great missed stories, of the Iraq war argument. The non-story is the alleged martyrdom of Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Wilson, supposed by many to have suffered cruel exposure for their commitment to the truth. The missed story is the increasing evidence that Niger, in West Africa, was indeed the locus of an illegal trade in uranium ore for rogue states including Iraq.The Senate's report on intelligence failures would appear to confirm that Valerie Plame did recommend her husband Joseph Wilson for the mission to Niger. In a memo written to a deputy chief in the CIA's Directorate of Operations, she asserted that Wilson had "good relations with both the Prime Minister and the former Minister of Mines [of Niger], not to mention lots of French contacts." This makes a poor fit with Wilson's claim, in a recent book, that "Valerie had nothing to do with the matter. She definitely had not proposed that I make the trip." (It incidentally seems that she was able to recommend him for the trip because of the contacts he'd made on an earlier trip, for which she had also proposed him.)
Wilson's earlier claim to the Washington Post that, in the CIA reports and documents on the Niger case, "the dates were wrong and the names were wrong," was also false, according to the Senate report. The relevant papers were not in CIA hands until eight months after he made his trip. Wilson now lamely says he may have "misspoken" on this. (See Susan Schmidt's article in the July 10 Washington Post.)
Now turn to the front page of the June 28 Financial Times for a report from the paper's national security correspondent, Mark Huband. He describes a strong consensus among European intelligence services that between 1999 and 2001 Niger was engaged in illicit negotiations over the export of its "yellow cake" uranium ore with North Korea, Libya, Iraq, Iran, and China. The British intelligence report on this matter, once cited by President Bush, has never been disowned or withdrawn by its authors. The bogus document produced by an Italian con man in October 2002, which has caused such embarrassment, was therefore more like a forgery than a fake: It was a fabricated version of a true bill.
Hitchens goes on to downplay any suggestion of a crime committed by the revelation of Plame's name. I'm not prepared to go that far. But contrary to the belief of those who want to keep this scandal alive for partisan purposes, Wilson's credibility--and Plame's--matter greatly in this investigation. And if a crime was committed in the revelation of Plame's identity, it will be most unfortunate if the seriousness of that crime was smothered and de-epmhasized thanks to Wilson's and Plame's apparent dishonesty.
UPDATE: I see that some fans of Hitchens are seeking to reward his work. Who am I to deny a good man a drink?
David Rifkin and Lee Casey have examined the Senate Intelligence Report just issued on the decision-making process that led to the war in Iraq. Their article effectively refutes the common media spin regarding the report and its consequences:
On Friday, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence released its "Report on the U.S. Intelligence Community's Pre-war Intelligence Assessment on Iraq." Although this report concluded that the Bush administration did not seek to "coerce, influence or pressure analysts to change their judgments related to Iraq's weapons of mass destruction capabilities," thereby decisively rebutting the oft-invoked charge that the administration had pushed the intelligence community to find a threat from Iraq, the president's opponents have been busy spinning the report's conclusions as evidence that Saddam Hussein simply posed no meaningful threat to the United States. They now assert that Saddam's Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), was so weak in conventional military forces that it presented no threat even to some of its smaller neighbors, and that, overall, the regime could have been safely contained for years to come.Emboldened by the report, the Democrat political establishment, including presidential candidate John Kerry, and his recently announced running mate John Edwards, have now broadened their attacks on the president's Iraq policy. Having spent months arguing that the problem was not with the fact that the United States effected a regime change in Iraq, but rather with how the administration went about it — not enough international support and insufficient planning for the postwar period have been Kerry's favorite allegations — now they have begun to claim that the whole enterprise was flawed.
These arguments are fundamentally wrong. They both underestimate the threat posed to the United States by Iraq's WMD programs, erroneously equating the absence of WMD stockpiles at a particular point in time with the absence of a WMD threat, and trivialize other aspects of the unique strategic challenge of Saddam Hussein. They also ignore compelling evidence that the international sanctions regime was collapsing and that the real strategic choice facing the United States was not between a regime change and containment, but between a regime change and Saddam Hussein's continuation in power, free from any meaningful constraints. More generally, the critics apparent belief that there is such a thing as perfect intelligence, and that the United States should not use force against a dangerous foe until and unless such perfect intelligence has been secured, is both historically unfounded and a prescription for a strategic disaster.
The article is somewhat long, but very informative and well-argued. Read it all.
UPDATE: A related--and excellent--post by Tom Bevan.
Well, you can fill in the rest. But seriously, this article pretty much annihilates Joe Wilson:
. . . we can find no place in Wilson’s book where he resolves this obvious point. If Bush talked about Africa; and Wilson only addressed Niger; then how could his observations, however valid, shoot down Bush’s larger claim? By page 328, Wilson says that, “From the sixteen words on down, in short, the whole administartion line was bogus.” But we simply can’t find the place where he resolves that problem from page 313. As far as we know, Wilson never addressed that obvious point in his 487-page book, although he did find plenty of time to describe the various standing ovations he received in subsequent months, as grateful citizens, from coast to coast, applauded him for his illogic. Modestly, Wilson records their applause. But when did he learn that the “sixteen words” referred to Niger and to Niger alone? We can’t find that part of his book. Maybe some others can help us.Did Saddam seek uranium from Niger? From Somalia? The Congo? From elsewhere in Africa? We don’t have the slightest idea. But we do know pure BS when we see it, and Wilson’s construction has never made sense. Don’t be shocked when the Senate committee tells you the things that we told you last year—things that had many readers upset, although they were right smack on target.
And that's actually some of the nice stuff they have to say about Wilson. The rest of it is . . . well . . . not so nice.
Mark Steyn's sarcastic pen has been unleashed:
Do you remember a year ago when the Democratic National Committee was putting out press releases headlined ''President Bush Deceives The American People"?Yawn. What's new? But last summer the Bush Lie Of The Week was all to do with Saddam trying to buy uranium from Niger. CNN and Co. replayed endlessly the critical 16 words from the president's 2003 State of the Union Address:
''The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."
Sixteen words that could break a presidency! Bush ''misled every one of us,'' huffed Sen. John Kerry. ''It's beginning to sound like Watergate,'' said Howard Dean. Joseph C. Wilson IV, the man the CIA sent to Africa to investigate, wrote a piece for the New York Times titled ''What I didn't find in Africa.''
Can you guess what he didn't find, dear reader? That's right, he didn't find a big package of uranium bearing the address label ''S. Hussein, Suite 27, the Saddam Hussein Centre for Armageddon Studies, Saddam Hussein Parkway, Baghdad.'' Ambassador Wilson said relax, he'd been to Niger, spent "eight days drinking sweet mint tea and meeting with dozens of people,'' and there's nothing going on.
Well, on Wednesday in London, Lord Butler will publish his report into the quality of the intelligence on which rested Britain's case for going to war with Iraq. The report is said to be critical of some of Tony Blair's claims, supportive of others. And, among the latter, he says that the statements about Iraq and Niger are justified and supported by the intelligence. In other words, the British Government did learn that Saddam Hussein did seek significant quantities of uranium from Africa.
As a gazillion e-mails a day shrieked from my in-box back then, ''BUSH LIED!!!!!!" So where exactly in that State of the Union observation is the lie?
UPDATE: Cliff May piles on--justifiably, I might add:
In 1991, Wilson's book jacket boasts, President George H.W. Bush praised Wilson as "a true American hero," and he was made an ambassador. But for some reason, he was assigned not to Cairo, Paris, or Moscow, places where you put the best and the brightest, nor was he sent to Bermuda or Luxembourg, places you send people you want to reward. Instead, he was sent to Gabon, a diplomatic backwater of the first rank.After that, he says in his memoir, "I had risen about as high as I could in the Foreign Service and decided it was time to retire." Well, that's not exactly accurate either. He could have been given a more important posting, such as Kenya or South Africa, or he could have been promoted higher in the senior Foreign Service (he made only the first of four grades). Instead, he was evidently (according to my sources) forced into involuntary retirement at 48. (The minimum age for voluntary retirement in the Foreign Service is 50.) After that, he seems to have made quite a bit of money — doing what for whom is unclear and I wish the Senate committee had attempted to find out.
But based on one op-ed declaring 16 words spoken by the president a lie, he transformed himself into an instant celebrity and, for a while, it seemed, a contender for power within the chien-mange-le chien world of foreign policy. That dream has now probably evaporated. It is hard to see how a President John Kerry would now want Wilson in his inner circle. But if he desired to return to Gabon or Niger I, for one, would not be among those opposing him.
Now that Jay Rockefeller is out and about attacking the Bush Administration for its use of intelligence in the run-up to the Iraq war, it behooves us to remember that he pretty much parroted the same lines used by the Administration in discussions regarding the threat posed by Saddam Hussein's regime. Stephen Hayes--as usual--has the details.
Dan Darling has the scoop. His words are worth highlighting:
Everything Powell said at the UN regarding Iraqi ties to al-Qaeda (which is pretty much the same as what President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, and others said going into the war) appears to have reflected the consensus of the broader intelligence community.Joe Wilson's claims (along with, I suspect, his reputation within Democratic circles) have more or less gone down in flames, as have claims that intelligence analysts were pressured into making certain conclusions. The claim on p. 328 that "Wali Khan" (i.e. Wali Khan Amin Shah, one of Ramzi Yousef's two lieutenants in the proto-9/11 Oplan Bojinka plot) and Jamal al-Fadhl (whose name is blacked out in the last sentence in that paragraph) identified Abu Hajir al-Iraqi (aka Mamdouh Mahmoud Salim, a high-ranking al-Qaeda leader who was arrested in the wake of the 1998 embassy bombings and later stabbed a NYC prison guard with a comb in his left eye in an attempted prison break in 2000) as the chief liaison between Iraq and al-Qaeda is sure to keep Mylroie enthusiasts around for quite some time at any rate.
In general, this document is a lot better than that Staff Statement No. 15 that was churned out by the 9/11 commission. One other thing to be mentioned, incidentally, is that this report specifically undercuts some of the 9/11 Commission's key findings with respect to Iraq and al-Qaeda. It cites post-1999 contacts between Iraq and al-Qaeda, which the 9/11 commission claims to possess no information on. Perhaps someone should hand the commission members a copy of the Senate Intelligence Committee report?
Also, this demolishes 2 of Richard Clarke's key claims with respect to Iraq: that there was no Iraqi involvement in terrorism post-1993, and that there is no evidence whatsoever of Iraqi support for al-Qaeda. Both of these claims, to put it quite simply, can now be shown to be factually untrue.
As I said, no doubt apologies will pending from all those concerned.
No doubt at all.
Greg Djerejian rips apart Josh Marshall's weak attack on the Susan Schmidt story. One of the most interesting passages pointed to in the Senate report blows apart Marshall's contention that Iraq was never mentioned and that it was Iran that was accused of trying to purchase uranium from Africa:
In a written response to questions from Committee Staff, the White House said that on September 11, 2002, National Security Council Staff (NSC) contacted the CIA to clear language for possible use by the President. The language cleared by the CIA said: "Iraq has made several to buy high strength aluminum tubes used in centrifuges to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons. And we also know this: within the past few years, Iraq has resumed efforts to obtain large quantities of a type of uranium oxide known as yellowcake, which is an essential ingredient of this process. The regime was caught trying to buy 500 metric tons of this material. It takes about 10 tons to produce enough enriched uranium for a single nuclear weapon."
(Emphasis Djerejian's.) And then there is this:
"...we also have intelligence that Iraq has sought large amounts of uranium and uranium oxide, known as yellowcake, from Africa."
(Emphasis Djerejian's.) Greg's follow-up question is therefore a natural one:
Josh, why didn't you point us to this language in the report too?
Well, why didn't he?
And in comments to this post, Tom Maguire highlights the following language from the Senate report:
The former ambassador [Wilson] also told Committee staff that he was the source of a Washington Post article (“CIA Did Not Share Doubt on Iraq Data: Bush Used Report of Uranium Bid,” June 12, 2003) which said, “among the Envoy’s conclusions was that the documents may have been forged because ‘the dates were wrong and the names were wrong.’” Committee staff asked how the former ambassador could have come to the conclusion that the “dates were wrong and the names were wrong” when he had never seen the CIA reports and had no knowledge of what names and dates were in the reports. The former ambassador said that he may have “misspoken” to the reporter when he said he concluded that the documents were “forged.” He also said he may have become confused about his own recollection after the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) reported in March 2003 that the names and dates on the documents were not correct and may have thought he had seen the names himself. The former ambassador reiterated that he had been able to collect the names of the government officials which should have been on the documents.
That sound you hear is the remains of Joe Wilson's credibility shattering.
Josh Marshall has noticed this story undercutting Joe Wilson's credibility (posted on here), and is properly alarmed that a key talking point (pardon the pun) in opposing the Bush Administration may be on its way to diminishment. He feels that he has to undercut the actual undercutting. Let's see how he does.
The start of Marshall's post is not promising. It essentially is an ad hominem attack on Susan Schmidt, the writer of the Post story:
Susan Schmidt is known, happily among DC Republicans and not so happily among DC Democrats, as what you might call the "Mikey" (a la Life Cereal fame) of the DC press corps, especially when the cereal is coming from Republican staffers.
None of this does anything to prove Marshall's point, and indeed, it is a cheap way to begin the post. But then, logical fallacies are rarely edifying in any way.
Marshall then goes on to argue that contra Schmidt, the CIA really did warn the White House about the "yellowcake" claim, that Plame's decision to recommend Wilson was irrelevant to the legal issues surrounding her outing, and that the report actually discusses Iran wanting to buy uranium from Niger, and not Iraq.
First of all, Jonah Goldberg aptly responds to Marshall's sudden belief that Plame's decision to recommend Wilson for the fact-finding assignment in Niger was irrelevant:
Frankly, I'll await someone else's legal analysis before I make up my mind about that. But assuming Marshall is correct about the law, am I alone in thinking he's being disingenuous? Marshall's been banging the drums about the Plame story for a very long time. The essence of the entire scandal has been the contention that the White House deliberately endangered a CIA agent's life in order to punish Wilson. Must we recount all of the paranoid pieties about how "this White House will stop at nothing to silence its enemies"? Now Marshall's new talking point is a legalism. Well, excuse me: If in fact the White House inadvertantly revealed Plame's identity in order to explain why a dishonest hack like Wilson was being sent to Africa (i.e. "His wife pulled some strings") and not so as to endanger a whistle-blower's life that sounds like more than a matter of "some political traction." That sounds like the whole enchilada, scandal-wise.
