JustOneMinute

Let's Make It Two Out Of Four

Don Luskin provides what we all hope is the final answer on Krugman's puzzling assertion that:

About the evidence regarding a manual recount: in April 2001 a media consortium led by The Miami Herald assessed how various recounts of "undervotes," which did not register at all, would have affected the outcome. Two out of three hypothetical statewide counts would have given the election to Mr. Gore. The third involved a standard that would have discarded some ballots on which the intended vote was clear. Since Florida law seemed to require counting such ballots, this standard almost certainly wouldn't have been used in a statewide recount.

We had a long head-scratcher offering the point that, under one subset of the scenarios they evaluated, the Miami Herald did in fact find that two out of three pointed to Gore.

But wait!  As Don Luskin notes, in versions of the story that went out on the wire, the Herald subdivided a scenario favorable to Bush, and reported that Gore and Bush each won two scenarios.  The eerily prescient Patterico had warned about this sort of thing when he wrote:

Third, Krugman’s formulation is a play on words that describes two standards favoring Bush (“two-corner detachments” and “clear punches”) as only one (“at least two corners detached”), making it seem like Bush won under only one standard. But you could just as easily describe the two Gore standards (“any dimples” and “dimples with other dimples”) as a single standard (“dimples”). With that verbal sleight of hand, you could say Bush won two of three standards (“two-corner detachments” and “clear punches”) vs. Gore’s one (“dimples”). It’s the same thing, but — presto-change-o! — Bush, not Gore, wins two of three.

Now, for the benefit of the folks who still care, we actually have a mild lead to the other half of Krugman's error and correction, which involved voter turnout in Ohio (Miami County, naturally, since we can't escape Florida).  Fortunately, we are not defending Krugman - it turns out that conspiracy-minded Dems lost track of their own spin, with comical results.  From Krugman's correction:

Corrections: In my column last Friday, I cited an inaccurate number (given by the Conyers report) for turnout in Ohio’s Miami County last year: 98.5 percent. I should have checked the official state site, which reports a reasonable 72.2 percent.

Here is the Conyers document, here is the official state site (via Powerline), and all seems to be well with the world.

But we wonder - were Conyers and Krugman hallucinating when they came up with that 98.5% figure?  Here at JustOneMinute we are 98.5% committed to the truth, so we poked around a bit, and found the seed from which this propaganda grew - "Hacking the vote in Miami County" by Richard Hayes Phillips, Ph.D.

Apparently, turnout was weirdly high in two precincts - Concord SouthWest at 98.55%, and Concord South at 94.27%.  Of course, there were other irregularities as well, and I have not attempted to run down explanations.

Last winter, Dem activists and Conyers' staffers were able to maintain the distinction between "precinct" and "county".  However, perhaps blinded by rage, the distinction blurred and disappeared, with the result shown by Krugman above.

New Orleans

The NY Times has extensive coverage of the hurricane, including this on New Orleans.

Glenn Reynolds has a huge collection of links for aid and donations, as does the Bear.

Stampede In Baghdad

From Reuters:

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Nearly 650 Iraqi Shi'ites died in a stampede on a Tigris River bridge in Baghdad on Wednesday, panicked by rumours a suicide bomber was about to blow himself up, an Interior Ministry official told Reuters.

Most victims were women and children who "died by drowning or being trampled" after panic swept a throng of thousands of people heading to a religious ceremony, the official said.

Dridge has the My Way version.

More broadly, Gregory Djerejian provides a long reading list to work through on Iraq, including this article from Francis Fukayama.  Some excerpts:

Within the Republican Party, the Bush administration got support for the Iraq war from the neoconservatives (who lack a political base of their own but who provide considerable intellectual firepower) and from what Walter Russell Mead calls "Jacksonian America" - American nationalists whose instincts lead them toward a pugnacious isolationism.

Happenstance then magnified this unlikely alliance. Failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and the inability to prove relevant connections between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda left the president, by the time of his second inaugural address, justifying the war exclusively in neoconservative terms: that is, as part of an idealistic policy of political transformation of the broader Middle East. The president's Jacksonian base, which provides the bulk of the troops serving and dying in Iraq, has no natural affinity for such a policy but would not abandon the commander in chief in the middle of a war, particularly if there is clear hope of success.

This war coalition is fragile, however, and vulnerable to mishap. If Jacksonians begin to perceive the war as unwinnable or a failure, there will be little future support for an expansive foreign policy that focuses on promoting democracy. That in turn could drive the 2008 Republican presidential primaries in ways likely to affect the future of American foreign policy as a whole.

...We do not know what outcome we will face in Iraq. We do know that four years after 9/11, our whole foreign policy seems destined to rise or fall on the outcome of a war only marginally related to the source of what befell us on that day. There was nothing inevitable about this. There is everything to be regretted about it.

Able Danger - Spying on US Citizens? [With UPDATE]

AJ Strata finds more on Able Danger from WTOP, and it connects nicely with a recent post by the Captain speculating that privacy concerns are hindering Able Danger type programs.

Here is the lead from WTOP:

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

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

And why did Able Danger die?

"The I.G. (inspector general) came in and shut down the operation because of a claim that we were collecting information on U.S citizens," says Smith.

It turned out to be more than just a claim.

"On some of my charts I had links to U.S citizens," he says.

Smith notes that it's illegal for the military to collect intelligence on U.S. citizens.

Oh, boy.  If the program was illegal, that might explain why the Pentagon did not provide many details to the 9/11 Commission.

I can not find an actual Pentagon statement.  And it is certainly possible that WTOP is hyping an out of context quote.  For example, a spokesperson may have said "there's no reason to doubt the specific recollections..., but we can't find any support for it."

However, the admission by Smith that there were legal problems noted by the IG seems like an obvious clue for follow-up - if the IG killed this program, there must be files.

And if the IG killed it, who buried it?

UPDATE:  WTOP updates their story:

WASHINGTON - The names of U.S. citizens with connections to the military, political organizations and educational institutions reportedly turned up when the Pentagon collected intelligence as part of its Able Danger effort.

The Pentagon shut down the data mining operation that uncovered the names of the Sept. 11, 2001, hijackers a year before the terror attacks.

Defense contractor J.D. Smith who worked on the project says his job was to find connections among people and where those connections went.

The names and the origin of the information turned out to be so sensitive that Smith says,"It cost me a contract and a eventually my job at the company that employed me at the time."

But the names the intelligence group investigated turned out not to be connected with al Qaida.

Sources familiar with Able Danger say the project was shut down because it could have lead to the exposure of a separate secret data mining project focusing on U.S Citizens allegedly transferring super-sensitive U.S technology illegally to the Chinese government.

Emphasis added - it sounds as if Smith is describing the China meltdown reported in the NY Post; we have a generous excerpt after the break.

The Times On Judy Miller (Again)

The NY Times rises to defend Judy Miller and descends to parody:

Last week a Paris-based journalists' organization called Reporters Without Borders sent around an impressive petition in support of Ms. Miller. It was signed by prominent European writers, journalists and thinkers including Günter Grass, Bernard-Henri Lévy, the French philosopher, and Pedro Almodóvar, the Spanish filmmaker. The text should be required reading for the judge, the prosecutor and the White House.

Oh yes, the White House surely ought to read it - I have no doubt they are interested in the opinions of Günter Grass, Bernard-Henri Lévy, and Pedro Almodóvar.

Perhaps the Times is under the misapprehension that John and Teresa won last fall.

Arriana tackles the abusrdity of the Time position; Jesse suggests a simpler resolution.

William E. Jackson Jr. of E&P pored through earlier Times editorials on Ms. Miller a few days back.

And on the subject of the media malfeasance in this story, Digby researches Tim Russert's obfuscations.  We love it!

After the break we will point out a couple of flaws in the stirring text presented by these Euro-heavyweights who are no doubt, as Arriana observed, well-versed in the intricacies of this case.

Titan Rain II - Its TIME Has Arrived

Unable to resist a cool code name, TIME has plunged in to the Titan Rain story about Chinese hackers targeting US military networks.  TIME gives us more new code names ("Spiderman" - OK, no points for originality there) but also has some details which suggest that this story may be a legitimately big deal.

Here is our original post, and a link to a round-up of commentary by a lot of IT bloggers.  The skeptic's gist was this - it may simply be that some Chinese spammers constantly on the lookout for targets of opportunity are being mistaken as hackers targeting military networks.  And why would the military make this mistake?  Because they don't talk to each other, and consequently, take each attack personally, rather than chalking it up to a mass hack attempt.

The latest TIME story notes that possibility but presses full speed ahead:

Carpenter [Aka "Spiderman"] gave chase to the attackers. He hopped just as stealthily from computer to computer across the globe, chasing the spies as they hijacked a web of far-flung computers. Eventually he followed the trail to its apparent end, in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong. He found that the attacks emanated from just three Chinese routers that acted as the first connection point from a local network to the Internet.

...

In Washington, officials are tight-lipped about Titan Rain, insisting all details of the case are classified. But high-level officials at three agencies told TIME the penetration is considered serious. A federal law-enforcement official familiar with the investigation says the FBI is "aggressively" pursuing the possibility that the Chinese government is behind the attacks. Yet they all caution that they don't yet know whether the spying is official, a private-sector job or the work of many independent, unrelated hands. The law-enforcement source says China has not been cooperating with U.S. investigations of Titan Rain. China's State Council Information Office, speaking for the government, told TIME the charges about cyberspying and Titan Rain are "totally groundless, irresponsible and unworthy of refute."