My reading of 50 U.S.C. sec. 421 suggests that even if Administration officials identified and leaked Plame's name as a way of responding to queries about how Wilson--who admits that he did little in Niger except "drinking sweet mint tea and meeting with dozens of people"--a crime may still have been committed (but see this post, suggesting an alternative possibility). But there still is an attendant issue of whether Wilson lied about his wife recommending him. It appears that she did, and even though Marshall claims that this is not legally important (and he may be right to an extent), it does square with the belief that the identification of Plame was made
. . . not to intentionally expose an undercover CIA employee, but to call into question Wilson's bona fides as an investigator into trafficking of weapons of mass destruction. To charge anyone with a crime, prosecutors need evidence that exposure of a covert officer was intentional.
So the issue is not as cut and dried as Marshall thinks it is. (Incidentally, the real operational scandal here may have been that Plame appeared to recommend her husband without any filters, thus making her outing easier. I don't blame Plame for this necessarily, but it strikes me as odd that her recommendation was not transmitted to the White House or the State Department via the Deputy Director (Operations) so that if any questions needed to be asked about Wilson's appointment to investigate the yellowcake claims, the White House could point to the DDO as having been the one who made the recommendation, thus lessening the chances that a covert operative like Plame would have been named as the source of the recommendation.)
As for the statement that Iran was named in the report and not Iraq, the naming of Iran could itself have been a typo in the Senate Intelligence report, and the writers of the report may have meant to mention Iraq instead. And the reporters covering the story may have known this. After all, Schmidt is not the only one who discusses Iraq seeking to purchase uranium from Niger. The other news story noted in my original post was an AP story not written by Schmidt, which said the following:
A Senate report criticizing false CIA claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction at the same time provides support for an assertion the White House repudiated: that Iraq sought to buy uranium in Africa. White House officials said last year it was a mistake for President Bush, in his 2003 State of the Union message, to refer to British reports that Saddam Hussein's government tried to buy uranium. The White House said the evidence for that claim was too shaky to have been included in such an important speech, and CIA Director George Tenet took the blame for failing to have the reference removed.
But let's assume arguendo that the Senate statement was not a typo, and that it really was Iran that tried to buy uranium from Africa. So what? We already know that the Butler inquiry in Britain states that Saddam Hussein's regime did indeed try to buy uranium from Niger. So we have independent verification that validates the famous "sixteen words" in the President's 2003 State of the Union Speech, and invalidates Wilson's claims that there was no attempt by Iraq to purchase uranium from Africa.
In other words, while the Post story states that Wilson's findings buttressed the belief that Iraq sought to find uranium, even if we take Marshall's finding that Iraq was never mentioned in the report by Wilson and that Iran was mentioned instead, we still have the British to verify through an independent inquiry that Iraq did indeed try to buy uranium. Wilson may not have reported as much, contra Schmidt's story. But at the very least, he appears to have completely missed the story that the Butler inquiry in Britain found, and that British intelligence has stuck with from the outset.
Maybe if Wilson didn't spend so much time drinking sweet mint tea, he would have found out that information as well. In any event, he is either incompetent, per the Butler report's findings, or a liar per Schmidt's. Either scenario appears to vindicate the finding that Iraq sought uranium from Niger, and validation regarding America's casus belli insofar as the Niger/uranium issue is concerned.
UPDATE: See also this post.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Dan Drezner weighs in with a typically valuable and thoughtful take.
A THIRD UPDATE: See also Tom Maguire here and here.
A FOURTH UPDATE: Many thanks to Jonah Goldberg for the link. Now I know where all of this traffic is coming from on a lazy Sunday.
And then we find out this.
I don't suppose that any apologies will be forthcoming, will they? Because after all, that would ruin the whole "Bush Lied! People Died!" bumper sticker industry.
Stuart Buck notes that the New York Times appears to have completely changed its tune regarding welfare reform over the past eight years. As Stuart says, everyone changes their mind about something, but it certainly would have been more laudable if the Times admitted that its past rhetoric regarding welfare reform was overwrought and hysterical.
William Safire offers some pointers on how the Commission can regain its credibility:
1. Require every member to sign off on every word that the commission releases, or write and sign a minority report. No more "staff conclusions" without presenting supporting evidence, pro and con.2. Set the record straight, in evidentiary detail, on every contact known between Iraq and terrorist groups, including Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's operations in Iraq. Include the basis for the Clinton-era "cooperating in weapons development" statement.
3. Despite the prejudgment announced yesterday by Kean and Democratic partisan Richard Ben-Veniste dismissing Mohammed Atta's reported meeting in Prague with an Iraqi spymaster, fairly spell out all the evidence that led to George Tenet's "not proven or disproven" testimony. (Start with www.edwardjayepstein.com.)
4. Show how the failure to retaliate after the attack on the U.S.S. Cole affected 9/11, how removing the director of central intelligence from running the C.I.A. would work, and how Congress's intelligence oversight failed abysmally.
5. Stop wasting time posturing on television and get involved writing a defensible commission report.
Safire also has some very good points about how the Commission's statements regarding Iraq-al Qaeda links have been misinterpreted in the press. Of course, the press and the Commission would do well to address the substance of this story in further examining the issue of ties between Saddam Hussein's regime and al Qaeda:
The commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks has received new information indicating that a senior officer in an elite unit of the security services of deposed Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein may have been a member of al-Qaida involved in the planning of the suicide hijackings, panel members said Sunday.John F. Lehman, a Reagan-era GOP defense official told NBC's "Meet the Press" that documents captured in Iraq "indicate that there is at least one officer of Saddam's Fedayeen, a lieutenant colonel, who was a very prominent member of al Qaida."
The Fedayeen were a special unit of volunteers given basic training in irregular warfare. The lieutenant colonel, Ahmed Hikmat Shakir, has the same name as an Iraqi thought to have attended a planning meeting for the Sept. 11 attacks in January 2000, in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. The meeting was also attended by two of the hijackers, Khalid al Midhar and Nawaf al Hamzi and senior al-Qaida leaders.
Lehman said that commission staff members continued to work on the issue and experts cautioned that the connection might be nothing more than coincidence.
"Shakir is a pretty common name," said terrorism analyst and author Peter Bergen, "and even if the two names refer to the same person, there might be a number of other explanations. Perhaps al-Qaida had penetrated Saddam's security apparatus."
Analysts say the Fedayeen was not an intelligence unit, but an irregular militia recruited from clans loyal to the regime in the capital, in Saddam's hometown of Tikrit and in the surrounding Tigris valley area. Michael Eisenstadt of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a think tank set up by the pro-Israel lobbying group AIPAC, described them to United Press International last year as "thugs and bumpkins."
He said the Fedayeen were "at the low end of the food chain in the security apparatus, doing street level work for the regime."
Nevertheless, the revelation seems sure to stoke the controversy over the extent of links between al-Qaida and Saddam's regime, links that were cited by the Bush administration as a justification for the invasion of Iraq.
I trust this is at least worth a look, no? [UPDATE: This story is also discussed here. ANOTHER UPDATE: This story discusses the possibility that there may be confusion regarding similar names. STILL ANOTHER UPDATE: But see this story.]
UPDATE: Here is another apt critique of the media's coverage of this issue.
It's more than a little amusing to peruse left-of-center blogs that tell us that the way to honor Ronald Reagan is to support stem cell research (and conveniently, to oppose the Bush Administration's stance on stem cell research). The issue of stem cells is obviously one that has generated a lot of debate, and it is a debate that is--fortunately--dominated by and large by people of good will on both sides. No one wants to see people dying of Alzheimer's or Parkinson's or any other disease that might conveniently be treated by stem cell research. At the same time, it is folly not to acknowledge the potential moral implications of using embryos to further the research. Even if one believes that such moral implications are not enough to stand in the way of the research, at the very least, one should make that argument with some degree of humility and respect. It may be a blastocyst now, but it could be a life later, and in my mind, the proper way to argue in favor of stem cells is to say that while it may be a sacrifice of a potential human life to go forward with embryonic stem cell research, the ends would justify the means and there would be some kind of utilitarian benefit to going forward with the lives that may potentially be saved if embryonic stem cell research delivers on its promises.
But that's not what a lot of stem cell research advocates say. Instead, they tell us that it's just a blastocyst, and nothing more, and that we shouldn't even give a second thought to the issue. Now, I respect the argument that people make on behalf of stem cell research. Indeed, it's a much more appealing argument than the one made in favor of abortion rights--as evidenced by the fact that many pro-life advocates are also for embryonic stem cell research. But again, I don't think the other side can be dismissed so easily. After all, if it is eventually proven that adult stem cells could cure Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and other diseases, we wouldn't even be discussing the use of embryonic stem cells, since the use of one's own adult stem cells would present no moral qualms whatsoever.
I wish that people would recognize this fact, and recognize that there are those who genuinely want to see breakthroughs in the prevention and treatment of terrible diseases like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's, but have genuine and deeply felt moral qualms about the use of embryonic stem cells to accomplish this. The way to potentially change their minds is not to ridicule their positions, but to treat them with some respect and decency, while at the same time sticking to one's intellectual position with every ounce of one's intellectual honesty.
And as for the Reagan legacy, if it prompts a discussion on stem cells, that is fine with me. It's an important topic, and it deserves to be discussed with passion and seriousness. It would be nice, however, if some of the aforementioned blogs might also note other Reagan legacies . . . like, oh, say, being instrumental in winning the Cold War, turning around the pre-Reagan conventional wisdom that our economy was irretrievably broken, etc. After all, it is more than a little disingenuous to say that the only Reagan legacy of any note just happens to be one with which the Bush Administration can be bashed by its opponents.
UPDATE: Via the comments section, we have this report on the feasibility of stem cells. I'm no expert on the matter, but it definitely seems worth a read.
Here are some other noble causes on which you can urge your favorite crusader to expend his considerable energy. I for one would be glad to sign on to Spitzer's staff if he promises to take Don Boudreaux's list of potential lawsuits and run with them.
Right now, the best thing the CIA could have is a Director who can work very closely and carefully with Congress. There is certainly a lot of bad blood between the intelligence agencies and the legislative branch, and those hard feelings have to be overcome with a new esprit de corps established before the CIA can go forth with its mission.
For that reason, I hope that now that George Tenet has resigned, he will be replaced by Porter Goss, who is the current Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, and a former covert operative. Goss has a great deal of credibility on the Hill and with the White House, and can help heal the breach that exists between the intelligence community and elected officials. I imagine that the hard feelings go beyond merely the Tenet era, and extend back to the tenure of John Deutsch (who was probably one of the worst DCI's the country has ever been saddled with), but it matters less how the era of bad feelings started than does the fact that it should come to an end.
So let's see if we have this straight:
1. Before, Joseph Wilson, the husband of outed CIA agent Valerie Plame, claimed that there was no evidence that Iraq tried to buy uranium from Niger.
2. Now, he seems to have changed his tune:
It was Saddam Hussein's information minister, Mohammed Saeed Sahhaf, often referred to in the Western press as "Baghdad Bob," who approached an official of the African nation of Niger in 1999 to discuss trade -- an overture the official saw as a possible effort to buy uranium.That's according to a new book Joseph C. Wilson IV, a former ambassador who was sent to Niger by the CIA in 2002 to investigate reports that Iraq had been trying to buy enriched "yellowcake" uranium. Wilson wrote that he did not learn the identity of the Iraqi official until this January, when he talked again with his Niger source.
Of course, the question arises: Even if Wilson didn't know the specific identity of the Iraqi official, how is it that the story was originally that no Iraqi official sought to buy uranium from Niger? Does Wilson have an explanation for that change in his story?
And didn't it behoove the Washington Post to ask about that change?
(Link via InstaPundit.)
When it comes to identifying the short-sightedness that too often afflicts us, David Brooks is right on target:
These are the crucial months in Iraq. The events in Najaf and Falluja will largely determine whether Iraq will move toward normalcy or slide into chaos.So how is Washington responding during this pivotal time? Well, for about three weeks the political class was obsessed by Richard Clarke and the hearings of the 9/11 commission, and, therefore, events that occurred between 1992 and 2001. Najaf was exploding, and Condoleezza Rice had to spend the week preparing for testimony about what may or may not have taken place during the presidential transition.
And for the past 10 days, all of Washington has been kibitzing over the contents of Bob Woodward's latest opus, which largely concerns events that happened between 2001 and 2003. Did President Bush eye somebody else's dinner mint at a meeting? Was Colin Powell in the loop on Iraq? When did Bush ask the Pentagon to draw up war plans?
This is crazy. This is like pausing during the second day of Gettysburg to debate the wisdom of the Missouri Compromise. We're in the midst of the pivotal battle of the Iraq war and le tout Washington decides not to let itself get distracted by the ephemera of current events.
Brooks is mistaken, in my view, in attributing this behavior to "smart-aleckyness" in Washington circles. I think that there are people in the opinion-fashioning world who are just not serious at all. Thus the fluffy dialogue of which Brooks rightly complains. The lack of seriousness in Big Media pundit circles means that it is all too easy to have ourselves distracted from what is genuinely important.
But that's just my view.
It's always reassuring to see that the 9/11 Commissioners are taking their work so seriously.
Via e-mail, Mark Kleiman refers me to this post, which references this story reporting the statements of Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Pat Roberts, disputing any allegations that Richard Clarke's testimony before the 9/11 Commission contradicted testimony before "a joint congressional panel on the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks." Kleiman asks for my reaction to this story, and in his post, he says that "Everyone who mentioned that charge now has an obligation to state clearly that it was false: not in an update to a now-dead post, but in a story or post as prominent as the one that carried the original charge."
I noted the Clarke perjury charge in this post and stated the following:
If declassification does not compromise any ongoing operations, I'm all for it. Clarke has leveled some very serious charges under oath. Let's see if he was consistent about it.
Roberts now says that Clarke was consistent before the joint congressional panel. As such, that would remove any perjury concerns regarding that particular testimony.
But there is other testimony to consider as well. I noted this post which indicates that there is a question about Clarke's testimony before the House Intelligence Committee--an entirely separate matter. The subscriber-only story contains this excerpt:
House Intelligence Chairman Porter Goss (R-Fla.) said Wednesday that former White House anti-terror czar Richard Clarke, the author of a new book critical of President Bush’s handling of the al Qaeda threat before Sept. 11, 2001, may have lied in testimony to his committee, and said he plans to explore whether Congressional action on the matter is warranted.Clarke’s “testimony to our committee is 180 degrees out of line with what he is saying in his book,” Goss said. “He’s either lying in his book or he lied to our committee. It’s one or the other.”
Note again that this appears to be testimony separate and apart from the testimony commented on by Roberts. As I didn't--and don't--have access to the subscriber page, I was careful in commenting on it, and said the following:
Consider as well this post, which indicates that Clarke may have lied in testimony before the House Intelligence Committee. I don't have access to the pay page, so I can't comment that much, but it will be interesting to see if Porter Goss pushes this any further.