Despite the official U.S. silence, several government analysts who protect the networks at military, nuclear-lab and defense- contractor facilities tell TIME that Titan Rain is thought to rank among the most pervasive cyberespionage threats that U.S. computer networks have ever faced. TIME has obtained documents showing that since 2003, the hackers, eager to access American know-how, have compromised secure networks ranging from the Redstone Arsenal military base to nasa to the World Bank. In one case, the hackers stole flight-planning software from the Army. So far, the files they have vacuumed up are not classified secrets, but many are sensitive and subject to strict export-control laws, which means they are strategically important enough to require U.S. government licenses for foreign use.

And here is an echo of Able Danger, as well as a partial explanation about sources.  We have an aggrieved whistle-blower, a bungled Government program, unimaginative bureaucrats - the usual list:

Federal rules prohibit military-intelligence officers from working with U.S. civilians, however, and by October, the Army passed Carpenter and his late-night operation to the FBI. He says he was a confidential informant for the FBI for the next five months. Reports from his cybersurveillance eventually reached the highest levels of the bureau's counterintelligence division, which says his work was folded into an existing task force on the attacks. But his FBI connection didn't help when his employers at Sandia found out what he was doing. They fired him and stripped him of his Q clearance, the Department of Energy equivalent of top-secret clearance. Carpenter's after-hours sleuthing, they said, was an inappropriate use of confidential information he had gathered at his day job. Under U.S. law, it is illegal for Americans to hack into foreign computers.

Carpenter is speaking out about his case, he says, not just because he feels personally maligned—although he filed suit in New Mexico last week for defamation and wrongful termination. The FBI has acknowledged working with him: evidence collected by TIME shows that FBI agents repeatedly assured him he was providing important information to them. Less clear is whether he was sleuthing with the tacit consent of the government or operating as a rogue hacker. At the same time, the bureau was also investigating his actions before ultimately deciding not to prosecute him. The FBI would not tell TIME exactly what, if anything, it thought Carpenter had done wrong.

This is a useful clue for folks looking for other leads on this story:

The attacks were also stinging allies, including Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, where an unprecedented string of public alerts issued in June 2005, two U.S. network-intrusion analysts tell TIME, also referred to Titan Rain-related activity. "These electronic attacks have been under way for a significant period of time, with a recent increase in sophistication," warned Britain's National Infrastructure Security Co-Ordination Center.

Fair enough - here is some commentary on Britain's National Infrastructure Security Co-Ordination Center ("NISCC"), and the NISCC announcement (a 9 page .pdf file).

Forbes had a story on Chinese hacking end cyberespionage; the Government Computer News had something too.

The Senate is looking into some aspect of the Carpenter situation or Titan Rain, as we see on page 4:

And in a letter obtained by TIME, the FBI's Szady responded to a Senate investigator's inquiry about Carpenter, saying, "The [FBI] is aggressively pursuing the investigative leads provided by Mr. Carpenter."

Finally, after more info on the legal tangle in which Mr. Carpenter is ensnared, we get this semi-happy ending:

Carpenter says he has honored the FBI's request to stop following the attackers. But he can't get Titan Rain out of his mind. Although he was recently hired as a network-security analyst for another federal contractor and his security clearance has been restored, "I'm not sleeping well," he says. "I know the Titan Rain group is out there working, now more than ever."

Well, TIME has Carpenter, the special source, so they are playing this story up and blasting past the caveats.  Since TIME mentions Carpenter's lawsuit, the truly diligent might look for coverage of that for more details into this situation.

Is this story the Real Thing, or just a summer fling?  We should know in a few weeks.

Victory In Iraq

David Brooks did *not* write "I love the smell of victory in Iraq.  It smells like... oil".  But I just did!  Evidently what passes for his optimism has made me giddy.

OK, the mood has passed, and here we go:

Andrew Krepinevich is a careful, scholarly man. A graduate of West Point and a retired lieutenant colonel, his book, "The Army and Vietnam," is a classic on how to fight counterinsurgency warfare.

Over the past year or so he's been asking his friends and former colleagues in the military a few simple questions: Which of the several known strategies for fighting insurgents are you guys employing in Iraq? What metrics are you using to measure your progress?

The answers have been disturbing. There is no clear strategy. There are no clear metrics.

Krepinevich has now published an essay in the new issue of Foreign Affairs, "How to Win in Iraq," in which he proposes a strategy. The article is already a phenomenon among the people running this war, generating discussion in the Pentagon, the C.I.A., the American Embassy in Baghdad and the office of the vice president.

Krepinevich's proposal is hardly new. He's merely describing a classic counterinsurgency strategy, which was used, among other places, in Malaya by the British in the 1950's. The same approach was pushed by Tom Donnelly and Gary Schmitt in a Washington Post essay back on Oct. 26, 2003; by Kenneth Pollack in Senate testimony this July 18; and by dozens of midlevel Army and Marine Corps officers in Iraq.

Krepinevich calls the approach the oil-spot strategy. The core insight is that you can't win a war like this by going off on search and destroy missions trying to kill insurgents. There are always more enemy fighters waiting. You end up going back to the same towns again and again, because the insurgents just pop up after you've left and kill anybody who helped you. You alienate civilians, who are the key to success, with your heavy-handed raids.

Instead of trying to kill insurgents, Krepinevich argues, it's more important to protect civilians. You set up safe havens where you can establish good security. Because you don't have enough manpower to do this everywhere at once, you select a few key cities and take control. Then you slowly expand the size of your safe havens, like an oil spot spreading across the pavement.

And he goes on.

Here is the Foreign Affairs link; here is the Tom Donnelly and Gary Schmitt WaPo story, titled "The Right Fight Now".

From "The Right Fight Now", almost two years ago:

As currently employed in Iraq, the American military can prevent the insurgents from winning. But the insurgents do not have to win; they simply have to avoid losing. Their goal is not to change the facts on the ground as much as to change American perceptions of the viability of the president's vision for Iraq.

I will be curious to see what rebuttals to this counterinsurgency strategy might emerge (and don't overlook the trackbacks).  My quick thought as to the shape of various rebuttals would be:

(a) we have been trying this, and it's not working;

(b) Iraq is not Vietnam, but that is a bad thing - since Iraq is more modern and more reliant on a water/oil/electricity infrastructure, it is not realistic to plan in terms of securing one village while ten miles away, terrorists find safe harbor to design car bombs and attack oil pipelines and electrical infrastructure.

Well.  If I were advising Karl Rove, I would ask him whether he believes there is a growing perception on the right that Bush is carrying us forward in Iraq sans plan, and if so, how that will be addressed.

Gregory Djerejian comes to mind as an earnest but frustrated righty - he has long thoughts about the public perception of our effort in Iraq in his "flypaper" essay, with more in his "Security, security, security" piece. 

For purposes of Republican election planning, Andrew is long gone, Gregory is looking sour - c'mon Karl, it's time for Plan B C D...

UPDATE:  Andrew may be long gone, but he is coming back!  A "Stay the course" piece from the Sunday Times:

In reality, of course, what matters is what will remain on the ground in Mesopotamia in the next few years. Will what emerges be preferable to a sanctions-wrecked Iraq still run by Saddam or on the brink of being handed over to his psychopathic sons? Will it be more democratic than any other Muslim country in the Middle East?

As long as the answer to both those questions is a plausible yes, the Bush administration will be able to claim success of a sort. Not the democratic revolution some of us once hoped for. But not quite the nightmare so constantly predicted by others, either.

Those of us who have long backed this war, despite its manifold errors, may well be chastened. But we haven’t given up yet.

More reaction to Brooks and the Foreign Affairs article at Memeorandum.

Here is Cliff May, writing at The Corner:

For what it’s worth, reading this has raised real doubts for me about whether Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld – whom I’ve always defended in the past – is on the right track.

And Kevin Drum on Krepinevich:

I found his essay deeply depressing for a number of reasons. First and foremost is the fact that Krepinevich had to write it at all. He acknowledges that even now, more than two years after the occupation began, the Army is still not committed to a counterinsurgency strategy. Whether or not his oil spot approach is correct, this can only leave you shaking your head. If we're still not committed to counterinsurgency as our overwhelmingly primary mission in Iraq, it seems unlikely that anything is going to change that.

Second, there's a lot of wishful thinking in Krepinevich's essay. It depends heavily on figuring out how to navigate the internal politics of Iraq's 150 tribes; gaining the trust of local leaders; mounting successful, large scale reconstruction projects; and improving our intelligence operations by an order of magnitude. Any strategy that depends on doing all these things successfully is walking on a very thin tightrope.

Third, Krepinevich suggests that our first target for oil spot operations should be Baghdad and Mosul. I almost choked when I read that. Baghdad? There's certainly no question that securing Baghdad would be good news indeed, but that's not a "spot," it's a city of 5 million people. I'd sure like to see his approach proven on a more modest scale before tackling Baghdad.

Finally, there's some serious waffling in his essay: he's anti-withdrawal but he's also pro-withdrawal. That is, he thinks we can execute both the Baghdad and Mosul offensives with fewer troops than we have now (!), and that after these offensives are concluded we can reduce our troop strength in Iraq to 60,000 (compared to about 140,000 today).