Now, as Roberts has absolved Clarke regarding testimony before the joint congressional committee, that's all good and fine. But there might remain a question as to whether a perjury charge regarding testimony before the House Intelligence Committee is called for. I have seen no updates to the Goss charge, so I don't know about that. But it is worth investigating.
Of course, even assuming no perjury, the instances of contradiction in Clarke's story are legion (I reference them here, here, here, here and here). So although I doubt that Clarke will do any time for perjury--or even that charges will be brought in such a high profile political case--the number of holes in Clarke's story make it difficult to take him seriously.
Juan Non-Volokh makes a comprehensive case for Jamie Gorelick's dismissal from the 9/11 Commission.
Revisiting her policy Waterloo, Hillary Clinton has written yet again in favor of her vision of health insurance. Robert Tagorda has considered her arguments, and offers his own thoughts on the matter.
UPDATE: Meanwhile, Jane Galt makes the case that the existence of the Clinton piece in the Times "violate[s] the spirit, if not the letter, of the campaign finance laws." She may have a point.
Christopher Cross asks a question:
Don't these 9/11 hearings do a fairly solid job of reinforcing the Bush notion of preemption as a necessary strategy?
Answer: Why yes, they do.
All the reasons that Jamie Gorelick should resign from the 9/11 Commission are present in this post. I'll just add that it is silly to think that Gorelick should have recused herself only when it came to the questioning of Janet Reno. As the issue of communications and intelligence sharing between the FBI and the CIA pervaded the questioning of just about every person from either the Bush or the Clinton Administrations, Gorelick--being the person who ordered the FBI to go the extra mile to hide information from the CIA--is hopelessly conflicted on this key matter. Instead of asking questions, shouldn't she be answering them?
UPDATE: Robert Tagorda is also all over this story.
Jane Galt once again properly inveighs against the hindsight games that people play--which are threatening to fully engulf the 9/11 Commission's ostensible mission. Her words are worth quoting at length:
Pointing to a non-specific memo received by the White House, which said that Al-Qaeda meant to attack something in America, sometime, and saying that George Bush or his appointees could therefore have stopped the attack, is ludicrous. First of all, you don't know how many other pieces of information the administration was inundated with, from which you are expecting them to have picked this one as the single item most worthy of action. Second of all, it's not clear whether any action could have stopped the attack at that late date; the much vaunted capture of the Millenium Bomber was the result of a suspicious customs inspector looking for drugs, not some master plan on the part of the Clinton administration. And third of all, both administrations were working under outside constraints, both institutional and political, that would have prevented them from taking the kind of action that we now urge.You're Bill Clinton in Autumn of 1998. Tell me, specifically, what you would have done to take out Bin Laden, and how you would have persuaded Congress, the military, and the American public to back your plan. Give especial attention to your public relations strategy for responding to members of the Republican congress accusing you of a "Wag the dog" strategy. You must also include your mechanism for the execution or imprisonment of a large number of militants against whom there is insufficient evidence to bring a court case.
You're George Bush in August 2001. Tell me, specifically, what you would have done based on that memo, that would have a reasonable chance of apprehending the hijackers. "Put the government on alert" is glaringly insufficient. The memo says that Al Qaeda may want to hijack an airplane to secure the release of militants, or that it may aim to make some sort of attack in Washington. Given that you do not know which of these, if either, is true, nor when, where, or how the attack will come; given that the "chatter" to which opponents of Mr Bush like to refer has more often not presaged an attack (as we have seen with the numerous "Orange Alerts" and so forth); and given that any measures you take will be expensive and anger some subset of the population, what do you do? If your answers include, with astonishing foresight, such unprecedented things as strip searching passengers on domestic flights or ordering pilots not to open cockpit doors even after hijackers have begun killing passengers, please explain which of the tens of thousands of domestic flights taking off in the United States each day you plan to target; where you will get the extra personnel to do so; how you will respond when the ACLU and the airlines get a preliminary injunction against you for flagrantly violating passengers' civil rights; how you plan to sell the massive delays to the millions of angry passengers; what you are going to do about the inevitable Democratic charges of racial profiling; and how long you plan to keep this up, given that you have no idea whether an attack is due this week, this year, or at all? You must also include a section explaining what you are going to do about the North Korea expert shouting in your ear that you really need to pay attention to this intelligence saying that crazy Cousin Kim may have nukes.
In short, unless you're the kind of genius who manages your own small affairs with 20/20 foresight, this sort of blame game strikes me as pure partisan grandstanding. And if we cannot remove the taint of partisanship from the 9/11 commission, at least we can expect better of ourselves, and our commentariat, than to crassly exploit those tragic events for electoral advantage. Some things are just more important than scoring a win for the team.
The problem in general with commissions is that they find what they are tasked to look for. If you appoint a government commission on fairy rings, they'll do their damndest to dig one up, because after all, fairy rings are the reason we're all assembled in this big, important looking room with the columns and the picture of George Washington. That's the first problem I have with this thing.The second problem is that we are all seeking some reassurance that we can somehow prevent all this stuff in the future. Everyone is very earnestly asking "What changes do we need to make so that our intelligence doesn't (for example) tell us Iraq has WMD, or not tell us that Al-Qaeda's about to attack us?" Almost no one seems prepared to accept the possibility that the answer is "None. Intelligence just sucks." The energy expended trying to blame this failure on someone--George Tenet, Louis Freeh, Condoleezza Rice, or whoever--goes beyond mere regular partisan bashing. It seems to me to express an underlying conviction that of course someone could have stopped this--it's only a question of who. For the commission, especially, it's an unacceptable answer; they simply cannot turn to a frightened American public and tell them that it's really too bad, but we live in a scary world.
That's not even asking about the potential tradeoffs between costs and benefits. I'm rather more of a purist about civil rights issues, and so on, than most of the American public, so probably this resonates more with me than most, but consider the problem of container shipping. Container shipping revolutionized logistics, allowing goods to be transported faster and more efficiently, minimizing loss, and eliminating an entire job description (stevedores). We could not get rid of it and return to the old days of manually unpacking goods from ships, and repacking them on ground transport, without immense economic loss. Nor can we feasibly decide not to trade overseas. Yet there is a considerably higher-than-zero chance that something horrible--a massive bomb, a crate of anthrax, a suitcase nuke--will be brought into the United States this way. There is simply no way to avoid it without massive cost. And government logic dictates that we will not impose a massive upfront cost to minimize a merely probable threat.
I hope that the people on the Commission take heed of this kind of critique--which I have seen repeated elsewhere. It seems to me that the best contribution that the Commission can make is to show how we can do better in the future. But they appear to have been steered away from that kind of mission.
We'll never know, of course, but this certainly seems to be at least a plausible scenario. The only thing I would take issue with is the seeming contention that Presidents are removed by impeachment. They are not. Impeachment occurs in the House of Representatives. A President needs to be convicted in a trial in the Senate before being removed. Easterbrook seems to conflate the two.
Of course, if anyone argues that this alternative history would not have occurred in the way Easterbrook says it would have, I'm open to hearing their arguments. I just would have to see a novel explanation of how an American President who was involved in a recount controversy for over a month after the presidential election, who was accused of being installed into the Presidency by the U.S. Supreme Court, and who won a minority of the popular vote, could have gotten away with behaving in a manner consistent with the altnernative history without suffering some drastic political consequences.
Since my post yesterday, we now have a report further detailing the degree of threats that were reported in the August 6, 2001 PDB that was at the center of much of the questioning of Condoleezza Rice this week:
U.S. news reports say a memo given to President Bush a month before the September 11 attacks warned that al-Qaida was planning an attack on U.S. soil.The reports cite people familiar with an intelligence memo delivered to Mr. Bush on August 6, 2001.
The sources say much of the intelligence was uncorroborated, and that the memo did not warn specifically of the September 11 attack.
They say it did warn that al-Qaida was interested in hijacking planes and in carrying out an attack inside the United States using explosives.
The information about the explosives came from a report received by U.S. intelligence in May 2001, three months earlier.
Testifying before the government commission Thursday, the president's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, said the memo was "historical" in nature and not a warning of an imminent attack.
There is little actual detail in the news story, and I suppose that we will continue to have to wait and see if the Bush Administration will declassify the August 6th PDB. However, as the story mentioned, much of the intelligence was uncorroborated, and as such, probably was classified with the thousands of other uncorroborated threat reports the United States government receives in a day--something this news story backs up.
The thing that stands out in light of the new reporting--again--is that the reports were incredibly vague. Al Qaeda was interested in hijackings, and in carrying out attacks with explosives inside the United States. As Rice pointed out. we probably didn't need a report to tell us that. But it is exceedingly difficult at best to marshal the counterterrorism forces of the United States against threats that are so vague in nature.
Perhaps if the PDB is released, we will learn more about the nature of the threats. But from these news stories, it is impossible to conclude that the United States had any hard or definitive information--"actionable intelligence" to use the term du jour--that would have allowed it to stop the 9/11 attacks.
UPDATE: A redacted version of the PDB has been released. The closest thing that comes to a warning regarding plane hijackings is the following:
We have not been able to corroborate some of the more sensational threat reporting, such as that from a [deleted text] service in 1998 saying that Bin Ladin wanted to hijack a US aircraft to gain the release of "Blind Shaykh" 'Umar' Abd aI-Rahman and other US-held extremists.Nevertheless, FBI information since that time indicates patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York.
Clearly, this is not actionable intelligence. There is just nothing for the United States to go on in this document--at least not from what we the general public are able to see in it. I imagine that the other side of the partisan divide will naturally disagree, in their zeal to get the Bush Administration in trouble. Fine. Perhaps they will favor us with their wisdom then. What specific actions that were not taken in response to this incredibly non-specific information should have been taken? Could those actions have been taken given various legal impediments that existed prior to 9/11, and given the political environment of the time? And what chance would those hypothetical actions have had in stopping the attacks?
Oh, and show your work, as my math teachers always admonished me.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Bill Schneider is a confused individual. First of all, contra Schneider's seeming implication, the August 6th PDB only mentions "federal buildings in New York" (emphasis mine) as the potential targets for hijacked planes, and/or "other types of attacks." It does not even mention Washington, D.C., or any of the buildings there. Schneider should get his facts straight on the issue instead of reading more into the redacted memo than the memo itself contains.
Secondly, merely because Osama bin Laden has carried out attacks in the past does not mean that the uncorroborated information in the August 6th PDB was somehow corroborated. And the mere mention of New York and Washington, D.C. in an offhand manner is unfortunately not enough to raise alarm bells. Recall that the hijacked planes were supposed to be flying from the East Coast to California, and then got turned around. Even if a sixth sense told government officials to concentrate on New York and D.C., it would have been impossible to monitor all of the flights going elsewhere without more specific information.
Porphyrogenitus has quite the apt remark:
The daily news decided to go with an interesting headline, "Condi admits U.S. not on 'war footing' before 9/11". It's news that we weren't on a war footing before 9/11?The implication there is that Bush's Liberal critics were all clamoring for a war footing then, rather than a "peace dividend". But it isn't news that the country was not on a war footing in the '90s or the first several months of the Bush Administration. What is more newsworthy is that half the country, with John Kerry as their standard bearer saying he's uncomfortable with describing it as a war, doesn't think we should be on a war footing now . . .
Here is the transcript of the Q&A; session between Condoleezza Rice and the 9/11 Commission (at this time, the transcript does not appear complete--perhaps it will be updated later on). From what I heard on the radio, she appeared to answer the questions with a great deal of poise and calm--despite the fact that Bob Kerrey and Timothy Roemer were constantly trying to interrupt her, and were frankly being partisan in the fulfillment of their roles. Of course, I didn't watch or listen to the entire testimony, and I will want to look at the transcript in full--as well as perhaps catch a replay of the testimony on C-Span.
I will say that having used the words "poise" in describing what I heard of the testimony, it may be that I will have to swig a drink. Or perhaps I won a Bingo game.
We already know that Clarke's recent praise of the Clinton Administration's efforts against terrorism just doesn't match what he said in the past about the previous administration, and the work that it did on the issue. Now we find yet more evidence to undercut Clarke's claim that the Clinton Administration was somehow on the ball regarding the fight against terrorism:
The final policy paper on national security that President Clinton submitted to Congress — 45,000 words long — makes no mention of al Qaeda and refers to Osama bin Laden by name just four times.The scarce references to bin Laden and his terror network undercut claims by former White House terrorism analyst Richard A. Clarke that the Clinton administration considered al Qaeda an "urgent" threat, while President Bush's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, "ignored" it.
The Clinton document, titled "A National Security Strategy for a Global Age," is dated December 2000 and is the final official assessment of national security policy and strategy by the Clinton team. The document is publicly available, though no U.S. media outlets have examined it in the context of Mr. Clarke's testimony and new book.
Now, we need to be fair. It is very difficult to remember the time before September 11th when al Qaeda didn't occupy nearly the attention and concern that it now occupies in the American consciousness. Still, it is patently absurd to argue that the Clinton Administration was somehow making progress against the terrorists, and that the fight against terrorism simply went to hell in a handbasket when George W. Bush came to office. For one thing, it obscures the fact that the terrorists are the ones primarily responsible for the atrocities they committed--as opposed to some administration being primarily responsible. For another, this latest story shows that the story Clarke told Richard Miniter for the latter's book is more accurate on the record of the previous administration than is the information he is revealing in his own book.
UPDATE: Glenn Reynolds has a lot more on this issue.
A number of people have pointed out that Clarke's testimony before the 9/11 Commission differed from testimony that he gave earlier to Congress, as well as differing from statements that Clarke made to the press. Now comes Richard Miniter, who says that the information in Clarke's book differs rather dramatically from Miniter's book, Losing Bin Laden.
Why is this important? Because Clarke was a key source for the Miniter book:
Curiously, about the Clinton years, where Mr. Clarke's testimony would be authoritative, he is circumspect. When I interviewed him a year ago, he thundered at the political appointees who blocked his plan to destroy bin Laden's camps in Afghanistan in the wake of the October 2000 attack on the USS Cole. Yet in his book he glosses over them. He has little of his former vitriol for Clinton-era bureaucrats who tried to stop the deployment of the Predator spy plane over Afghanistan. (It spotted bin Laden three times.) He fails to mention that President Clinton's three "findings" on bin Laden, which would have allowed the U.S. to take action against him, were haggled over and lawyered to death. And he plays down the fact that the Treasury Department, worried about the effects on financial markets, obstructed efforts to cut off al Qaeda funding. He never notes that between 1993 and 1998 the FBI, under Mr. Clinton, paid an informant who turned out to be a double agent working on behalf of al Qaeda. In 1998, the Clinton administration alerted Pakistan to our imminent missile strikes in Afghanistan, despite the links between Pakistan's intelligence service and al Qaeda. Mr. Clarke excuses this decision--bin Laden managed to flee just before the strikes--as a diplomatic necessity.While angry over Mr. Bush's intelligence failures, Mr. Clarke actually defends one of the Clinton administration's biggest ones--the bombing of a Sudanese "aspirin factory" in 1998. Even at the time, there were good reasons for doubting that it made nerve agents. He fails to mention that in 1997 the CIA had to reject more than 100 reports from Sudan when agency sources failed lie-detector tests and that the CIA continued to pay Sudanese dissidents $100 a report, in a country where the annual per-capita income is about $400. The soil sample he cites, supposedly showing a nerve-gas ingredient, is now agreed to contain a common herbicide.
Last year Mr. Clarke made much of such failures. But this year he treats Mr. Clinton with deference. Indeed, the only man whom he really wants to take to the woodshed is President Bush. Mr. Clarke believes the Iraq war to be a foolish distraction from the fight against terrorism, driving a wedge between the U.S. and its Arab allies. In fairness, he might have noted that, since the war started, our allies (e.g., Saudi Arabia and Sudan) have given us more intelligence leads, not fewer. Considering its anti-Bush bias, maybe Mr. Clarke's book should have been called "Against One Enemy."
Or, better, "Against All Evidence." Mr. Clarke misstates a range of checkable facts. The 1993 U.S. death toll in Somalia was 18, not 17. He writes that Khalid Shaikh Mohammed became al Qaeda's "chief operational leader" in 1995; in fact, he took over in November 2001. He writes (correctly) that Abdul Yasim, one of the 1993 World Trade Center bombers, fled to Iraq but adds the whopper that "he was incarcerated by Saddam Hussein's regime." An ABC News crew found Mr. Yasim working a government job in Iraq in 1997, and documents captured in 2003 revealed that the bomber had been on Saddam's payroll for years.
Mr. Clarke gets the timing wrong of the plot to assassinate bin Laden in Sudan; it was 1994, not 1995, and was the work of Saudi intelligence, not Egypt. He dismisses Laurie Mylorie's argument that Iraq was behind the 1993 World Trade Center blast as if there is nothing to it. Doesn't it matter that the bombers made hundreds of phone calls to Iraq in the weeks leading up to the event? That Ramzi Yousef, the lead bomber, entered the U.S. as a supposed refugee from Iraq? That he was known as "Rasheed the Iraqi"?
Read the rest for more information on facts Clarke got wrong in his book. Any bets on whether Clarke will be asked--or whether he will volunteer--to explain the discrepancies?
William Fusz of the Bull Moose Republicans has made the following general announcement:
Defending the rule of law and promoting free trade are two of the foundational values of modern American conservatism. President Bush's immigration proposal has brought these two principles to the fore of public discussion within the GOP as faithful conservative loyalists debate the practical application of these two shared values as they apply to our country's present immigration situation.Authors are invited to interpret these two values - rule of law and free trade - philosophically and/or historically, and apply them in defense of or opposition to the specific immigration policy proposal of the Bush administration.
For source material, read the President's immigration proposal.
More information can be found here.
That may indeed be the case, according to this report:
Richard Clarke, a former aide to President George W. Bush who wrote a book criticizing the administration's response to terrorism, may have lied to lawmakers probing intelligence failures, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist said.The Tennessee Republican senator, 52, said on the Senate floor that in July 2002, Clarke told a House-Senate inquiry investigating the attacks that the administration had tried to thwart al-Qaeda beforehand.
"Loyalty to any administration will be no defense if it is found that he has lied before Congress,'' said Frist, referring to Clarke's position that while he was working for the White House, he avoided criticizing the president. Clarke, 53, worked as a special assistant to the president under Bush and President Bill Clinton. He left the administration last year.
Republicans are rallying to Bush's side after Clarke on Wednesday told an independent commission looking into the attacks that Bush hadn't made fighting terrorism a priority.
Clarke wasn't available for comment, said Carisa Hays, publicity director for his publisher, Free Press, owned by Viacom Inc.
If declassification does not compromise any ongoing operations, I'm all for it. Clarke has leveled some very serious charges under oath. Let's see if he was consistent about it.
UPDATE: Perhaps Clarke will be kind enough to explain his role in this as well--now that the issue of post-9/11 actions has become such a partisan football.
Dan Drezner pretty much hits the nail on the head. Remember the common line that every Washington memoir can be subtitled If Only They Had Listened To Me, and you will go a long way towards understanding the basis and foundations for Clarke's allegations.
UPDATE: Consider as well this post, which indicates that Clarke may have lied in testimony before the House Intelligence Committee. I don't have access to the pay page, so I can't comment that much, but it will be interesting to see if Porter Goss pushes this any further.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Still more on this issue from Stephen Green (here, here and here).
Having been out of pocket yesterday, I didn't have the chance to check out some of the interesting new Richard Clarke-related links that have come out. Fortunately--and not surprisingly--Glenn Reynolds has. Check here, here and here (assuming you are one of the few people who hasn't already done so, of course), and follow the links.
We are about to be confronted with the latest utterly ridiculous pseudo-scandal to hit the public since the nonsensical Paul O'Neill kerfuffle. Former terrorism advisor Richard Clarke has written a new book alleging that--hold your breath!--people in the Bush Administration talked about including Iraq in the scope of retaliation in the days immediately after September 11th.
What a stunner--especially considering the fact that two previous administrations considered Iraq a national security threat. I'm shocked, shocked that anyone could have brought up the possibility that a response scenario may have involved Iraq, particularly when one considers the fact that in the period shortly after the attacks, there was all sorts of speculation and free thinking as to what the response might have to entail.
Actually, I'm not shocked in the slightest. For the record, I wouldn't be surprised if there was discussion of other potential targets as well as an American administration had to find a response to an unprecedented and catastrophic asymmetrical attack on American soil. After all, Bob Woodward pretty much came out with this story two years ago. And Woodward's coverage directly contradicts Clarke--who alleges that the Bush Administration wanted to go after Iraq instead of going after Afghanistan.
From this portion of the Woodward special regarding a meeting of the national security principals:
As the meeting continued, Rumsfeld hammered on a point he had made before. He asked, "Are we going against terrorism more broadly than just al Qaeda? Do we want to seek a broader basis for support?"Bush said his instinct was to start with bin Laden. If they could strike a blow against al Qaeda, everything that followed would be made easier. But Rumsfeld worried that a coalition built around the goal of taking out al Qaeda would fall apart once they succeeded in that mission, making it more difficult to continue the war on terrorism elsewhere.
Powell argued that it would be far easier initially to rally the world behind the specific target of al Qaeda. They could win approval of a broad U.N. resolution by keeping it focused on al Qaeda.
Cheney again focused on the question of state sponsorship of terrorism. To strike a blow against terrorism inevitably meant targeting the countries that nurture and export it, he said. In some ways the states were easier targets than the shadowy terrorists.
Bush worried about making their initial target too diffuse. Let's not make the target so broad that it misses the point and fails to draw support from normal Americans, he said. What Americans were feeling, he added, was that the country had suffered at the hands of al Qaeda.
As the discussion turned to the shape of the international coalition, several things became clearer. Everyone believed that a coalition would be essential, particularly to keep international opinion behind the United States. But Bush was prepared, if necessary, to go it alone. The United States had an absolute right to defend itself, he believed, no matter what others thought; although he believed that the rightness of the cause would bring other nations along.
Cheney argued that the coalition should be a means to wiping out terrorism, not an end in itself -- a view that others shared. They wanted support from the rest of the world, but they did not want the coalition to tie their hands: The mission should define the coalition, not the other way around.
In that case, Rumsfeld argued, they wanted coalition partners truly committed to the cause, not reluctant participants. Powell offered what a colleague later described as the "variable geometry" of coalition-building. The coalition should be as broad as possible, but the requirements for participation would vary country by country. This would entail, as Rumsfeld put it, a coalition of coalitions.
Rumsfeld then raised the question of Iraq, which he had mentioned in the morning meeting. Why shouldn't we go against Iraq, not just al Qaeda? he asked. Rumsfeld was not just speaking for himself when he raised the question. His deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, was even more committed to a policy that would make Iraq a principal target of the first round in the war on terrorism and would continue to press his case. Arrayed against the policy was the State Department, led by Powell, and among those who agreed with him was Shelton, chairman of the Joint Chiefs.
Everyone around the table believed that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein was a menace, a leader bent on acquiring and perhaps using weapons of mass destruction. Any serious, full-scale war against terrorism would have to make Iraq a target -- eventually. The issue Rumsfeld raised was whether they should take advantage of the opportunity offered by the terrorist attacks to go after Hussein immediately.
Consider this as well:
The Pentagon briefing that day was conducted by Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, a senior defense official under Cheney during the administration of Bush's father, George H.W. Bush. Wolfowitz often gave voice to the views of an outspoken group of national security conservatives in Washington, many of them veterans of the Reagan and senior Bush administrations. These conservatives believed there was no greater menace in the world than Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, and they argued that if Bush was serious about going after those who harbor terrorists, he had to put Hussein at the top of that list.Iraq posed nearly as serious a problem for the president and his team as Afghanistan. If Hussein, a wily and unpredictable survivor, decided to launch a terrorist or even a limited military strike on U.S. facilities after Sept. 11 and the president had failed to move against him, the recriminations might never end.
Rumsfeld had raised the issue of Iraq during the previous day's national security meetings. Now, in the daily briefing, Wolfowitz issued an implicit public warning to terrorist states that was quickly taken as another effort to prod the president to include Iraq in his first round of targets.
"It's not just simply a matter of capturing people and holding them accountable, but removing the sanctuaries, removing the support systems, ending states who sponsor terrorism," Wolfowitz said. "It will be a campaign," he said, "not a single action. And we're going to keep after these people and the people who support them until it stops."
In its most benign form, it was merely a provocative restatement of the Bush Doctrine from the night of Sept. 11, but it was certain to alarm many U.S. allies. "Ending states who sponsor terrorism" – regime change – was not an easy task. The earlier Bush administration had gone to war with Hussein in 1991 but never attempted to oust him with military force.
Toppling Hussein would mark a major escalation of what the administration was trying to do. Nobody at that point had even agreed that Iraq should be part of the initial phase of the war on terrorism; in truth, at that point nobody other than Tenet was even talking about dislodging the Taliban, only threatening to punish the regime if it didn't break with bin Laden.
And this:
Rumsfeld raised another problem. Although everyone agreed that destroying al Qaeda was the first priority, singling out bin Laden, particularly by the president, would elevate bin Laden the way Iraqi President Saddam Hussein had been elevated during the Gulf War.Rumsfeld told the others the worst thing they could do in such a situation was to misstate their objective. It would not be effective to succeed in your objective of removing or killing bin Laden or Taliban leader Mohammad Omar without solving the basic problem of terrorism. Vilification of bin Laden could rob the United States of its ability to frame this as a larger war.
[. . .]
In this context, the issue of Iraq once again was on the table. The full sequence is not clear from the recollections and notes of several key participants. But all agree that the Iraq strategy's principal advocate in the group was Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz. He had been the department's third-ranking official under Cheney during the Gulf War and believed that the abrupt and incomplete end to the ground campaign, with Hussein still in power, had been a mistake.
The Bush administration had been seeking to undermine Hussein from the start, with Wolfowitz pushing efforts to aid opposition groups and Powell seeking support for a new set of sanctions. Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz had been examining military options in Iraq for months but nothing had emerged. The fear was that Hussein was still attempting to develop weapons of mass destruction, and without United Nations inspectors in the country, there was no way to know the exact nature of the threat they faced. Wolfowitz argued that the real source of all the trouble and terrorism was probably Hussein. The terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 created an opportunity to strike. Hussein was a bad guy, a dangerous leader bent on obtaining and probably using weapons of mass destruction. He also likely was culpable in the attacks of the previous Tuesday, at least indirectly, and all of them ought to acknowledge it.
Rumsfeld had helped raise the Iraq issue in previous meetings, but not as vehemently as his deputy. Now, Rumsfeld asked again: Is this the time to attack Iraq? He noted that there would be a big buildup of forces, with not that many good targets in Afghanistan. At some point, if the United States was serious about terrorism, it would have to deal with Iraq. Is this the opportunity?
Powell objected. You're going to hear from your coalition partners, he told the president. They're all with you, every one, but they will go away if you hit Iraq. If you get something pinning Sept. 11 on Iraq, great-let's put it out and kick them at the right time. But let's get Afghanistan now. If we do that, we will have increased our ability to go after Iraq-if we can prove Iraq had a role.
Bush let the discussion continue but he had strong reservations about Iraq. He was concerned about two things, which he described in an interview last month. "My theory is you've got to do something and do it well and that . . . if we could prove that we could be successful in this theater, then the rest of the task would be easier," he said. "If we tried to do too many things-two things, for example, or three things-militarily, then . . . the lack of focus would have been a huge risk."
His other concern was one that he did not express to his war cabinet but that he said later was part of his own thinking. He knew that around the table were a number of advisers-Powell, Cheney and Wolfowitz-who had been with his father during the Gulf War deliberations. "And one of the things I wasn't going to allow to happen is, that we weren't going to let their previous experience in this theater dictate a rational course for the new war," the president said.
Bush also noted that, whatever his comments were about Iraq that morning, they seemed to bring the debate to a close. "There wasn't a lot of talk about Iraq in the second [afternoon] round," he said. "The second round of discussion was focused only on Afghanistan, let me put it to you that way."
Wolfowitz had persisted in making his arguments about Iraq and other issues, and had annoyed some of his colleagues by showing up at meetings that were called for principals only-not for deputies. To Card, the president's chief of staff, it seemed as if Wolfowitz was just banging a drum, not providing additional information or new arguments.
[. . .]
Rumsfeld was next. We must not undercut our ability to act over the long term, he said, which meant they should keep thinking about what to do about terrorism in general. Patience was important. Rooting out bin Laden would take very different intelligence than they had. The doctrine of "hit, talk, hit," in which the United States would strike, pause to see the reaction, and then hit again, sounded too much like Vietnam. Rumsfeld said there was a need for unconventional approaches, especially the Special Forces information operations, in gathering intelligence on the ground.
But Rumsfeld, significantly, did not make a recommendation on Iraq.
I burden you with all of these excerpts in order to make a point--that considering Iraq as one of the targets of an American reprisal was well-publicized and reported long before the writing of the Clarke book. The considerations were entirely natural to entertain--again the United States was facing the aftermath of an unprecedented asymmetrical attack, and had to consider a whole host of options and responses in planning what truly was a new kind of war. In the end--contra the allegations in the Clarke book--the Woodward account makes clear that the Administration, Rumsfeld included at the end, decided to take the fight to Afghanistan instead of going after Iraq. Which is what happened, of course.