Hearing Footsteps

Byron Calame, the Public Editor of the NY Times, chats with the standards editor of the Times about, well, standards - anonymous sourcing, corrections, media bias, and more.

Bloggers will like this:

Q. How have reader expectations about the paper's standards changed over the past few years?

A. It's a very hard question to answer because with the blogs out there drumming up opposition to the "mainstream media," and with the Bush administration and some of its most fervent supporters drumming up contempt for the news media - for the Eastern liberal news media, so called - it's very hard to tell which expressions of reader sentiment are genuine. You obviously pay more attention to a one-of-a-kind letter than you do to one that comes in all full of phrases repeated off some pressure group's Web site.

Readers are certainly suspicious of the news media these days. And you realize that some readers have formed the conclusion that nobody at the newspaper cares what they think or what they say. It's both gratifying and dismaying when you get back a letter that says, "I never expected you to answer me."

Q. What have been the most important changes in the standards editor's job?

A. The big one that I've mentioned is the degree of scrutiny and our awareness of the scrutiny from the blogs, and the degree of expectation on the outside that we must be doing something wrong and we're not to be trusted. So we have to explain ourselves and prove we mean well, and in ways that we once probably wouldn't have had to.

Those Liberal Law Professors

A new study is out about the political leanings of law profs.  The first paragraph of the Times coverage has a howler (but only lefties will howl):

PROFESSORS at the best law schools are generally assumed to be overwhelmingly liberal, and now a new study lends proof. But whether the ideological imbalance matters - to the academic environment students encounter, to the kinds of lawyers the schools produce and to the stock of ideas the professors generate - depends on whom you ask.

The study, to be published this fall in The Georgetown Law Journal, analyzes 11 years of records reflecting federal campaign contributions by professors at the top 21 law schools as ranked by U.S. News & World Report. Almost a third of these law professors contribute to campaigns, but of them, the study finds, 81 percent who contributed $200 or more gave wholly or mostly to Democrats; 15 percent gave wholly or mostly to Republicans.

The percentages of professors contributing to Democrats were even more lopsided at some of the most prestigious schools: 91 percent at Harvard, 92 at Yale, 94 at Stanford. At the University of Virginia, on the other hand, contributions were about evenly divided between the parties. The sample sizes at some schools may be too small to allow for comparisons, though it bears noting that by this measure the University of Chicago is slightly more liberal than Berkeley...

Imagine my surprise.

Able Danger - Another Senate Committee Steps In

Per TIME, we may be getting down to crunch time on "Able Danger" - the Senate Intelligence Committee wants to find out if Weldon is talking through his hat about his mysterious chart:

The Senate Intelligence Committee is asking the Pentagon to let it interview anyone who worked on Able Danger, and last week drafted a letter asking the White House for a copy of a chart that Congressman Curt Weldon claimed in a recent book he gave then-deputy national security adviser Steve Hadley just after the 9/11 attacks.

TIME also tells us that, as of last Friday, the Pentagon was still mystified and unable to verify any Able Danger claims.

Now, in other developments, the Captain is sailing towards Iran.  My much-too-brief summary: there is evidence that the 9/11 Commission was ignoring the July 2004 Able Danger briefing at the same time it was ignoring Iranian connections to 9/11.  They had a story and they were sticking to it!

MORE:  No, of course we aren't actually *getting* to "crunch time" on Able Danger.  But we have turned the corner!

AND MORE:  Very cool at Able Danger topic page at the NZ Bear.

Able Danger And Psychic Strata

HUGE props to blogger AJ Strata, who noted a link between Mohammed Atta and the Blind Sheik that has now been confirmed by JD Smith of the Able Danger team.

OK, AJ - any picks for the Powerball?   [Apparently not, but here is his latest on Able Danger, with a deeply buried lead - see my "UNBURIED", buried below.  [Which is now "UNBURIED AND REVISED".]]

Fine, I'm green - but I did link to his post, so I know a psychic when I see one.  And my explanation of why Atta was in the Brooklyn cell even though he wasn't in Brooklyn looks a bit better.  [Laura Rozen has more on that as well.]

But I am still green.  I may always be green...

More from Mickey.

AND MORE:  From Fox, we have this cryptic offering:

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

What two sources might these be, why are they anonymous, and did Fox find them trhough Weldon?  Fox runs through the Able Danger roster in their story, and the only person we have heard about that has not yet been identified is the civilian official (aka the female PhD).

On the other hand, in speaking to Fox Weldon added that at least five people on the federal payroll will testify under oath about the validity of the Able Danger intelligence.  So perhaps we have two anonymous sources to go with the three that have been identified. 

Or perhaps Weldon and Smith delivered that tidbit off the record, since, one might argue, gathering intel about religious activities and groups might be problematic.

Let's also note this:

Smith said data was gathered from a variety of sources, including about 30 or 40 individuals. He said they all had strong Middle Eastern connections and were paid for their information. Smith said Able Danger's photo of Atta was obtained from overseas.

That is not exactly public source data-mining, which is how Able Danger has been described.  This sounds more like our spies were spying - not that there is anything wrong with that.

UNBURIED AND REVISED:  AJ Strata has the excellent idea of following Rep. Weldon's home-town paper, which reported on this story before anyone else and provides a useful forum for Weldon's witnesses.  But here is a shocker:

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

The letter also requested an interview with Mangum.

In June, Shaffer said he tried to "broker" a working arrangement between Special Operations and the FBI for the operation, but the effort failed.

After reading the letter Thursday, Shaffer said the text was at odds with what he told the committee.

"They got it wrong," he said.

Shaffer claimed he directed the committee to ask for information from an agency other than the FBI, which he refused to identify for The Times Herald.

"This (request) isn't going to get (the committee) the information they're looking for," he said.

Shaffer is scheduled to meet with the committee today, he said.

Hello - how could Specter's staff get that wrong?  [See "REVISION].  And how did the Times get that wrong on Aug 9 when they met with Weldon and a fellow later revealed to be Shaffer?  [Answer in "REVISION"]  And might source credibility be a reason that the NY Times seems to have lost interest in this story?

As a communicator and liason, Shaffer may not have been a great first choice.  One might almost wonder if the 9/11 Commission staffers are correct in saying Shaffer did not mention Atta to them in October 2003.

REVISION - Props to Captain Ed and others, who point out that Shaffer's story may have been simple and unchanging - Able Danger tried to liase with the FBI, but some third, currently unidentified agency blocked them.

Fair enough.  Now, why did Specter's people not get that simple message?  I will stand by my insinuation that Shaffer may not be a great communicator.  However, to fully salvage Shaffer, one might point out that Specter's staff may be doing all they can - as noted earlier, this is the Judiciary Committee, with FBI oversight.  However much they may want to grill agencies in the DoD, and however little hope they have for useful info from the FBI, this may be the best they can do.

That said, Shaffer should not be bad-mouthing Specter's staff to the press, and he ought to have left his meeting with them with an understanding of their limitations, so I do continue to question his interactive skills.

MORE FOR THE SKEPTICS:  This NY Post story, via Mickey, raises questions and eyebrows.  James Smith was fired from Able Danger in May 2000?  But per Shaffer's original account to the Times, Able Danger did not approach the FBI, or whomever, until the summer of 2000.

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

The private contractors working for the counter-terrorism unit Able Danger lost their jobs in May 2000. The firings following a series of analyses that Pentagon lawyers feared were dangerously close to violating laws banning the military from spying on Americans, sources said.

...

A Pentagon official said last night that, while the canned contractors worked for Able Danger, the China project was separate from the counter-terrorism assignment.

The Able Danger work was transferred to another Department of Defense contractor — and the program quietly expired later that year when it was completed, the official said.

The China chart was put together by James Smith, who confirmed yesterday that his contract with the military was canceled and he was fired from his company because the military brass became concerned about the focus on U.S. citizens.

"It was shut down in a matter of hours. The colonel said our service was no longer needed and told me: 'You just ended my career.' "

Smith also claims his team came up with 9/11 hijacker Mohamed Atta's name and photo in 2000.

Baffling.  And Weldon's account to the Times Herald in June was that Able Danger was closed down in Feb 2001, not "later" in 2000.

Two Out Of Three Ain't Good

[UPDATEs:  Fans of agonized logic will want to read the whole screenplay that follows; others can skip to "HAMLET OPINES, AGAIN!" at the bottom, where a case for Krugman is made.  But by whom?!?  [But it is never over!  Don Luskin tells us that "two out of three" was also reported at the time as "two out of four"].]

Paul Krugman just can't write this correction - Patterico is poised on a window ledge, Michelle Malkin is scratching her head, but I have an answer!  I think.  Check the UPDATEs.

Let's start with Patterico:

Okay, stop.  Isn’t Krugman saying the same exact thing he said in his correction? Paul Krugman initially said “Gore won two out of three” — and corrected that statement today to “Gore won two out of three.” Call me crazy, but this appears to be the same exact claim.

I’m really starting to wonder whether Paul Krugman is looking at a different 2001 study of undervotes by a consortium including the Miami Herald than I am.  Every time I look at my link to the USA Today article on the study, it says Bush won 3 out of 4 times...

OK, I agree with Patterico - it is a pretty cryptic correction that simply restates the original claim with no explanation, and I have a hrd time believing that this is what the public editor had in mind (although maybe he enjoys getting e-barrages).  However, Patterico's "different study" suggestion triggers a bell.

Patterico is linking to a USA Today story from May 2001 describing the results of the Miami Herald/USA Today consortium.  However, Krugman cites an April 2001 study, and his original comment seems to have been based on a book review, rather than any research.

Well.  This article tells us that (a) the Miami Herald/USA Today consortium published results in April, and (b) those results could have been re-interpreted to point to "Gore Wins Manual Recount of Undervotes".

Now, why the April stories are not trumped by the May reporting is between Krugman and his editors - I would have hoped that in a reality-based community, if a paper publishes a final version in May, columnists would not cite the preliminary April conclusions four years later.  Or, if an editor requested a clarification or correction, we would get something other than a restatement of the original proposition.

However, pending the moment when I track down the specific Miami Herald stories, let's say this: it is quite possible that the Miami Herald published a story and follow-up in April 2001 that, when condensed into a table-pounding book about Republican election malfeasance, came out as "Gore won two out of three manual recounts of undervotes".

Maybe. 

[And that is the case]

MORE:  More cites here - we are 404 on the links, but the headlines are certainly suggestive.  Please note that [1] was published *after* [2]:

[1] Recounts could have given Gore the edge
Broward, Palm Beach checked
http://www.miami.com/herald/special/news/flacount/docs/038575.htm
The Miami Herald
Published Thursday, April 5, 2001
BY SHARI RUDAVSKY AND BETH REINHARD

[2] Review Shows Ballots Say Bush
But Gore backers have some points to argue
http://www.miami.com/herald/special/news/flacount/docs/032868.htm
The Miami Herald
Published Wednesday, April 4, 2001
BY MARTIN MERZER
[email protected]

Enough.  I am declaring victory [prematurely] and going home - this article from April 20 explains the whole thing.  Now, why the USA Today article from May is hanging around, and which takes precedence, I don't know.  Nor do I know what "the truth" is, or what an accurate journalistic disposition of this question might be.

But on a much narrower point - Krugman is certainly basing his "Two out of Three" on this April logic, which tracks with the "different study" suggestion.  Although actually, it is the same Miami Herald/USA Today study modified to recount the already-counted counties under a less restrictive standard.  And the jump to "Two out of three" eludes me.  Let's just say, *IF* Krugman has a coherent defense, these two additional scenarios described by the Miami Herald will be a key part of it.

Here is what Krugman coulda shoulda written, and it *might* be defensible:

On April 4th, 2001, a newspaper consortium led by the Miami Herald and USA Today reported that in three out of four scenarios involving a manual recount of undervotes, Bush won the Florida election.  Under these scenarios, the already-recounted and certified results for four disputed counties were included with a state-wide hypothetical recount performed by the consortium's accounting firm.

However, on April 5th, the Miami Herald reported separately on another plausible set of scenarios, in which *all* votes, including the four disputed counties, were recounted by the accounting firm under consistent standards.  In these cases (which were legally unlikely), Gore was the winner in two out of three scenarios.

Here is what Krugman wrote in his attempted explanation last week:

About the evidence regarding a manual recount: in April 2001 a media consortium led by The Miami Herald assessed how various recounts of "undervotes," which did not register at all, would have affected the outcome. Two out of three hypothetical statewide counts would have given the election to Mr. Gore. The third involved a standard that would have discarded some ballots on which the intended vote was clear. Since Florida law seemed to require counting such ballots, this standard almost certainly wouldn't have been used in a statewide recount.

Since Krugman does not distinguish between the consortium conclusion, as reported originally by both the Miami Herald and the USA Today, and the later "what-if" reported by the Miami Herald, a clarification was clearly in order.  However, a careful reading reveals this key phrase - "Two out of three hypothetical statewide counts".  Ah ha!  As we have been saying, the "three of four go against Gore" story cited by Patterico (and me) does not involve a *hypothetical statewide* recount - it relies on the actual recount for the disputed counties.

Well, here is the attempted clarification, the cause of Patterico's puzzlement:

Corrections: In my column last Friday, I cited an inaccurate number (given by the Conyers report) for turnout in Ohio's Miami County last year: 98.5 percent. I should have checked the official state site, which reports a reasonable 72.2 percent. Also, the public editor says, rightly, that I should acknowledge initially misstating the results of the 2000 Florida election study by a media consortium led by The Miami Herald. Unlike a more definitive study by a larger consortium that included The New York Times, an analysis that showed Al Gore winning all statewide manual recounts, the earlier study showed him winning two out of three.

That did not exactly lend clarity.  Well, e-barrage Byron Calame: [email protected]

But in e-barraging him do note that, although he ought to be filing newspaper columns rather than legal briefs, Krugman seems to be technically correct have available two scenarios supporting his position, although the leap to "two out of three" is missing.  Why this is still mysterious after two attempts suggests a breakdown in the communication process.

Still Missing - Do any of these articles follow-up articles actually say "Two out of three"?  Hmmph.  A quick re-read indicates this possible interpretation - Gore winning under two loose standards that recounted the missing counties, and losing under the rules chosen by the Herald. 

IGNORANCE WAS BLISS:  The indefatigable Patterico points me to a copy of the April 5 Miami Herald story, reproduced here sans the Beavis and Butthead background.  I see where Krugman gets two new scenarios in which Gore wins, but I can't conjure a "two out of three" from this.

Well.  After far too many words, let's just say that *if* Krugman has an explanation, these two scenarios will be a part of it.

HAMELT OPINES, AGAIN!  A careful reading of the version of the April 4 story found by Patterico in the Google cache yields this:

1998 RULING       

The Florida Supreme Court ruled in 1998 that canvassing boards must examine ``damaged or defective'' ballots for voter intent and further defined the term ``defective ballot'' as ``a ballot which is marked in a manner such that it cannot be read by a scanner.''

Though some canvassing boards in optical-scan counties conducted such reviews on Election Night, most boards around the state did not.

Had all canvassing boards in all counties examined all undervotes, thousands of votes would have been salvaged in Broward County, Palm Beach County and elsewhere long before the election dispute landed in court -- and the outcome might have been different, The Herald found.

In that scenario, under the most inclusive standard, Gore might have won Florida's election -- and the White House -- by 393 votes, The Herald found. If dimples were counted as votes only when other races were dimpled, Gore would have won by 299 votes.

But if ballots were counted as votes only when a chad was detached by at least two corners (the standard most commonly used nationally), Bush would have won by 352 votes.

That is two out of three for Gore, for statewide manual recounts under the 1998 standard.

This bootleg version of what is meant to be the original April 4 Miami Herald story breaks these same scenarios out in more detail and presents this same two of three result under the heading "The Statewide Standard".

That is a pretty clear boost for Krugman, on content anyway.  Why was this so mystifying?  If we had been able to find that darn April 4 story right away, this controversy might never have developed.

And in the fullness of time, my source for that bootleg version may become clear.  Or, the copyright folks may take it away - stay tuned!

FINAL ANSWER - per Don Luskin, the Miami Herald also subdivided the scenarios favorable to Bush and reported the result as "two out of four". 

Specter Wades Into Able Danger

Se. Arlen Specter, in his role as Senate Judiciary Chairman, has involved himself in the Able Danger dispute.  Fox has the most coverage; the NY Times and the WaPo run the AP story; K Lo provides the full text of Specter's letter.

So, why Specter and the Judiciary Committee?  Wouldn't an Intel or Armed Services venue make more sense?

Well.  Shaffer's claim is that military lawyers advised him to cancel his meetings with the FBI.  If the obstacle was that FBI lawyers were advising their military counterparts that the topic of the meeting was verboten, then, Specter might argue, this was an FBI problem which falls into his oversight area.

However, other than knowledge of an outline of the project and of a few cancelled meetings, the FBI ought not to know much about Able Danger.  Still, every little bit helps.

Bonus observation - this ties into the notion that Gorelick's Wall, built at the Justice Dept., was impeding this Defense Dept. project.

Of course, another notion is that Weldon and Specter are both from Pennsylvania, so there may be a local connection or deal at work.

Or, Specter may be throwing a bone to placate the right-wing crazies.  Well, I'm not placated!

But placated or not, I am pleased that the "Able Danger" crew have resumed playing "Googler's Delight" - the FBI contact cited in Specter's letter is "Xanthig Mangum", a name which represents a huge upgrade from the previous entry, "James D. Smith".

Check Juan Cole For A Pulse

Mark Kleiman delivers a blogging beatdown, and illustrates an old adage - when the facts are with you, argue the facts.

These Schizoid Times

The multiple personalities are unmasked in this long look at the NY Times positions on Judith Miller.  Diagnosis by William E. Jackson Jr.

Tracking Atta

Andrew McCarthy and Captain Ed note that, in dismissing the presentation by Able Danger member Stephen Phillpott that Atta had been ID'ed in January or February of 2001, the Commission had relied on the evidence that Atta had only entered the States in June 2000.

A simple resolution to this puzzle would be the following - Able Danger was tasked with developing a global organization chart for Al Qaeda.  Suppose that, as of January 2000, the data-mining process linked Atta to suspected Qaeda sympathizers in Brooklyn, even though Atta himself was in Germany.  AJ Strata cautiously suggests such a link.