These subtleties are, of course, lost on the likes of Brad DeLong, who in the typically overwrought, hysterical and analysis-free style he has chosen to make his own, calls for Congress to "[i]mpeach George W. Bush. Impeach Richard Cheney. Do it now" in response to the non-revelation of the Clarke book. Apparently, DeLong hasn't read Art. II, sec. 4 of the United States Constitution, which contrary to popular rumor, does not say that "The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors, and for merely talking about Policy Options that do not Comport to the Desires of one J. Bradford DeLong."
It is genuine and fatuous silliness such as this that makes one wish at times that the Internet had never been invented. The time I spent reading through all of the hullabaloo regarding this recapitulation of the internal considerations of the Bush White House in the wake of September 11th, was time wasted. The time I spent reading DeLong's post is time I shall never get back. The only "story" we have is a story most of us were aware of since 2002, with the added bonus that some people advocate the skull-crushingly absurd notion that impeachment is warranted for policy differences.
And gee, here I was with the naïve notion that questions regarding policy are supposed to be resolved via the electoral process. A quaint notion for Brad DeLong and his ilk, I'm sure.
When the Valerie Plame scandal broke into full bloom a few months back, more than a handful of left-of-center bloggers appeared to make the claim that the scandal proved that Republicans could not be trusted on national security matters. Even more such comments could be found in various comments sections.
I call on people who are right-of-center not to engage in such demagoguery now that the shoe may be on the other foot. Such generalizations are low and dishonest. And while some on the other side may have failed to keep the debate clean, there is no reason why we should follow that poor example.
UPDATE: Of course, someone should perhaps tell certain members of the media that if we are going to draw relations between loyalty to the United States, and association with others, highlighting the fact that the alleged spy is a second cousin of White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card is far less relevant than which side of the partisan divide that actual alleged spy worked for. I think that either association is immaterial, but if we must make them, then blood relationships matter not a whit when compared with ideological implications. Yet guess which association gets the most attention in this second story.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Big Media is really lousy at covering this story. It really says something about the media's devotion to its ideological kin that they would spin this story so disgracefully.
Then this story could have inspired a brilliant campaign ad:
Voting with a thunderous "aye," Killington residents endorsed a plan Tuesday for the ski resort town to secede from Vermont.The overwhelming voice vote inside the elementary school opened the next chapter in what could be a long and costly push to join New Hampshire, a state 25 miles to the east. Town officials estimated between 200-300 people attended the meeting, and that about two-thirds of them supported the idea in the voice vote.
"Other towns have been sitting back and waiting for Killington to break ground," said Jim Blackman, 46. "It is Killington's obligation to break that ground."
Blackman's comments were echoed by many of the dozen-odd residents who spoke at the town meeting.
Their comments mirrored Killington's long-standing frustration over how much the town of roughly 1,000 pays the state in taxes and how little residents say they get in return to pay for the town's school and municipal services.
That frustration drove town officials to launch the secession movement last fall. The town already has spent about $20,000 studying the feasibility and potential advantages of joining New Hampshire, the state where it was originally chartered in 1761.
Secession activists say the legality and economic rationale behind the plan are sound.
Vermont lawmakers have given the plan a lukewarm reception. They have said it is largely symbolic and probably will be voted down by the Legislature.
"The state is treating us like a cash cow," said David Lewis, the town manager.
Yes, I know that Dean is no longer Governor. But this move likely stemmed from policies he implemented in the past, and represents a startling vote of no confidence in the manner in which Vermont conducts its affairs.
Pejmanesque has been a gay marriage-free zone. It's not that I don't find the issue interesting, it's just that I don't feel that I have anything particularly compelling to say on the issue that can't better be said by others. Thus, I spend my time writing about topics on which I feel I can make an actual contribution. For commentary on gay marriage, you can check out Andrew Sullivan in general, this post by Asparagirl, or this one courtesy of Jessica Harbour.
I just want to make that clear, in the event that anyone has been wondering about my silence on the issue. Also, I want to assure you that I am well aware of the debate surrounding the Federal Marriage Amendment, and what is currently going on in San Francisco.
Which is more than I can say for some people.
UPDATE: Okay, now that I think about it, I do have something to say about this issue--but it will have to wait a little bit. For now, I'll tell you that I oppose a constitutional amendment to define marriage, and I think that Scott Ganz's point--that Bush should refocus his attention to the War on Terror, rather than on the issue of gay marriages--is the right position to take. The states can deal with this issue on their own, and events have hardly reached the point where a Federal Marriage Amendment even needs to be considered. If it is any consolation, I don't think that such an amendment has a candle's chance in a cyclone of passing.
I'm just appalled--appalled, I tell you--by the efforts of an American President to outsource jobs that should belong to Americans.
Of course, my non-facetious thoughts on outsourcing can be discerned from reading this post.
Good News: Jane Galt reports that evolution has returned to the public school curriculum in Georgia.
Bad News: As Jane aptly points out, other forms of regulation are tougher to get rid of.
Stuart Buck has an excellent post on how to analyze intelligence and the level of acceptable error that we should be willing to accept. An excerpt:
Put it this way: It's well-known in statistical analysis that you're never going to have perfect information or a perfect statistical model. Thus, you are always going to run the risk of either Type I errors or Type II errors. A Type I error is technically defined as rejecting a true null hypothesis. That is, if the statement you're testing is "The drug Claxodil is safe," a Type I error would result if your test found that Claxodil was dangerous when it really was safe. A Type II error is technically defined as failing to reject a false null hypothesis. That is, if your test found that Claxodil was safe when it in fact was dangerous, you would have a Type II error on your hands.What's crucial to keep in mind, however, is that Type I and Type II errors are inversely proportional. This means that any time you reduce the risk of Type I errors, you're going to end up with more Type II errors. And vice versa.
In many areas of policy analysis, most people agree that it's better to avoid Type II errors, even if that means having more Type I errors. In the world of drug testing, for example, most people would rather have the FDA avoid the Type II errors in which a dangerous drug is approved and marketed to the public -- even if that means a few Type I errors in which safe drugs are denied approval.
This is especially true of left-wingers. When it comes to environmental decisions or genetically-modified food or approval of chemical pesticides or nuclear power or carbon emissions, left-wingers almost always argue that the government should err on the side of avoiding Type II errors. That is, the government should err on the side of preventing any development that might turn out to be harmful, even if that means taking the risk that the government bans some perfectly safe pesticides or nuclear plants or what-have-you.
I'd say that the same should probably be true of our decisions as to intelligence and war. In a Type II error, we underestimate the risk posed by the world's tyrants and terrorists. The risk -- displayed most drastically on Sept. 11 -- is that thousands of innocent civilians might die. In a Type I error, as the war on Iraq may have been, we overestimate the risk posed by the world's tyrants and terrorists. The risk was that some of our soldiers and some of Iraq's civilians would die.
This is key: In either case, there is a risk that some people will needlessly die. BUT -- with a Type I error like the war on Iraq, there are some enormous countervailing advantages. Most obviously, 1) an evil tyrant was deposed, 2) other tyrants elsewhere (e.g., Khaddafi) started to quake in their boots at the thought that they might be next, and 3) we have at least a shot at establishing a foothold for constitutional democracy in the Middle East. But I can't think of any substantial countervailing advantage to making Type II errors here, except that people like Michael Moore might be happier.
There's more. Be sure to check out the whole post.
Via InstaPundit, we have this post putting the budget deficit in perspective in terms of size:
As a percentage of the gross domestic product -- which many economists consider a better measure than simple dollar amounts -- the currently projected deficit, at 4.2 percent according to the Congressional Budget Office or 4.5 percent according to the Bush administration, is equal to or smaller than those recorded in six years during the 1980s and 1990s (6.0 percent in 1983, 4.8 percent in 1984, 5.1 percent in 1985, 5.0 percent in 1986, 4.5 percent in 1991, and 4.7 percent in 1992).
True. But consider this apt reply from my Congressman:
Recall that on 9-11, Congress was forced to scramble for emergency funds to defend our own soil. That moment was a wake up call. Our government -- wealthy beyond comprehension -- had earmarked a shocking pittance from its overflowing coffers to protect the very citizens who produced that wealth. During JFK's presidency, military spending constituted 50% of the federal budget. By the end of the Gulf war in 1991, it had declined in actual dollars by $61.8 billion -- to a mere 13% of the federal budget. Thirteen percent. That's less than a decent restaurant gratuity.And still the defense budget continued to decline throughout the 90's as all other spending went up. But we should not be surprised.
Even as the rubble of the World Trade Center and Pentagon still smoldered, there were those already wrapping themselves in the kryptonite cloak of September 11 to justify ever more government spending that had nothing to do with national security.
September 11th was, for some, a marketing ploy -- a convenient peg on which to hang the perennial ever-expanding wish lists. Wish lists that, in too many cases, had nothing to do with the proper function of the federal government.
The truth is: rapid, unsustainable increases in non-defense spending threaten our ability to protect American citizens, and to respond to future threats. Period. And that's precisely what's happening now -- so long as neither the Congress nor the president will say no.
At around this time in his presidency, Ronald Reagan had vetoed 22 spending bills. President Bush has vetoed not a single spending bill. During his first term President Reagan vetoed 39 bills. Through three years of his first term, President Bush has not vetoed any bills at all.
You'd have to go back to James Garfield in 1881 to find a president who did not veto a single bill -- and of course Garfield was shot after he had served only four months in office.
Don't misunderstand -- President Bush has shown a spine of steel, worthy of Mount Rushmore, in cutting taxes every year he's been in office. And when Congress has sent him worthy bills, he has signed them ... including the long-awaited ban on partial birth abortion. His leadership has increased the security of this country. We cannot over-emphasize the enormous good that was done in the liberation of Iraq and Afghanistan.Nothing can diminish those achievements. At the same time, conservatives must come together to defend our core values. All relationships -- if they are to be meaningful -- require honesty and conviction as well as congeniality.
This is not being contentious; it is being mature. We do our families and ourselves no favors by ignoring the big government elephant in the living room.
Excessive spending doesn't have to represent a large percentage of GDP to be wasteful, and even though the deficit may be smaller than previous years by percentage of GDP, it still represents an expansion in government that should make all conservatives and libertarians nervous. To be sure, the Columbia Journalism Review offered some much needed perspective on budget numbers. But Christopher Cox offered equally valuable perspective on the growth of government to unreasonable levels. Small government advocates would do well to take heed of his warnings.
An excellent essay by Christopher Hitchens:
Those who love the Near East are fond of repeating the legendary anecdotes of one Nasreddin Hodja, a sort of Ottoman Muslim Aesop of the region with a big following among Greeks and Greek Cypriots as well as among Turks, Syrians, Lebanese, Iraqis, and others. On one occasion, this folkloric wise man went to the hammam, or Turkish steam bath. His undistinguished and modest demeanor did not recommend him to the attendants, who gave him brief and perfunctory attention before hustling him out to make room for more prosperous customers. They were duly astonished when he produced an enormous tip from under his robes, and when he paid a return visit some time later, they were waiting for him with the richest and warmest towels, the longest and most detailed rubdown, the finest oils, the most leisurely service of sherbet, a long soak, and the most obsequious attendants. As he departed, the old man dropped a few meager coppers into their outstretched palms and, when they began to protest, told them: "The last tip was for this time. This tip is for the previous time."So Saddam Hussein finally got his reward for all the unpunished times. Well, history doesn't move in a straight line, and irony is a dialectical hairpin. But if he really didn't have any stores of unlawful WMD, it was very dumb of him to act as if he still did or perhaps even to believe that he still did. And it seems perfectly idiotic of anybody to complain that we have now found this out (always assuming that we have, and that there's no more disclosure to come). This highly pertinent and useful discovery could only be made by way of regime change. And the knowledge that Iraq can be finally and fully certified as disarmed, and that it won't be able to rearm under a Caligula regime, is surely a piece of knowledge worth having in its own right and for its own sake.
David Kay and his colleagues in the post-1991 inspections met with every possible kind of evasion, deceit, and concealment. Then they had to watch as their most golden inside informers, the Kamel brothers, were lured back to Iraq by their father-in-law on a promise of safe conduct and put to death at once. Who would trust a word uttered by this gang, after that? It has since been established, by the Kay report, that there was a Baath plan to purchase weapons from North Korea, that materials had been hidden in the homes of scientists, and that there was a concealment program run by Qusai Hussein in person. This may look less menacing now that it has been exposed to the daylight, but there was no reason not to take it extremely seriously when it was presented as latent.
Read it all.
By linking to this South Knox Bubba post, Brad DeLong--if I may borrow a phrase--"screams and leaps, fangs bared, for the jugular of [his blogger opponents]. However, he trips over a tree root and falls off a cliff."
According to SKB--and by incorporation, to DeLong--I am almost to be felt sorry for, since when it comes to the issue of WMD's in Iraq, I am supposedly like a "rube at a sideshow" who got conned. DeLong and SKB come to this conclusion as a result of this post of mine, in which I say that "I think that [David] Kay is going to prove invaluable in resolving the question about WMD's."
I'm sure that more inculpatory posts and writings exist to prove that I believed that WMD' existed in Iraq, so I'm surprised that DeLong and SKB rely on such a lame statement--all I said was that Kay would help resolve the WMD issue. I have a search engine on my site, so perhaps they can go through and find something a little more damning (whatever their definition of "damning" is).
However, let me make it easy for DeLong, SKB and their ilk by restating that I believed that WMD's existed in Iraq. And now, I'll do the heavy labor as well. Given that DeLong and SKB rely on cheap and mindless sloganeering, and eschew what one might consider more sophisticated analysis, allow me to recapitulate recent history regarding Iraq, and the issue of WMD's.
As mentioned in this post,
I've seen a lot of people claim that they "always knew" that there were no WMD's in Iraq, which is why they opposed the war. I presume that these same people are making tons of money in the stock market--what with the fabulously effective crystal ball that they must have at their disposal. The truth is that there was an overwhelming belief on the part of intelligence agencies all over the world that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.
That overwhelming evidence was nicely summarized by Robert Kagan in this excellent piece:
Start with this: The Iraqi government in the 1990s admitted to U.N. weapons inspectors that it had produced 8,500 liters of anthrax and a few tons of VX. Where are they? U.N. inspectors have been trying to answer that question for years. Because Hussein refused to come clean, the logical presumption was that he had hidden them. As my colleague, nonproliferation expert Joseph Cirincione, put it bluntly in a report last year: "Iraq has chemical and biological weapons." The only thing not known was where they were and how far the Iraqi weapons programs had advanced since the inspectors left in 1998.Go back and take a look at the report Hans Blix delivered to the U.N. Security Council on Jan. 27. On the question of Iraq's stocks of anthrax, Blix reported "no convincing evidence" that they were ever destroyed. But there was "strong evidence" that Iraq produced more anthrax than it had admitted "and that at least some of this was retained." Blix also reported that Iraq possessed 650 kilograms of "bacterial growth media," enough "to produce . . . 5,000 litres of concentrated anthrax." Cirincione concluded that "it is likely that Iraq retains stockpiles of anthrax, botulinum toxin and aflatoxin."