Atta eventually entered the US in June.  But, per Shaffer's original account to the Times, Able Danger did not attempt to liase with the FBI until the summer of 2000.

No inconsistency there - by the time Atta was of sufficient interest to Able Danger to merit action, the FBI was the group to involve.

So - Atta was ID'ed as part of the global organization in January while in Germany, and appeared on the chart in the "Brooklyn" cell when the chart was made that summer and he was in the States.

Now, if this is true, why couldn't Phillpott explain that to the Commission?  Beats me.

Can't Get It Right When He Tries

Last week, Paul Krugman mentioned in passing that various recount studies showed that Gore "won" Florida in 2000, prompting howls in the blogosphere.

Yesterday, due to overwhelming reader demand, Krugman dedicated a column to justifying his intital assertion.  And he still can't get it right, as Patterico points out.

Let's clip the highlights.  From Krugman:

The 2000 election is still an open sore on the body politic. That was clear from the outraged reaction to my mention last week of what would have happened with a full statewide manual recount of Florida.

This reaction seems to confuse three questions. One is what would have happened if the U.S. Supreme Court hadn't intervened; the answer is that unless the judge overseeing the recount had revised his order (which is a possibility), George W. Bush would still have been declared the winner.

The second is what would have happened if there had been a full, statewide manual recount - as there should have been. The probable answer is that Al Gore would have won, by a tiny margin.

The third is what would have happened if the intentions of the voters hadn't been frustrated by butterfly ballots, felon purges and more; the answer is that Mr. Gore would have won by a much larger margin.

About the evidence regarding a manual recount: in April 2001 a media consortium led by The Miami Herald assessed how various recounts of "undervotes," which did not register at all, would have affected the outcome. Two out of three hypothetical statewide counts would have given the election to Mr. Gore. The third involved a standard that would have discarded some ballots on which the intended vote was clear. Since Florida law seemed to require counting such ballots, this standard almost certainly wouldn't have been used in a statewide recount.

The Herald group later did an analysis of "overvotes," in which more than one choice was recorded, but this wasn't a true recount, because some of it was based on computer records rather than the ballots themselves.

All clear?  Krugman refers quite specifically to the "undervote" standard when he says that "Two out of three hypothetical statewide counts would have given the election to Mr. Gore".

Now let's flip to the consortium:

George W. Bush would have won a hand count of Florida's   disputed ballots if the standard advocated by Al Gore had been used, the first   full study of the ballots reveals. Bush would have won by 1,665 votes —   more than triple his official 537-vote margin — if every dimple, hanging   chad and mark on the ballots had been counted as votes, a USA TODAY/Miami   Herald/Knight Ridder study shows. The study is the first comprehensive review   of the 61,195 "undervote" ballots that were at the center of Florida's disputed   presidential election.

...   USA TODAY, The Miami Herald and Knight Ridder newspapers hired the national   accounting firm BDO Seidman to examine undervote ballots in Florida's 67 counties.   The accountants provided a report on what they found on each of the ballots.

The newspapers then applied the accounting firm's findings   to four standards used in Florida and elsewhere to determine when an undervote   ballot becomes a legal vote. By three of the standards, Bush holds the lead.   The fourth standard gives Gore a razor-thin win.

I hope that one of Krugman's acolytes can clarify this for us, if only to spare us a third column rehashing the 2000 election.

As to "overvotes", here is what the consortium said, but nothing there seems to tie in to Krugman's notion that two out of three ain't bad for Gore.

I wonder what Krugman was reading as he researched his book review.  Given the tone of his column, he actually does seem to be trying to set the record straight, and he does acknowledge in his intro that the Supreme Court did not halt a process that was headed towards a Gore victory.

However, given his evident confusion about the basic facts reported by the Miami Herald consortium, this bit of his latest column seems especially poignant:

So why do so many people believe the Bush win was rock solid?

One answer is that many editorials and op-ed articles have claimed that no possible recount would have changed the outcome. Let's be charitable and assume that those who write such things are victims of the echo chamber, and believe that what everyone they talk to says must be true.

The other answer is that many though not all reports of the results of the ballot reviews conveyed a false impression about what those reviews said.

I don't know how many people would describe the Bush win as "rock solid", but perhaps Krugman could turn his attention to sorting out why so many think that Scalia gave the election to Bush.

Titan Rain

If we do nothing else, let's thank the Pentagon for coming up with some cool code-names to ease us through the slow news days of summer.  From the front page of the WaPo:

Hackers Attack Via Chinese Web Sites
U.S. Agencies' Networks Are Among Targets

By Bradley Graham, Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, August 25, 2005;  Page A01

Web sites in China are being used heavily to target computer networks in the Defense Department and other U.S. agencies, successfully breaching hundreds of unclassified networks, according to several U.S. officials.

Classified systems have not been compromised, the officials added. But U.S. authorities remain concerned because, as one official said, even seemingly innocuous information, when pulled together from various sources, can yield useful intelligence to an adversary.

"The scope of this thing is surprisingly big," said one of four government officials who spoke separately about the incidents, which stretch back as far as two or three years and have been code-named Titan Rain by U.S. investigators. All officials insisted on anonymity, given the sensitivity of the matter.

"Seemingly innocuous information"?  They're data-mining!  But who are "they"?

Whether the attacks constitute a coordinated Chinese government campaign to penetrate U.S. networks and spy on government databanks has divided U.S. analysts. Some in the Pentagon are said to be convinced of official Chinese involvement; others see the electronic probing as the work of other hackers simply using Chinese networks to disguise the origins of the attacks.

Sounds scary.  But the Pentagon tells me to relax, in their own special way:

Another official, however, cautioned against exaggerating the severity of the intrusions. He said the attacks, while constituting "a large volume," were "not the biggest thing going on out there."

Good point - I could die in a terrorist attack tomorrow.  Thanks for the reminder.

MORE:  After careful sleuthing, I have targeted a likely suspect - tech savvy, a data hound - connect the dots.

Other sleuths may get a kick out of the Google search for "Titan Rain".  There is a whole 'nother world out there.

UPDATE:  TIME magazine has colorful details.

MORE:  Alternative view - these networks are attacking *everyone*, but since the military doesn't share data, they are taking it personally.

And IT bloggers are all over this.

David Brooks, Optimist

David Brooks tracks down two experts who think the new proposed Iraqi constitution may work.

From Peter Galbraith, Bush critic:

"The Bush administration finally did something right in brokering this constitution," Galbraith exclaimed, then added: "This is the only possible deal that can bring stability. ... I do believe it might save the country."

Let the RNC save that quote for the archives - Mr. Galbraith was not nearly so laudatory just last July 14, writing in the NY Review of Books.

However, he made a similar argument last July - Iraq is not culturally or politically united, which has certain consequences:

When President Bush spoke to the nation on June 28, he did not mention Iran's rising influence with the Shiite-led government in Baghdad. He did not point out that the two leading parties in the Shiite coalition are pursuing an Islamic state in which the rights of women and religious minorities will be sharply curtailed, and that this kind of regime is already being put into place in parts of Iraq controlled by these parties. Nor did he say anything about the almost unanimous desire of Kurdistan's people for their own independent state.

Instead, President Bush depicted the struggle in Iraq as a battle between the freedom-loving Iraqi people and terrorists....

...Unfortunately, many of the administration's sharpest critics seem to share its assumption that there is a people sharing a common Iraqi identity, an inaccurate assumption that provides fodder for misleading Vietnam analogies.

I am tempted to issue a Strawman Alert - the artificial nature of the Iraq state, and its natural division amongst Kurds, Shi'ites, and Sunnis, is old news.  However, the connection to the Vietnam analogy is interesting.

Peter Galbraith also wrote this:

There is, in fact, no Iraqi insurgency. There is a Sunni Arab insurgency. And it cannot win. Neither the al-Qaeda terrorists nor the former Baathists can win. Even if the US withdrew tomorrow, neither insurgents nor terrorists would be knocking down the gates to Iraq's Presidential Palace in Baghdad.

Basically, the military equation in Iraq comes down to demographics. Sunni Arabs are no more than 20 percent of Iraq's population. Even in Baghdad—once the seat of Sunni Arab power—Sunni Arabs are a minority. To succeed, the insurgency would have to win support from Iraq's other major communities—the Kurds at 20 percent and the Shiites at between 55 and 60 percent. This cannot happen.

...

But while the insurgents cannot win, neither can they be defeated.

For most of his thirty-five-year rule Saddam Hussein faced guerrilla warfare from Kurds or Shiites—and sometimes both. Even the most brutal of tactics could not pacify communities that did not accept Sunni Arab rule. Today Sunni Arabs reject rule by Iraq's Shiite majority. It is unrealistic to think the American military—operating with a fraction of the intelligence of the Saddam Hussein regime and with much less brutality (Abu Ghraib notwithstanding)—can quell a Sunni Arab resistance that is no longer solely anti-American but also anti-Shiite.

Well, what would constitute "victory" for the insurgents?  While granting that the insurgents will never rule Iraq, they might consider it to be a victory if they make a section of Iraq ungovernable by any but themselves.  In that sense, they certainly can "win".

Gregory Djerejian and Kevin Drum have more on what this means for US policy and troop levels.  From Gregory:

Security. Security. Security. Let me say that again: Security. Security. Security. There still isn't a sense of it, now two years out from the invasion, through large swaths of Iraq and major population centers like the capital. And the President isn't persuasively explaining how he plans to change that, to materially remedy the lack of security plaguing much of Iraq.