On the question of VX, Blix reported that his inspections team had information that conflicted with Iraqi accounts. The Iraqis claimed that they had produced VX only as part of a pilot program but that the quality was poor and the agent was never "weaponized." But according to Blix, the inspections team discovered Iraqi documents that showed the quality of the VX to be better than declared. The team also uncovered "indications that the agent" had been "weaponized." According to Cirincione's August 2002 report, "it is widely believed that significant quantities of chemical agents and precursors remain stored in secret depots" and that there were also "thousands of possible chemical munitions still unaccounted for." Blix reported there were 6,500 "chemical bombs" that Iraq admitted producing but whose whereabouts were unknown. Blix's team calculated the amount of chemical agent in those bombs at 1,000 tons. As Blix reported to the Security Council, "in the absence of evidence to the contrary, we must assume that these quantities are now unaccounted for."
Today, of course, they and many other known weapons are still unaccounted for. Does it follow, therefore, that they never existed? Or does it make more sense to conclude that the weapons were there and that either we'll find them or we'll find out what happened to them?
The answer depends on how broad and pervasive you like your conspiracies to be. Because if Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair are lying, they're not alone. They're part of a vast conspiratorial network of liars that includes U.N. weapons inspectors and reputable arms control experts both inside and outside government, both Republicans and Democrats.
Maybe former CIA director John Deutch was lying when he testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Sept. 19, 1996, that "we believe that [Hussein] retains an undetermined quantity of chemical and biological agents that he would certainly have the ability to deliver against adversaries by aircraft or artillery or by Scud missile systems."
Maybe former defense secretary William Cohen was lying in April when he said, "I am absolutely convinced that there are weapons. . . . I saw evidence back in 1998 when we would see the inspectors being barred from gaining entry into a warehouse for three hours with trucks rolling up and then moving those trucks out."
Maybe the German intelligence service was lying when it reported in 2001 that Hussein might be three years away from being able to build three nuclear weapons and that by 2005 Iraq would have a missile with sufficient range to reach Europe.
Maybe French President Jacques Chirac was lying when he declared in February that there were probably weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and that "we have to find and destroy them."
Maybe Al Gore was lying when he declared last September, based on what he learned as vice president, that Hussein had "stored secret supplies of biological and chemical weapons throughout his country."
Finally, there's former president Bill Clinton. In a February 1998 speech, Clinton described Iraq's "offensive biological warfare capability, notably 5,000 gallons of botulinum, which causes botulism; 2,000 gallons of anthrax; 25 biological-filled Scud warheads; and 157 aerial bombs." Clinton accurately reported the view of U.N. weapons inspectors "that Iraq still has stockpiles of chemical and biological munitions, a small force of Scud-type missiles, and the capacity to restart quickly its production program and build many, many more weapons." That was as unequivocal and unqualified a statement as any made by George W. Bush.
Indeed, as referenced in the January 25th post of mine, and brought to my attention originally by Power Line, the 1999 UNSCOM report stated that "the United Nations concluded that Iraq had under-reported its production of those materials, including anthrax and VX, had systematically lied to and deceived the U.N. inspectors, and had wholly failed to account for the weapons' current whereabouts." (Power Line's summary.) And in March of last year, UNMOVIC reported that "Based on all the available evidence, the strong presumption is that about 10,000 litres of anthrax was not destroyed and may still exist." (From the UNMOVIC report.) In the event that DeLong and SKB need still further reminders of the state of the intelligence on Iraqi WMD's, they need only look here.
Given the above, the debate in the run-up to the war was as follows: Had sanctions, the enforcement of the no-fly zones, and the lingering aftereffects of Operation Desert Storm sufficiently defanged Saddam? Or was he re-arming/ha he re-armed, and was it the case that in the post-September 11th world, taking a chance on containment could no longer be afforded? The issue of whether Saddam even had WMD's was taken as a given on a bipartisan level, as is pointed out here.
It is important to note the above with regard to the state of the debate because of the many people who now self-servingly claim that they "always knew" that Iraq never had WMD's. How they "knew" is a mystery, of course. As stated, intelligence reports from multiple sources formed a broad consensus for more than a decade, and lasting through three Administrations that WMD's were present in Iraq. Are we to believe that these people were on the ground in Iraq and saw differently? Are we to believe that they somehow found the magic intelligence bullet that evaded the U.S., the U.N., the French, the Germans, the British, the Democrats and the Republicans?
Well, of course not. What these people did--assuming arguendo for a moment that there really was a time when they believed that Iraq never had WMD's--was to perform the functional equivalent of taking a coin, assigning "No WMD's" to the heads side, assiging "WMD's present" to the tails side, and base their decision on the fact that the coin came up heads. In other words, in the face of the mountain of evidence to the contrary, these people took a wild-assed guess on the existence of WMD's--adopting a view so extremely in the minority, and if stated, stated with so much equivocation that it is perhaps an overstatement to say that a school of thought even existed for it. Again, assuming arguendo that these people were correct, is this the way to perform intelligence analysis? Should it be? After all, you can take a complete novice at dart-throwing, get him rip-roaringly drunk, blindfold him, spin him around until the nausea fully sets in, and he might still hit the dartboard with the dart. That doesn't make the dart-thrower an expert, now does it? And it wouldn't make the crowd around him any less liable to duck the next time he lets fly with a dart, would it?
What the DeLong/SKB school of thought also neglects to mention is the fact that all of the resolutions passed by the Security Council pursuant to Iraq's WMD's demanded not only the destruction of those WMD's, but also demanded the accounting of that destruction. No such accounting was ever presented, thus giving the international community every right to believe that Iraq had WMD's, and refused to get rid of them. Iraq further failed to reassure the world community by refusing to allow Iraqi scientists to answer questions posed by UNMOVIC inspectors without an official government minder. Any reasonable, thinking person would take all of this evidence, and conclude that Iraq had something to hide. Now, of course, we get reports like this one, stating that after 1998,
. . . Iraqi scientists realized they could go directly to Mr. Hussein and present fanciful plans for weapons programs, and receive approval and large amounts of money. Whatever was left of an effective weapons capability, [David Kay] said, was largely subsumed into corrupt money-raising schemes by scientists skilled in the arts of lying and surviving in a fevered police state.
But in the post-September 11th world, no one was going to take a chance on that kind of theory, even if the theory was correct. Even sans September 11th, if someone publicly suggested that the WMD debate--a debate that occupied a dozen years of attention from three successive American administrations--was just the result of a con that Iraqi scientists were running on Saddam Hussein, they would have been laughed out of the public square. And it would surprise me not in the least if people like DeLong and SKB joined in the laughter.
(Furthermore, it should be noted (again) that the ceasfire resolution that brought Operation Desert Storm to an end required Iraqi cooperation with activities like the no-fly patrols over Iraq. No such cooperation was offered, and Iraq repeatedly attacked American and British planes. Such aggression blatantly violated the terms of the ceasefire, adding yet another justification to force Iraq to comply with relevant U.N. resolutions.)
Now, DeLong and SKB cite David Kay--per the comments of people like me to the effect that Kay would "prove invaluable in resolving the question about WMD's"--to argue that people like me should now repent and recant our support for the war. After all, according to the report that DeLong and SKB cite, Kay said the following:
I don't think [the stockpiles of biological and chemical weapons that everyone expected to be there] existed. I think there were stockpiles at the end of the first Gulf War and those were a combination of U.N. inspectors and unilateral Iraqi action got rid of them. I think the best evidence is that they did not resume large-scale production, and that's what we're really talking about, is large stockpiles, not the small.
But as long as we are quoting David Kay, this article--originally linked to here--should perhaps be mentioned as well:
David Kay, the former head of the coalition's hunt for Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, yesterday claimed that part of Saddam Hussein's secret weapons programme was hidden in Syria.In an exclusive interview with The Telegraph, Dr Kay, who last week resigned as head of the Iraq Survey Group, said that he had uncovered evidence that unspecified materials had been moved to Syria shortly before last year's war to overthrow Saddam.
"We are not talking about a large stockpile of weapons," he said. "But we know from some of the interrogations of former Iraqi officials that a lot of material went to Syria before the war, including some components of Saddam's WMD programme. Precisely what went to Syria, and what has happened to it, is a major issue that needs to be resolved."
And then, via Robert Tagorda, we have this interview with the following exchange between Kay and National Public Radio's Liane Hansen:
Liane Hansen: Knowing what you know now, though, did Iraq pose an imminent threat?Kay: Liane, I think this is one of the questions the American public and politicians are going to have to grapple with. "Imminent" depends -- it's a risk assessment. How risky are you to run? And in the shadowing effect of 9/11, it seems to me that you recalculate what risk based on the intelligence that existed. I think it was reasonable to reach the conclusion that Iraq posed an imminent threat. Now that you know reality on the ground, as opposed to what you estimated before, you may reach a different conclusion -- although I must say I actually think Iraq, what we learned during the inspection, made Iraq a more dangerous place potentially than, in fact, we thought it was even before the war.
(Emphasis Tagorda's.) As Tagorda properly notes, Kay "observes that our intelligence may have even underestimated how dangerous Iraq was -- a point that seems to help the hawks." Indeed, if Kay's description is correct, Iraq was rapidly turning into a version of Taliban-dominated Afghanistan thanks to the many terrorists that were passing through the country, and thanks to the lack of centralized control regarding weapons programs and activities.
None of this, of course, is cited by DeLong or SKB in their posts. Wonder why . . . In any event, see also this post by Tagorda analyzing Kay's recent statements, which I recommend highly. (Of course, I would recommend that you read Robert Tagorda all the time. Even if--God forbid--he sustains a massive, gushing head wound as a result of incurring the wrath of a herd of stampeding mastodons, he would still manage to put together a more coherent and cogent analysis of the issues of the day than either DeLong or SKB. But that is another story.)
So as to SKB's and DeLong's offers to feel sympathy for me, I'm glad to tell them that I neither need, nor require it from them. I have no problem defending my position or arguments. I believe that given all that we knew--and know--the war was justified. We could not afford to take a chance on what the international community overwhelmingly believed regarding Iraqi WMD's. The U.N. resolutions were flagrantly violated. And it was clear that a message had to be sent to others in the Middle East who would have been enemies of the United States. If Saddam Hussein had been half as cooperative as Muammar Qaddafi is being now, he might have avoided war with the United States, and remained in power. Saddam failed to do that, however--making his ouster well-merited. Qaddafi appears, of course, to have learned the lesson that Saddam failed to understand, and will therefore likely be spared a similar onslaught. It's that simple.
Would that DeLong and SKB understood that. I almost feel sorry for them given their relative cluelessness.
Almost.
UPDATE: Sebastian Holsclaw makes an excellent point--stating that the failure of international diplomacy regarding the vigorous enforcement of U.N. resolutions relating to Iraq also prevented us from finding out more about Iraq's weapons program:
. . . Bush I was convinced to avoid going in to Iraq partially based on the idea that international community would work together to keep Saddam contained. This was a serious issue, because the UN revealed that Saddam was only about 6-12 months from getting access to nuclear weapons before the Gulf War, which put him about 4 years ahead of where the UN anti-proliferation groups thought he was before he invaded Kuwait. But the international will to implement UNSCOM was seriously lacking. For a short overview see here . By 1997 it was clear that Saddam was allowed to obstruct the inspectors at will with no consequence. At the same time, he was starving his own people while stealing money from the 'Food for Oil' program. This allowed him, in effect, to get paid for starving his own people while simultaneously using the starvation to leverage further international discontent with containing him. By January 2002 France, Germany and Russia were suggesting that all sanctions be lifted and all inspections be waived. This despite the fact that inspectors had not been in Iraq since 1998 and that they had not been allowed to work in Iraq since late 1996. When Bush went to the UN in 2002 he revealed a crisis that diplomacy had papered over for more than four years. We now know that Iraq did not maintain programs just before the 2003 invasion. If the international community had bothered to muster the will to have intrusive inspections in the 1990s we might have known that before now. Instead they pretended to be dealing with it diplomatically while actually just ignoring the problem. (And please no revisionist history about how we knew that before. France, the leading anti-war advocate did not respond to the UK when a minister said that every intelligence agency in Europe 'knew' that Saddam was still seeking WMD).
It is nice to see that non-defense and Homeland security related spending is only being held to an increase of less than 1%. Of course, it is still an increase, which is worse than a cut, and which means that still more pressure should be brought to bear on the Bush Administration to reduce the size of government.
Hopefully, some in Congress can take a crack at that with reasonable amendments to the budget proposal. Meanwhile, it would be nice to see the White House actually veto something to convince us that it will indeed hold the line against future spending increases.
Well, not really. But this story speaks to the overwhelming consensus that existed regarding Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. And it is notable that after all this time, Clinton's opinions on this issue are utterly indistunguishable from the those "hardline neoconservatives" of the Bush Administration.
Many people have complained that thus far, President Bush hasn't called in any of his staffers into his office to confront them about the role they might have played in releasing the identity of Valerie Plame to the press. The complaints basically center around the belief that Bush could force the truth out if he was serious about finding out the source of the leak.
But Mark Kleiman, one of the previously complaining voices, now tells us that this complaint is wrong and unfair:
While it's true that Bush could issue such an order, and fire anyone who failed to comply, and it's true that doing so would either (1) get the bad guys off his staff right away or (2) set them up for impossible-to-defend perjury (and perhaps accessory-after) charges later, it is also true that doing so would complicate, rather than simplifying, the process of criminal investigation and prosecution. Under an Supreme Court case about a corruption investigation in the NYPD, when a governmental employer makes such a demand, the employee acquires a use-immunity for any material produced in response to that demand.So if the President wanted to clean his own house, he could do so, but only by putting any subsequent criminal charges at risk. (Prosecutors would have to show an independent source for each piece of evidence; the equivalent rule for Congressional hearings is what got Ollie North off.)
Therefore I have been wrong to criticize Mr. Bush for failing to do so, and all the people who have been ignoring me have been correct.
I even disagree with the first paragraph, as I've mentioned before. It is doubtful that whoever did this is simply going to confess--they may face criminal charges, after all (assuming that this defense doesn't apply, of course). But it is good to know the rest of what Kleiman reveals--it may help clear up some of the debate on the Plame affair. I haven't had a chance to find ouut which Supreme Court case Kleiman refers to, but I hope to do that soon.
If you say the word "Halliburton" to some people, it is like waving a red flag in front of a bull, showing a dirty picture to someone who recently took a vow of chastity, or . . . well . . . mentioning the USA PATRIOT Act to the uninitiated. Nervous twitching begins, rashes form, foaming at the mouth occurs--you know the drill.