Gregory than offers a large grain of salt as accompaniment to a Guardian story describing how the insurgents have "won", and are governing a town in the Sunni Triangle.

CAFE, Fuel Economy, And Safety

The Times tells us about the new Bush Administration Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards released yesterday:

The Bush administration's long-awaited plan to overhaul fuel economy regulations was released yesterday, promising to save gasoline by requiring modest improvements in the performance of sport utility vehicles and other trucks.

But the proposal was swiftly condemned by environmental groups and other critics, who said it would do little to slow the nation's swelling oil consumption.

Top administration officials said their plan would save 10 billion gallons of gasoline over nearly two decades, or roughly 25 days' worth of gas under current consumption trends. It is the first sweeping change of fuel regulations covering light-duty trucks, a category that includes sport utility vehicles, pickup trucks and vans.

...

If nothing else, the 169-page plan is complex. Today, corporate average fuel economy regulations - known in the industry as CAFE standards - divide each automaker's annual new vehicle production into two categories: passenger cars and light-duty trucks. New cars must average 27.5 miles a gallon and light trucks 20.7 miles a gallon in 2004 models. Rules for cars are not being changed.

The administration previously increased the standard for light trucks to 22.2 miles a gallon by the 2007 model year. The new plan would raise it to 23.5 miles a gallon by 2010.

More important, it would create a system in which each automaker's new light trucks would be divided into six size classes. Larger size classes would have less demanding fuel economy targets. From 2008 to 2010 models, automakers would have a choice between the current system and the new size-based system. By 2011 models, only the new system would remain.

This announcement ties in nicely with the recent column by Fareed Zakaria decrying our dependence on imported oil.

The new CAFE phonebook also connects to Andrew Sullivan's comments - first, the Times notes that there is a safety issue:

The administration's plan is expected to reopen a vigorous debate about the effects of fuel economy regulations on safety. A leading architect of the plan, John D. Graham of the Office of Management and Budget, has been an author of much-criticized research in the past contending that fuel economy regulations killed thousands of people each year because they gave automakers incentives to make vehicles lighter so they would be more fuel-efficient. Similar findings have been published more recently by the National Academy of Sciences and are at the heart of the plan's structure.

Consumer groups dispute such contentions and raised concerns about the opposite problem, that increasingly heavy S.U.V.'s and pickup trucks have added risks for other drivers. The proposal, as written, could add to the disputes if automakers made vehicles larger to put them into less stringent categories.

John D. Graham has indeed been studying this safety question for years.

Let's also cite a CBO review from 2002; the Times notes a National Academy of Sciences study; this seems to be a rebuttal by the Competitive Enterprise Institute, although I really ought to track down the original study as well. 

Finally, let's note Sullivan's near perfect tone-deafness - he has a proposed bumper-sticker meant to rally public support for conservation by asking "How many soldiers-per-gallon does your SUV get?".  Jonah Goldberg has admitted to having an increased sympathy for Zakaria's viewpoint, and I suspect many other right-wingers are as well.  However, a bumper sticker that points just one degree away from "No More Blood for Oil" is unlikely to rally Mr. Goldberg or others not already rallied.  Even people who support the war in Iraq can support conservation.  Or, Dems can look for opportunity here (and imperil their NASCAR outreach!).

The Times also covers at length the innate problem of relying on a rulebook - for example, the rules encourage manufacturers to build slightly larger cars, since stretching a car or truck into the next-larger category eases the requirements.

I expect everyone will have a laugh at the "Too Big to Regulate" category:

The proposal does not extend fuel regulations to the largest and least fuel-efficient S.U.V.'s and pickup trucks - those like the Hummer H2 that are more than 8,500 pounds when loaded. The administration said it would seek further comment on whether larger S.U.V.'s alone should be inserted into the final rule.

Can no one control these monsters?  Well, as Arnold might have said - the regulators will be back.

And yet another area for caveats and quibbles - the Times recently ran a story on hybrid cars noting that engineers, presemably responding to consumer demand, had used most of the potential benefits of a hybrid to boost performance rather than improve fuel economy.  The result - hybrid cars with slightly better fuel economy and sports car performance.  Cool, yes, but not exactly the point.

Ultimately, people will have to want slower, smaller, more fuel efficient cars before Detroit will be able to sell them.

UPDATE:  John Cole is also not impressed, and he drags the Charging Rhino into the fray.

Can I soundbite my official editorial position?  Two obvious externalities muddy the free market for cars and oil.  First, a signficant bit of our defense budget goes to securing access to "cheap" Persian Gulf oil, which suggests that the true price of this oil is not being borne by consumers (especially suach as the Japanese.

Secondly, auto safety depends in part on what others are driving - if some drivers are lumbering about in large SUVs, the folks scurrying about in tiny rice-eaters are at greater risk.  But can regulation solve this problem of unilateral disarmament?

MORE:  Let's put Andrew Samwick in the picture, with good links on the safety question.  Fuel economy estimates here.

Able Danger - 9/11 Commissioner Slade Gorton Breaks News

9/11 Commissioner Slade Gorton was either breaking news or breaking wind in his appearance on The O'Reilly Factor last night.  He was commenting on the Pentagon statement that they can not yet confirm or clarify the output of the Able Danger program, and said this:

GORTON:  Since this has come out, the Defense Department ...

O'REILLY:  They issued a statement sayin' that they didn't know anything ...

GORTON: ... has been scrambling to see if it has something.

O'REILLY:  Absolutely.

GORTON: It has nothing and, as of today, it tells us that the civilian female whom Col Shaffer has as a source does not corroborate what he has to say.

O'REILLY:  OK.  Alright.  And that's all true.  The Defense Department has said ...

Emphasis added.  The female civilian is (presumably) the third witness that has appeared, anonymously, in various accounts offered by Shaffer.

Now, *IF* Gorton is correct and she has disavowed Shaffer's story, that ought to be the lead.  However, neither the NY Times, the WaPo, nor the Wash Times mention it.

Naturally, I can't find a transcript of this briefing at the Pentagon website - has anyone seen one?

My current guess is that Gorton is confused, but it would be nice to know.

UPDATE:  Boris, commenting at AJ Strata, suggests that Gorton is making an inference - "It has nothing and, as of today, it tells us that the civilian female whom Col Shaffer has as a source does not corroborate what he has to say..." means "The Pentagon has nothing, and therefore, my common sense tells me that the female civilian does not corroborate...".  Makes sense.

BONUS:  Thomas Kean, another NJ Republican, picks up my clarion call, and points out that National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley could save the Pentagon a lot of man-hours that might be better spent in other ways:

Thomas H. Kean, chairman of the now-disbanded Sept. 11 commission, called on the Bush administration yesterday to provide more information about what it knows regarding Able Danger and the Atta allegations.

Kean focused specifically on an assertion in Weldon's book about Stephen J. Hadley, then deputy director of the National Security Council. Weldon wrote that shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks, he gave Hadley a 1999 Able Danger chart that "diagrammed the affiliations of al Qaeda and showed Mohammed [sic] Atta and the infamous Brooklyn Cell." Weldon repeated the allegation last week.

"At some point, somebody has to say this is true or this is not true," Kean said. "He's supposed to have a list of names of terrorists in his possession. He either does or he doesn't. . . . It's a very significant question."

The NSC press office has repeatedly declined to comment, referring questions to the Pentagon.

Embarrass Weldon, embarrass the NSC and the Pentagon... decisions, decisions...

Now I'm Confused

Mickey sends us to a new post by Edward Jay Epstein describing how a data mining operation might have picked up Mohamed Atta rather easily.  However, this bit leaves me at sea:

First, if Able Danger cross-referenced Arab males who flew to Pakistan in 1999 and Arab males who subsequently requested a replacement passport and then applied for a US visa, it would have come up with a list of Arabs possibly seeking to hide trips to al-Qaeda facilities in Pakistan and Afghanistan from US authorities. Such a list would include both the names of Atta and al-Shehhi.

OK, but... wouldn't Atta have been using a German passport, or at least, a non-US passport?  We have been told a million times in the last week that he was a non-US citizen, so that "The Wall" did not apply to him.

Is the redoubtable Dr. Epstein (who is very well-versed in this) assuming that the Able Danger team would have access to passport replacement requests made to other governments?  Or does he have something else in mind?  Here is an obvious alternative - note the issuance date on the passports of visa applicants, and cross-reference that.  Presumably this will capture new passports, although it won't separate replacement passports.  Or might there be an international registry for lost/stolen/cancelled passports that have been replaced?  There ought to be.

Per this CNN story, Atta *did* get a new passport, perhaps to conceal a trip to Afghanistan, but was it a US passport?  If it was, the German Interior Ministry seems to know a lot about the US passport process.

Puzzling.  But I have no plans to get rich betting against Dr. E.

Shaffer Named Terrorists On A No-Name Basis

[See UPDATE 2 - the transcript *may* tell a different story]

Lt. Col. Shaffer, a key source for Able Danger info, has changed his story:

Shaffer said in an interview on FOX News' "Hannity and Colmes" Thursday night that he and a fellow officer — a Navy captain — briefed the commission on Able Danger's findings.

"The fact is this — they were told not once but twice," he said.

Although Shaffer conceded that during his own personal briefing of Sept. 11 commission staffers in Afghanistan in Oct. 2003, he didn't specifically name the terrorists.

Emphasis added.

A week earlier, when the Commission was revising their story about what they knew and when they knew it, we got this blast from Congressman Weldon:

On Thursday, Weldon told FOX News that the military official, who was under cover when he was in Afghanistan for the October 2003 briefing, is certain he told the staffers about Atta at that time.

The military intelligence officer who attended that meeting with staffers "kept notes of that meeting and will testify under oath that he not only told" the staffers about Able Danger's mission, but about Atta.

Oh, boy.  Well, I bet folks have a few oaths for Weldon and Shaffer just now.

Hat Tip to Laura Rozen.

UPDATES:  Steady as she goes (down), from Mark Coffey at Decision '08:

Is that the end of Able Danger, then?

No, it is not. There are two things at play here: one, did ‘the wall’ between the military and law enforcement prevent the apprehension of the 9/11 conspirators, and two, was the 9/11 Commission negligent in not pursuing an Atta-related lead? Question two is increasingly leaning towards a favorable outcome for the Commission, but question one, I believe, remains an open book.

"She" is a nautical metaphor, BTW - this is still a family-friendly blog.

And for that "mushy" feeling, let's flip to John Hinderaker, who had doubts about Shaffer a few days ago.

UPDATE 2:  Don't give up the ship, cries the Captain!  Since Hannity and Colmes were especially interested in the notion that Shaffer named names, either they weren't listening when he broke news with this answer, or they took his response to mean "I named Atta, but not the other terrorists".

You read, I deride.

MORE:  If I were a table-pounding Attack Dem, I would target Stephen Hadley, purported recipient of Weldon's mysterious chart.  Either Hadley embarrasses Weldon (if that is possible) by debunking the chart, or he admits that he sat on a breakthrough chart during the 9/11 Commission process, and, BTW, is not pushing for funding of this successful intel project (or has pushed, but forgot to mention it to Weldon).

All roads lead to despair.  Well, an Attack Dem would think so, at least.  I'm going to thank Weldon and look for a new road.

An Able Danger Question That Can Be Answered!

9/11 Commissioner Tim Roemer asks a question about Able Danger that can actually be answered:

While making no judgment on the veracity of the claims, former commissioner Tim Roemer said inconsistencies are appearing between the story and the facts that the commission knows.

For one, Roemer asked how Able Danger got a photo of Atta in 2000 for its alleged chart of terrorists when he had not yet applied for a U.S. visa.     

Here is how the Times presented that in their opening story:

In the summer of 2000, the military team, known as Able Danger, prepared a chart that included visa photographs of the four men...

...He said that he delivered the chart in summer 2000 to the Special Operations Command headquarters in Tampa, Fla., and said that it had been based on information from unclassified sources and government records, including those of the Immigration and Naturalization Service.

...Mr. Atta arrived in Newark from Prague on June 3 that year [2000].

OK.  Since "summer" starts on June 21, a chart prepared over the summer could have included a visa photograph.

Now to flag Andrew McCarthy.  [Kevin Drum does a first-rate job on this question.]

MORE:  Not so fast!  Per the 9/11 Commission statement of Aug 12, it *appears* that the photo may have been from the spring of 2000, but we can spin that.  Here we go:

On July 12, 2004, as the drafting and editing process for the Report was coming to an end (the Report was released on July 22, and editing continued to occur through July 17), a senior staff member, Dieter Snell, accompanied by another staff member, met with the officer at one of the Commission’s Washington, D.C. offices. A representative of the DOD also attended the interview.

According to the memorandum for the record on this meeting, prepared the next day by Mr. Snell, the officer said that ABLE DANGER included work on “link analysis,” mapping links among various people involved in terrorist networks.

According to this record, the officer recalled seeing the name and photo of Mohamed Atta on an “analyst notebook chart” assembled by another officer (who he said had retired and was now working as a DOD contractor).  The officer being interviewed said he saw this material only briefly, that the relevant material dated from February through April 2000, and that it showed Mohamed Atta to be a member of an al Qaeda cell located in Brooklyn.

The officer complained that this information and information about other alleged members of a Brooklyn cell had been soon afterward deleted from the document (“redacted”) because DOD lawyers were concerned about the propriety of DOD intelligence efforts that might be focused inside the United States. The officer referred to these as “posse comitatus” restrictions. Believing the law was being wrongly interpreted, he said he had complained about these restrictions up his chain of command in the U.S. Special Operations Command, to no avail.

Ahh!.  Just because the original chart was dated April 2000, it does not follow that this Naval officer (now known to be Navy Capt. Scott Phillpott) *saw* it in April; nor does it mean that the chart was never updated.)

In other stories, the WaPo tells us more emphatically today what the NY Post told us yesterday - Lt. Col. Shaffer is getting his information second-hand. 

The Wapo also tries to probe Rep. Weldon's memory:

Time magazine reported last week that Weldon said he is no longer sure that Atta was included on the chart he gave Hadley. But Weldon's chief of staff said yesterday that Atta was on the chart and that it was produced in 1999. Representatives for Hadley, who is now President Bush's national security adviser, have declined to comment on Weldon's claims.

Weldon did not respond to a request for an interview yesterday.

Weldon may not have responded yesterday, but he responded to Eric Umansky of Slate, and told the world that he only learned that Able Danger ID'ed Atta in June 2005.  My gloomy thoughts here.

BONUS PUZZLE:  Per the Commission statement about Phillpott's briefing, the names were redacted shortly thereafter.  Well, as we wondered when the Commission's statement was first reported - when Gen. Shelton was briefed in Jan 2001, were the names still redacted?

We ask because we are still grappling with this from the Aug 12 Times:

In an interview this week, a former senior military officer disputed that the unit members had ever presented to their superiors information that identified Mr. Atta or other suspected members of Al Qaeda.

Weldon didn't know about the Atta ID until 2005, Shaffer didn't know until after 9/11, Gen. Shelton may not have been told at all - I can see why the Pentagon is taking so long to respond to this.  So far, the WaPo has this:

A Pentagon official said yesterday that although the investigation into the allegations is still ongoing, "we're not finding information that substantiates these claims."

The Pentagon presumably has folks engaged in a heroic attempt to prove a negative.  We are stalled because no one wants to be the poor fool to say "There are no relevant Able Danger documents", because they know what will be found five minutes after those words leave their mouth.

However, they can't find anything.  Or, they have found the smoking chart, and are now scrambling to marshall a cover-up an explanation.

Able Danger - Muddying The Waters

In an earlier post I wondered if Mohamed Atta was showing up in public databases or in news reports prior to 9/11.  It turns out he was - sort of.  There was a Mahmoud Atta who attacked a bus in the West Bank in 1986, was arrested in Venezuela, and was eventually deported from the US to Israel in 1990.

So what?  Well, per Snopes, in the aftermath of 9/11 news services confused the two and wondered which bright lights in the INS allowed a known terrorist into the country.  (Jeralynn Merritt debunked this back in the day).

So, as part of our ongoing attempt to square the circle and resolve the conflicting stories about Able Danger, we are tossing out this notion - might Lt. Col. Shaffer or someone else have confused the two Attas in their analysis?

OK, that seems like an incredibly dumb idea, until you think about it (it then rises to "Not hopelessly farfetched") - the first Atta (Mahmoud) was a naturalized US citizen and a known terrorist.  If you were data mining for new terrorists, mightn't you start with him and see who his friends and connections were?  As Shaffer explained in an interview with Michael Savage, its all about linkages.

And having captured the linkages, mightn't Atta's name appear on some chart or file as a focal point for "Persons of Interest with Links to Atta"?

Finally, post 9/11, confusion sets in.  In his latest interview in the NY Post, Lt. Col. Shaffer tells us that, like Rep. Curt Weldon, he didn't know that Able Danger had identified Atta until after 9/11:

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

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

OK, the idea that we have two Attas is a longshot, and a lot of the story we are getting does not support it.  On the other hand, a lot of the story we are getting is second hand - we have *still* not heard directly from someone who can say that they had identified Atta as a terrorist before 9/11.  Both Weldon and Shaffer only learned about the Atta ID afterwards (in Weldon's case, roughly June of 2005).

I toss the idea out there.

Oh, and if the Pentagon has suspended Shaffer's security clearance and lost his files, after failing to respond meaningfully to the 9/11 Commission's request for info - shouldn't we be calling this a Pentagon cover-up, rather than a Commission cover-up?  Just wondering.

MORE:  A Tale of Two Attas - the confounding of Czech and German investigators:

Consider the odds: two men named Mohamed Atta, total strangers with nothing to connect them, both arriving in Prague just as one, the Sept. 11 hijacker, was beginning his fateful journey to the United States.

According to documents in the files of the German federal police, the improbable scenario of "The Two Attas" is precisely what transpired in the spring of 2000, confusing investigators for months and laying the groundwork for a spurious claim that Atta later met with an Iraqi intelligence agent.

Thanks to Lucy in the comments.

And speaking of Lucy, let's note that Lt. Col. Shaffer would not be having a problem producing the famous Al Qaeda organization chart if Dan Rather were covering this story.

9/11 Commission To Pentagon - Over To You!