Today, Byron York tries to point out that much of the recent hullabaloo over Halliburton is just that. Hopefully, someone is listening.
So what do New Yorkers think about this? I'm not sure what to think, as I haven't seen a detailed picture or blueprint of the proposed building, and the rendition in the story isn't exactly the best or most detailed one around.
Comments are below. Use them.
UPDATE: Here is a better picture.
Look, I understand that Tapped is never going to give the Right the time of day, much less credit in most any debate. I understand that it has an editorial position, and that it makes its arguments from an ideological perspective. I respect that--I make ideological arguments too, and there is a time and place for that.
But posts like this one are just ridiculous. First of all, as much as people like Matt Yglesias may want to argue to the contrary, the actions of Plame and Wilson have a great deal of bearing on this story. Both Plame and Wilson have claimed that the former's life and livelihood--not to mention, the national security of the United States--were put into jeopardy by the leaking of Plame's identity. Fine. Wilson has claimed that his wife "would rather chop off her right arm than say anything to the press and she will not allow herself to be photographed." Fine. So the obvious question arises: Why have all of these sentiments been trampled in Plame's and Wilson's recent decision to reveal themselves in Vanity Fair? Indeed, as mentioned earlier, there are a whole host of obvious questions that are raised by the Vanity Fair exposé. Merely saying that "Whether or not Wilson or Plame are 'serious people' is, frankly, irrelevant," does nothing to answer those questions, and any thinking person would demand more substantive answers.
And then there is this gem, responding to the charge that Wilson and Plame are self-promoters:
. . . the entire Bush national security team posed for a Vanity Fair photo spread in the magazine's February 2002 issue. But I'm sure self-promotion had nothing to do with that.
Well, I'm sure it did have something to do with it. But, of course, "the entire Bush national security team" does not consist of a single person whose identity needs to remain secret. On the contrary, it consists of politicians, for whom "self-promotion" is mother's milk. Circumstances are quite different for Wilson and Plame--by Wilson's and Plame's own insistence. Supposedly, Plame cannot and should not be exposed to the media. But she is exposed to the media--by her own choosing, and by the choosing of her husband. Are we ever going to hear a rationalization of this double-standard and hypocrisy that does not depend on inapposite analogies and strained comparisons such as the one above?
Incidentally, it is possible to state both that the leak of Valerie Plame's identity should be fully investigated and any guilty parties should be sent to jail, and that Wilson and Plame are idiotically undermining the gravity of their own charges through their rather shameless self-promotion.
In fact, I just made that statement. Surely others can follow, can they not?
And a hint of normalcy returns:
Commuter train service reopened Sunday at the World Trade Center site, marking the first rebuilding project to be completed there and the first time the public is allowed back since Sept. 11, 2001.The first train glided smoothly into the rebuilt station, filled with officials and politicians and uniformed train conductor David McQuillan peering out one of its side windows.
"It just feels good," said the 15-year veteran of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which operates the train service connecting the two states under the Hudson River.
To have seen this when I was in New York . . .
For the longest time, I was unalterably opposed to any concept of drug legalization--given my concerns that legalization would increase the number of the addicted, as well as send the wrong message regarding society's view of drug use.
I'm still pretty much opposed, but I am wondering whether I should soften my stance regarding marijuana. I'm not sure though. On the one hand, there is the question of medicinal use, and the argument made by plenty of people who I respect that smoking a joint is less dangerous than going to a bar and having drinks--and potentially waking up with a hangover the next day. At the same time, there are plenty of reports stating that marijuana is more dangerous than many give it credit for, and the possibility that the medicinal use exception could be abused.
Where do my readers stand and why? Include your statements and supporting links in the comments section below. Be responsive and thorough, while at the same time, being civil. Thanks.
If demagoguery could power the United States through a blackout, Robert Kuttner and Paul Krugman would be true national resources. As it stands, they are some of the most disingenuous and offensive commentators to be found, as this post points out.
Mark Steyn discusses the reaction to the blackouts in New York, and cmes up with a priceless observation:
A friend in Lower Manhattan was in the lift when the power died, and he thought initially this is it, it's happening again. Then he called his wife, found out what was going on, and started plotting his escape. At least in this part of town, Americans have internally absorbed September 11.They are not waiting to be led sheep-like through lame photo-ops by Mayor Bloomberg. The bad news is that as of Saturday morning the Department of Homeland Security website, which is supposed to be the one-stop shop for all your national emergency updates, still had nothing at all on the blackout. The good news is nobody cared.
I don't know if the blackouts were some kind of heroes' trial, but if they were, Americans passed them with aplomb, no matter what various foreign news services imply to the contrary.
If someone puts Lynne Kiesling in charge of making sure that there are no further power outages. Her solution seems the right road to take in addressing the danger of future blackouts.
This isn't what one wants to read on a Monday:
The 29-hour blackout that hit New York City on Thursday cost its economy about $1.05 billion or $36 million per hour, city officials said on Monday.The power outage kept about $800 million of economic activity from taking place and destroyed $250 million of perishable goods in the Big Apple, according to New York City Comptroller William Thompson.
"That does not include lost tax revenues or overtime pay," said Michael Egbert, assistant press secretary for Thompson.
City and state officials in other areas were generally not prepared on Monday to estimate the economic impact of the blackout.
Nick Schulz sums up the proper lessons of the blackout perfectly:
Maybe the blackout will prompt folks like Sens. Joe Lieberman and John Kerry -- or their comrade in arms in green causes Sen. John McCain -- to pause and register a moment of appreciation for a delicate technological infrastructure that didn’t just magically happen. And to realize overhauling it with the heavy and indiscreet hand of the state might not be the easiest or wisest thing in the world to do.
Hope springs eternal.
A lot was made yesterday about a story purporting to cut the pay of American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. James Taranto, however, has received a letter from an Air Force Captain disputing the story:
Neither the Pentagon nor Congress has any plans of removing the family-separation allowance or the hostile fire/imminent danger pay from all of our deployed troops.I am currently deployed to Uzbekistan in support of Operation Enduring Freedom. As a captain (O-3) and a deployed member, I am entitled to the following benefits in addition to my regular pay:
$3.50 per diem (to cover miscellaneous expenses, soap, snacks, etc). $3.50 per day for one 30-day month comes to $105. This is the least amount given to every deployed military member and may be increased based on the cost of living in the deployed area.
Hostile fire/imminent danger pay. Currently set at $150 a month for members deployed in support of Operations Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom. The Pentagon is reviewing whether or not those areas that are no longer considered dangerous deserve this specific pay. This will not affect those members deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan.
Family separation allowance. Currently set at $250 per month. This pay is given to any military member who is away from his family for at least 30 days. Congress increased the amount to $250 from $150 a month after Sept. 2001 and reviews it each fiscal year to determine whether to should drop it back to $150.
Tax-free status. Given to every military member deployed to a combat/imminent danger zone. And this amount is not prorated. If I deploy on June 30, my pay for the entire month of June is tax free. If I go home on July 1, all of July is tax-free as well. This is given to the military member by not withholding FICA from his monthly paycheck--and that month is not considered part of total taxable income on the W-2. As a captain with 10 years of total military service, my monthly pay increased approximately by $600.
So for my deployment to Uzbekistan, I receive additional benefits totaling $1,105 a month. In the worst-case scenario, the Pentagon is considering for my area to remove hostile fire pay and reduce family separation back to $150. Based on that, my total benefits would drop to $855.
There it is, for whatever it is worth.
I really don't have a lot to say about this issue, because whatever needs to be said can be found on InstaPundit. I think the point that this event will teach us how we will react to a terrorist threat needs reiterating, however. It's clear that we were caught short in some ways by the blackout, and that we need to step up our response to this and other national emergencies. We have conflicting stories of how the blackout came about, people engaging in the blame game on the second day of the event (surely setting a new speed record in that regard), and no real plan for dealing with future blackouts with anything resembling a backup emergency system. I suppose that's the reason people are now talking about modernizing the power grid. It would be about time.
I imagine that there are a bunch of people in the Homeland Security Department who are wondring why we haven't yet wargamed how we would respond to a power blackout--or alternatively (and more frighteningly) why it is that whatever wargaming that has takn place has proven to be so ineffective.
We'll all continue to monitor what happens with the blackouts. But make no mistake--we have peered into what one scenario of a future terrorist attack or national calamity might look like, and we have been found wanting in a number of ways. Maybe it's time to get on the ball here.
No, that's not what I'm doing, though I imagine that someone, somewhere, might be. I'm relieved to see that terrorism does not appear to be a factor, and I'm hopeful that the outage will not spread to my hometown of Chicago. One report I heard indicated that it already has, while the reports I linked to say nothing about Chicago being hit.
Needless to say, I'll be sure to post more information once I come across that information.
Bob Novak isn't the most reliable reporter, but given the fact that this report seems to coincide with this post, I'm inclined to find it credible:
Former international weapons inspector David Kay, now seeking Iraqi weapons of mass destruction for the Pentagon, has privately reported successes that are planned to be revealed to the public in mid-September.Kay has told his superiors he has found substantial evidence of biological weapons in Iraq, plus considerable missile development. He has been less successful in locating chemical weapons, and has not yet begun a substantial effort to locate progress toward nuclear arms.
Senior officials in the Bush administration believe Kay's weapons discoveries should have been revealed as they were made. However, a decision, approved by President Bush, was made to wait until more was discovered and then announce it -- probably in September.
Here is why:
A top Bush administration weapons investigator told Congress in closed testimony last week that he has uncovered solid information from interviews, documents, and physical evidence that Iraqi military forces were ordered to attack US troops with chemical weapons, but did not have the time or capability to follow through, according to senior defense and intelligence officials.The alleged findings by David Kay, a former UN weapons inspector now working for the United States, would buttress the administration's claim that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was concealing weapons of mass destruction -- a key component of President Bush's case for war that has since fallen into dispute.
Kay's report acknowledged that his team of 1,400 investigators had not yet found any such weapons, raising the possibility that Hussein either hid them, destroyed them, or was simply bluffing in his orders to the Republican Guard.
Kay told Congress his team is searching new sites almost daily, interviewing scientists and captured leaders, and sifting through thousands of pages of documents, officials said.
A summary of his report, described by officials who have seen it, said Republican Guard commanders were ordered by Hussein's regime to launch chemical-filled shells at oncoming coalition troops, and that Kay believes he will soon know why the shells weren't launched.
''They have found evidence that an order was given,'' but no definitive explanation for why the weapons weren't used, said a senior intelligence official with access to Kay's report who asked not to be identified.
I think that Kay is going to prove invaluable in resolving the question about WMD's. I wonder, however, what advantage there would have been to the Iraqis for Saddam to bluff in his orders to the Republican Guard. The only ones who would have been bluffed in that instance would have been the Republican Guard, unless Saddam intended that the orders leak to the coalition forces. And since the orders have just been discovered, it doesn't appear that they have leaked at all. American forces were aware of indications that WMD use was ordered, but this really didn't seem to do much to help Hussein in terms of a bluff.
(Link via InstaPundit.)
It would appear that those who doubt their existence had better reconsider their opinions:
The United States has found evidence of an active program to make weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, including "truly amazing" testimony from Iraqis ordered to dupe UN inspectors before the war, the man leading the hunt said Thursday.David Kay, a former United Nations inspector who is joint head of the Iraq Survey Group, offered an unprecedentedly optimistic assessment of the hunt for weapons of mass destruction.
Although he called for patience, he predicted that doubters were in for a "surprise" by the time his work was done.
His 1,400-strong team of American, British and Australian experts now scouring Iraq has not yet found actual biological or chemical weapons, Kay told private Senate hearings.
But there was mounting evidence of an active WMD program, he said.
That evidence included documents detailing how to conceal arms plants as commercial facilities, and for restarting weapons production once the coast was clear, officials told reporters.
If Kay's report turns out to be what I expect it will--and what this report seems to indicate it will--I wonder what lame excuses we will hear next dismissing the findings. And we will hear lame excuses by the bushel--too many people have invested too much prestige bashing the casus belli to go back and admit error even if they are eventually proven completely wrong.
A new Bush administration proposal for Amtrak's future could end the government-subsidized railroad's monopoly on intercity passenger rail travel, a congressional supporter says.Officially, the legislation is intended to eliminate unprofitable long-distance routes and force states to give more financial support to intercity passenger rail.
Amtrak has been under severe pressure from Congress and the Bush administration to end its dependency on government cash and start turning a profit. The passenger railroad has received government subsidies every year of its 32-year existence.
Michael Jackson, outgoing deputy transportation secretary, described the broad outlines of the plan to the Senate Commerce Committee in April. He said a bill would soon follow, and that proposal is going to Congress Tuesday.
Rep. John Mica, R-Fla., a senior member of the House Transportation subcommittees that deal with railroads and transportation infrastructure, was briefed on the administration's proposal last week.
"If properly implemented, this could be as dramatic as the establishment of the interstate highway system in the Eisenhower years," Mica said.
Reforming Amtrak is long overdue, and it's wonderful to see that people are finally thinking seriously about doing it. I was beginning to wonder when that rathole would finally tax the patience of all involved.
Any day that sees both the deaths of Uday and Qusay Hussein and the return home of Private First Class Jessica Lynch is a wonderful day indeed.
It is especially wonderful to contemplate the fact that Uday and Qusay were brought down by an Iraqi informant. This indicates that for all of the problems still being faced by the country, and for all the fears that the Ba'athist regime may return, Iraqis are still willing to help and assist coalition forces. Now that the heirs to Saddam's regime are dead and gone, they will be even more willing to help.
Like I said, a perfect day. May it be a harbinger of all kinds of good news to come.
Steven Den Beste has a thorough and comprehensive post discussing the reasons and background behind the war in Iraq. It is very long, but highly recommended. And as those who check the post out will see, it is certainly more intelligent and on-point than the "discussion" of the issue provided by Steven's interlocutor.
Then read this.
Then ask yourself why more people in the media are not making the points raised in this article.
I found this report more than a little amusing:
Last fall, the administration repeatedly warned in public of the danger that an unprovoked Iraqi President Saddam Hussein might give chemical or biological weapons to terrorists."Iraq could decide on any given day to provide a biological or chemical weapon to a terrorist group or individual terrorists," President Bush said in Cincinnati on Oct. 7. "Alliance with terrorists could allow the Iraqi regime to attack America without leaving any fingerprints."
But declassified portions of a still-secret National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) released Friday by the White House show that at the time of the president's speech the U.S. intelligence community judged that possibility to be unlikely. In fact, the NIE, which began circulating Oct. 2, shows the intelligence services were much more worried that Hussein might give weapons to al Qaeda terrorists if he were facing death or capture and his government was collapsing after a military attack by the United States.
"Saddam, if sufficiently desperate, might decide that only an organization such as al Qaeda, . . . already engaged in a life-or-death struggle against the United States, could perpetrate the type of terrorist attack that he would hope to conduct," one key judgment of the estimate said.
It went on to say that Hussein might decide to take the "extreme step" of assisting al Qaeda in a terrorist attack against the United States if it "would be his last chance to exact vengeance by taking a large number of victims with him."
If this is indeed the kind of intelligence reporting that gets to the President, I would hope that it was deliberately ignored. The reasoning is absurd beyond measure. Under normal circumstances, we are to believe that Saddam Hussein would not have given any assistance or support to al Qaeda. But then the NIE states that if Saddam is attacked, then he would make common cause with the group because he would be "desperate." And this makes sense . . . how, exactly? If Saddam had an interest in making common cause with al Qaeda, he wouldn't have waited to be attacked in order to do it. If he waited until then, the creation of a relationship might take far too long to be of any benefit to Saddam.
Note the fact that the NIE assumes that Saddam would want to attack the United States through terrorism. The only question appeared to be whether Saddam would do it alone, or whether he would ally with al Qaeda. But Saddam's malevolent intentions are the premise on which the NIE is based.
The whole basic argument that Saddam could become more dangerous if placed under heavy attack by the United States is astonishing in nature. It brings to mind Obi-Wan Kenobi's "If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine" argument--one which works fine in science fiction, but doesn't work all that well in real life. Dead is dead, folks. And when one is confronted with an enemy like Saddam Hussein, one prefers him dead. We don't know whether Saddam is dead, of course, but we do know that he wields no power whatsoever. Jedi logic doesn't work in real life.
The piece also brings to mind this hilarious satire by the much-missed Michael Kelly:
"Good evening, and welcome to 'All Is Lost,' the nightly public affairs program produced by National Public Radio and the British Broadcasting Corp. Tonight we discuss what has been called America's war against terror. I am your host, Perfectly Modulated Voice of Reason."With me, in our Washington studio, are: Fabled Newsman Who Was There When Saigon Fell . . . Scientifically Trained Impartial Scholar . . . and Bureau Chief of Second-Rate Regional Monopoly Newspaper Who Is Desperate to Be Hired by the New York Times. From London, we are joined by our European affairs analyst, Loathes America and Prays for Its Swift Destruction.
"First, today's war news. Tens of thousands of Afghans in liberated Kabul greeted President George W. Bush with wild cheers and much waving of American flags. The mayor of Kabul, in a traditional gesture of welcome, presented President Bush with the head of Osama bin Laden on a pike. Accepting the gaily decorated head, Mr. Bush quipped: 'This shall not stand -- at least not without this handy pike!' Meanwhile, across the Middle East, news of the so-called allied victory in Afghanistan appeared to be producing remarkable changes in the political dynamic. Radical Islamic fundamentalism, as Western critics perhaps unfairly call it, seemed under attack. . . .
"In Iran, tens of thousands of men lined up at barber shops for shaves and Western-style haircuts, with the majority favoring the 'mullet' look, which is popular, we are informed, with young men in some American regions where we have actually never been. . . . In Iraq, President Saddam Hussein remained for the fifth day under siege in his summer palace as hundreds of thousands of students gathered outside chanted, 'Hey hey, ho ho, the Great and Maximum Leader for Life has got to go.' . . .
"The governments of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait pledged today to develop armies sufficient to protect themselves without American assistance, pointing out that it was wrong to ask the United States to shoulder the burden of defending their wholly corrupt oligarchies. In Israel, newly appointed tourism minister Yasser Arafat announced a new policy of 'peace at any cost.' Saying 'I must have been meshugenah,' Arafat declared: 'Of course, Jerusalem must be the capital of the Jewish homeland, any fool can see that.'
"Gentleman, given all this, the question is obvious -- Is there any reason to even go on?"
Chorus: "No . . . no . . . utterly hopeless . . . doomed . . . repudiation of entire U.S. strategy. . . . A colossal failure . . . no hope."
Perfectly Modulated: "Scientifically Trained, why doomed?"
Scientifically Trained: "Well, it is important to put all this into context. In the Islamic world, things are never what they seem. As the great Hashemite warrior Abdullah the Less Than Brilliant expressed it, 'The victory of my enemy is my victory.' This is how this week's events will be seen in what I like to call the Arab street -- as a prelude and a catalyst to a great uprising against American interests, led by an entire new generation of martyrs inspired to jihad by U.S. belligerence."
It appears that Abdullah the Less Than Brilliant is now writing National Intelligence Estimates for the U.S. government. That would explain a few things.
They bring such perspective to overblown and overhyped events. This article is too good to excerpt, so just read.
(Link via Stephen Green, who has better things to do than blog.)
When reading this report, keep in mind the fact that the Daily Howler isn't exactly a conservative electronic screed.
Up until now, the issue has been whether the White House ignored CIA evidence regarding Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, or whether the CIA was somehow pressured to skew its intelligence. Thus far, I haven't seen any evidence of the latter. As for the former--it would appear that the CIA was quite emphatic on the issue of whether Iraq had WMD's:
An intelligence assessment by the CIA last October cites "compelling evidence" that Saddam Hussein was attempting to reconstitute a nuclear-weapons program, according to documents released Friday by the White House.Mounting a campaign to counter criticism that it used flawed intelligence to justify war with Iraq, the White House made public excerpts of the intelligence community's October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate. That report helped shape now-challenged comments by President Bush in his State of the Union address that Iraq was attempting to buy uranium in Africa.
The report asserts that Baghdad "if left unchecked...probably will have a nuclear weapon during this decade."
It also cites unsubstantiated reports that Iraq was trying to buy uranium from three African countries: Niger, Somalia and "possibly" Congo.
Not having seen the NIE, I don't know whether it lends any credibility to the "unsubstantiated" reports, or whether those reports were "unsubstantiated" in the first place. However, there appears to be plenty of guidance and support for the claim that Iraq had WMD's--especially when one considers the fact that the belief that Iraq possessed WMD's spanned three American administrations, other countries, and was adopted by UNSCOM. The interesting thing--and I have mentioned this before--is that the British still stand by their belief that Iraq tried to purchase uranium from Niger. I hope that evidence can be declassified--it would help us get to the bottom of things.
So I too am going to direct you to the latest column by Mark Steyn.
Need I tell you to read it all?
Here is Keith Burgess-Jackson on the Iraq-Uranium controversy and the case for war:
What I want to examine is the question whether a false statement made by President Bush in his State of the Union address undermines the justification for the war in Iraq. I have heard it said ad nauseam that, since the justification for the war rested on Iraq's having a nuclear capacity, the fact that Iraq had no such capacity makes the war unjustified. Let me make some assumptions so as to sharpen the issue. First, let's assume that Iraq had no nuclear capacity, or even an intention to acquire such a capacity, at the time the United States military crossed its borders. Second, let's assume that President Bush knew about Iraq's lack of a nuclear capacity at the time he made his State of the Union address. In fact, let's assume the worst: that President Bush told a bald-faced lie.I have made the assumptions most favorable to President Bush's critics. But these assumptions still don't render the war unjustified. In fact, I doubt very much that the hypothesized lie made any difference to most people's thinking about the justification for war. The only people who have reason to complain about the so-called lie are those who supported the war only because they believed President Bush when he said (falsely) that Iraq tried to obtain uranium from Niger. These are people who, without this belief, would have opposed the war, but who, with the belief, supported it. Are you in that class? I didn't think so. I doubt that many people are.
Many of us believed the war to be justified even without an Iraqi nuclear threat. To us, President Bush's "lie" (still assuming this for the sake of argument) is immaterial. We did not rely on it, so it does not affect our assessment of the morality of the war. In our view, the falsehood was a "harmless error." This legalism sheds light on the debate. There are two types of error that trial judges commit: harmful and harmless. Only the former are a basis for reversal and retrial. Mistakes were made, the appellate court says, but they were immaterial to the outcome. They were trivial, formal, or merely academic. This legal doctrine has obvious merit, for if every error, however harmless, were a basis for reversal and retrial, few cases would reach closure and we would have no resources for other public goods. No trial is perfect, after all.
The funny thing, of course, is the fact that this issue is receiving so much attention, while President Clinton's utterly mistaken bombing of an aspirin factory in Sudan--a bombing that was carried out without nearly the amount of background history that the Iraq-uranium story had (and remember that the British still stand by that story)--received no criticism whatsoever from those who now claim that "Bush lied!". I guess hypocrisy must have no limits.
UPDATE: Daniel Drezner, as always, has an interesting take on the issue:
Look, Frank Gaffney overreaches when he says this is pure partisanship. It's perfectly valid to question the policy process that led to the SOTU screw-up, and part of me is grateful that it's happening.I can't get exercised about it, however. My reasons for supporting an attack on Iraq had little to do with the WMD issue. The uranium question was part of one rationale among many the administration gave for pushing forward in Iraq. I'm not saying this should be swept under the rug, but the level of righteous indignation that's building up on the left is reaching blowback proportions.
Jonah Goldberg discusses all of the reasons why, despite all of my abhorrence of what Gray Davis has wrought in California, I am not willing to support a recall petition.
So is Richard Epstein. But not for the reasons that you might expect.
I had my say on this issue a while back, and when I wrote my piece, I was worried, as I said at the time, that "A headlong rush to legislate will only make for nice political theater. It will do nothing to restore investor or market confidence. And it will fail utterly to stop corporate malfeasance, while further harming economic performance." I regret to see that my views are confirmed by an observer as astute as Epstein.
But Stephen Green discusses one which is downright loony.
Someone in the comments section speculated that maybe Jayson Blair actually wrote the column. I hope so--I thought that Krauthammer was better than this.
Arthur Silber thinks so. His logic is compelling.
Can we do a "2 for 1" recall operation that might be coordinated between New York and California? It's becoming an attractive option.
I hope and trust that we will consider the quotes mentioned here as the corroborting evidence for the intelligence indicating the presence of weapons of mass destruction.
I haven't been as exercised about the issue of the RAVE Act sponsored by Senator Joseph Biden as has Glenn Reynolds. But this shouldn't be ignored, and is patently outrageous:
During Prohibition, the government required that industrial alcohol be poisoned, typically with methanol, to keep it from being converted into cocktails. If bootleggers did not completely remove the adulterant, it could cause blindness, paralysis and death. Thus a measure aimed at discouraging alcohol consumption made it more hazardous for those who continued to drink.A similar dynamic can be seen in today's war on drugs. The latest example is a law President Bush signed last month. The measure, attached to the Amber Alert bill by Senator Joseph Biden, Democrat of Delaware, holds club owners responsible for drug use on their property. The main target — reflected in the rider's original name, the Reducing Americans' Vulnerability to Ecstasy (RAVE) bill — is the all-night dance parties, or raves, where the drug MDMA, also called Ecstasy, is popular.
The act prohibits "knowingly opening, maintaining, managing, controlling, renting, leasing, making available for use, or profiting from any place for the purpose of manufacturing, distributing or using any controlled substance." Given this broad language, anyone who organizes or rents space for an event where drug use takes place could face criminal charges. Not only is the law unlikely to keep people from using Ecstasy, it could magnify the drug's dangers by pushing raves further underground and discouraging voluntary efforts to protect users from serious harm.
[. . .]
For years volunteer groups like DanceSafe have been passing out fliers at raves and night clubs with advice on how to avoid dangerous overheating — drink water, take frequent breaks, abstain from alcohol (which compounds dehydration). Event sponsors have helped by providing bottles of water and ventilated "chill out" rooms, measures intended not to encourage drug use but to reduce drug-related harm. Under the new law, however, such sensible precautions could be seen as evidence that the host or owner knew guests would be using drugs, exposing him to $250,000 or more in civil penalties, a criminal fine of up to $500,000, and a prison sentence of up to 20 years.
Can any action more self-defeating be contemplated or conceived?
At long last, Eric Rudolph has been found and arrested.
Here's a link to the story. The reports are that no one has been injured. I hope they stay that way, and my thoughts and prayers are with all those who are affected.
That you see a fundamental shift in thinking regarding what should constitute the American security doctrine.
If you don't understand what I just wrote, then click here. Everything is explained.
I'm sure readers remember the recent crackdown on dissidents in Cuba, and how the crackdown was blamed on American opposition to Cuba's totalitarian dictatorship--with the theory being that since the United States has spoken out against Castro and his regime, Castro felt the need to crack down on dissidents as a defensive measure.
Given that background, I am sure that this story will be used as the next excuse for Castro's human rights violations:
The United States has ordered 14 Cuban diplomats serving at the United Nations and in Washington to leave the country, implying that they had been spying.The Cubans were being expelled "for engaging in activities deemed harmful to the United States" - the usual diplomatic way of referring to espionage.
Havana is likely to see the expulsions as a sharp escalation in the confrontation between the two nations, the BBC's Greg Barrow at the UN says.
Relations between Cuba and the US, poor at the best of times, have recently deteriorated significantly.
The US was highly critical when Cuba imprisoned 75 journalists, librarians and opposition figures and executed three Cuban hijackers who tried to take a boat to the US.
The executions triggered international protests, including condemnation by the Pope.
The Cuba Policy Foundation, a lobbying group dedicated to ending the US embargo of Cuba, disbanded in protest at the crackdown on dissent.
I'm sure that it will somehow be made out to be our fault that Cuban diplomats are spying on the United States. Just about any and all abuses on the part of the Castro government are blamed on the U.S.. Why should this be any different?
Can we have more people pick up Hilary Kramer's apt point that there is no conflict of interest or other form of impropriety involved in having companies like Halliburton working in post-war Iraq? I have tried my best to destroy the ridiculous meme to the contrary, but others are needed to do the same. It's not like the argument against the meme is hard to make.
But this just can't be good:
A nuclear reactor in Texas is leaking cooling water from the bottom of its giant reactor vessel, a development that experts view with concern because they have never seen it before, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission said today.Technicians at the South Texas Nuclear Project, about 90 miles southwest of Houston, have found residues indicating that cooling water leaked from the vessel through two penetrations where instruments are inserted into the core, according to the company that operates the plant. Operators at all 103 commercial nuclear reactors have been giving closer attention to their reactor vessels since the discovery last year of extensive leaks in the vessel head at another plant, Davis-Besse, near Toledo, Ohio.
The Texas plant, South Texas 1, shows much smaller signs of leakage than the Ohio plant. In both cases, technicians found deposits of boron, a chemical added to the water to control the nuclear reaction, which remains after the water evaporates. At Davis-Besse, technicians cleaned out boron with shovels; in Texas, technicians found an amount about half the volume of an aspirin tablet, according to Ed Halpin, the plant general manager.
I haven't heard much about this on the TV news. Wonder why--it would seem like a natural story to cover.
When are you going to find time to complain about this? Thus far, Glenn Reynolds is one of the few people to have been consistent on this issue.