Thomas Kean of the 9/11 Commission bounces the Able Danger ball into the Pentagon's court:

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

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

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

On this question of what did the Pentagon know and when did they know it, I am not sure enough attention has been paid to the clarified Curt Weldon story, as developed by Eric Umansky. 

According to Weldon, it was only in June 2005 that his Able Danger connections told him that they had ID'ed Mohammed Atta back in 2000.  This, despite the fact that in May 2002 Curt Weldon was extolling the Able Danger program, lauding its output, and describing its briefing (part of which he had seen).  There is an extended excerpt after the break, but nowhere in his speech does he mention Mohammed Atta, and apparently, that name was not mentioned to him.

Why so coy, we wonder - if the Able Danger people wanted to promote their effort by enlisting a Congressman, why not give him the headline grabbing story about Atta right away?  Why wait three years before delivering the clincher?  Even if the identification of Atta was classified in 2002 (and the other parts Weldon revealed were not?), couldn't they have whispered it to him?

Well.  The Pentagon is continuing to tread water:

The Pentagon has not disputed the accounts from Colonel Shaffer or the Navy captain. But it has withheld comment on Able Danger, saying it is gathering information about it.

My Things To Do list:

(a)  Per Lt. Col. Shaffer, "Able Danger had made use of publicly available information from government immigration agencies, from internet sites and from paid search engines such as Lexis Nexis".  Right, then, has anyone checked Lexis-Nexis to see if Mohammed Atta generates any hits in 1999 or 2000?  It proves nothing if the answer is no, but "yes" might be very interesting - why would Atta have been in the news?

(b)  Helpen ze Captain, und mach snell!  Captain Ed notes an obscure arrest in Germany, in Feb 2001, of two Iraqi intelligence agents.  However, finding follow-up has been difficult.  Needed - eager German-speaking Googlers!  The hope is that the German press may have more on this.  The prosecutor's name, Kay Nehm, may be a starting point.

As a sidebar to the Captain's "UPDATE II" - here is some AP coverage of the situation - apparently, the report from the Carribbean about an Islamic terrorist plot to fly a plane into the WTC was presented at a Congressional hearing, but dropped from the 9/11 report:

At congressional hearings last week that reviewed the pre-Sept. 11 performance of the CIA, FBI and other agencies in sorting through such possible clues, 10 intelligence reports made public described threats the government received suggesting terrorists might use planes as weapons.

Those, plus two publicly known plots, in 1994 and 1995, that would have crashed planes into targets, suggest the government should have taken a closer look at terrorists' potential use of planes, investigators said.

The threats detailed in the congressional report do not tell the whole story, said Cannistraro. ''That's taking one snapshot in a movie that's five hours long,'' he said.

...For example, U.S. intelligence got information in August 1998 that a group of unidentified Arabs planned to fly an explosive-laden plane from a foreign country into the World Trade Center, says the report by Eleanor Hill, staff director of the congressional investigation.

The report does not offer a source for the information. A U.S. intelligence official, speaking Friday on condition of anonymity, said it was from a dubious source: a Caribbean police officer.

''It was viewed as wildly speculative,'' said the official, speaking on condition of anonymity. ''There was no information to corroborate this report.''

The report was passed on to the FBI, Federal Aviation Administration and other groups, which did little with it.

Officials do not believe the police officer's report is linked to the Sept. 11 attacks.

Weldon excerpt below.

Able Danger Source Steps Forward

The NY Times interviews Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer, who has been a key source on the Able Danger disclosures:

WASHINGTON, Aug. 16 - A military intelligence team repeatedly contacted the F.B.I. in 2000 to warn about the existence of an American-based terrorist cell that included the ringleader of the Sept. 11 attacks, according to a veteran Army intelligence officer who said he had now decided to risk his career by discussing the information publicly. The officer, Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer, said military lawyers later blocked the team from sharing any of its information with the F.B.I.

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

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

...

The Defense Department did not dispute the account from Colonel Shaffer, a 42-year-old native of Kansas City, Mo., who is the first military officer associated with the so-called data-mining program to come forward and acknowledge his role.

At the same time, the department said in a statement that it was "working to gain more clarity on this issue" and that "it's too early to comment on findings related to the program identified as Able Danger." The F.B.I. referred calls about Colonel Shaffer to the Pentagon.

John Podhoretz has a two posts at the Corner, which summarize the alternative "who's lying or confused?" scenarios, from which we extract this:

The Able Danger papers shown to the 9/11 Commission at the Pentagon after the Afghanistan meeting did not feature anything mentioning Atta. So the 9/11 Commission says. So either the Commission staff is lying. Or no paper mentioned Atta and Shaffer is just wrong. Or the Defense Department misplaced the paperwork mentioning Atta. Or somebody at the Defense Department deliberately didn't give the Commission the material.

In the first case, if the 9/11 commission staff is lying, the hell to be paid is going to be colossal. Among other things, it could shake the current State Department to its foundations, since the 9/11 commission staff director, Philip Zelicow, is one of Condi Rice's most trusted aides.

In the second case, if the Defense Department withheld critical information on this matter, it's almost impossible to imagine the intensity of the bloodletting that will follow.

He also notes an AP story with this charge from Lt. Col. Shaffer:

In an interview with Fox News Channel and The New York Times, Shaffer said the panel was not given all the information his team had gathered.

"I'm told confidently by the person who did move the material over that the 9/11 commission received two briefcase-size containers of documents," Shaffer said in the interview, part of which was aired by Fox News Tuesday night. "I can tell you for a fact that would not be ... one-20th of the information that Able Danger consisted of during the time we spent."

The information request from the 9/11 Commission to the Pentagon was described in the Commission's Aug 12 press release:

In November 2003, shortly after the staff delegation had returned to the United States, two document requests related to ABLE DANGER were finalized and sent to DOD. One, sent on November 6, asked, among other things, for any planning order or analogous documents about military operations related to al Qaeda and Afghanistan issued from the beginning of 1998 to September 20, 2001, and any reports, memoranda, or briefings by or for either the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff or the Commanding General of the U.S. Special Operations Command in connection with such planning, specifically including material related to ABLE DANGER. The other, sent on November 25, treated ABLE DANGER as a possible intelligence program and asked for all documents and files associated with “DIA’s program ‘ABLE DANGER’” from the beginning of 1998 through September 20, 2001. In February 2004, DOD provided documents responding to these requests. Some were turned over to the Commission and remain in Commission files. Others were available for staff review in a DOD reading room. Commission staff reviewed the documents.

A possible resolution - the Pentagon sent over two briefcases of obviously relevant material, and made the rest avaliable in the reading room.  (Yes, it was Philip Zelikow in the reading room with a briefcase.  Leave Col. Mustard out of it.)

Mickey has his own round-up of possible motivations for a cover-up:

Still, it seems deceptive [of J Podhoretz] to target only Gorelick, and extremely foolish to assume that all the screw-ups the 9/11 Commission may have made are attributable to some insidious desire to protect her (as opposed to, say, protecting John Kerry, or Bill Clinton, or the Pentagon, or George H.W. Bush, or the Commission's already-written story line--or to sheer negligence, lack of manpower, or excusable bad luck).

Fair enough, although the rationale for a George "41" Bush cover-up does not leap off the page at me, and "43" is missing from Mickey's list, although Mickey's notes him elsewhere (I believe - sites are crashing at my insecure remote location, and Slate is now gone.)

I nominated some folks that might prefer to bury this a few days back:  "The obvious whipping boys of summer would be Clinton/Berger/Gorelick, for fostering an overly legalistic approach to the War on Terror; Bush/Tenet/Rice for failing to draw this information from the system in the summer of 2001, when we were at a high terrorist threat level and Tenet's hair was on fire; and Gen. Hugh Shelton and the Pentagon."   

Let's end with an easy question - do people think they have seen enough to merit a Congressional investigation?  And do people want the investigation to be in Curt Weldon's House, or over in the Senate?

My answer - if the Defense Dept. now denies everything, I may not believe them, and if they admit that they sat on Atta's name, I really won't believe it - send it to the Senate, start putting people under oath, and sort this out.

MORE:  Great moments in "Get the quote right", with emphasis added.  From the Times:

Colonel Shaffer said that because he was not an intelligence analyst, he was not involved in the details of the procedures used in Able Danger to glean information from terrorist databases. Nor was he aware, he said, which databases had supplied the information that might have led to the name of Mr. Atta or other terrorists so long before the Sept. 11 attacks.

But he said he did know that Able Danger had made use of publicly available information from government immigration agencies, from internet sites and from paid search engines such as Lexis Nexis.

"We didn't that Atta's name was significant" at the time, he said, adding that "we just knew there were these linkages between him and these other individuals who were in this loose configuration" of people who appeared to be tied to an American-based cell of Al Qaeda.

"We didn't that Atta's name was significant" - didn't what?  "Know", "reveal", "grok", "comprehend"?  Yes, from the context the missing word is almost surely "know", but why am I suddenly playing "Wheel of Fortune"?

MORE:  Weldon tells us that he first learned of the Atta link a few months ago, and he is hazy about his famous chart.

Able Was I - Weldon Remembers!

Eric Umansky, who has been a skeptic at Slate on the Able Danger story, interviews Rep. Curt Weldon and pins down the time when Weldon first became aware that the Able Danger team had identified 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta:

Three months ago I was doing my book and went back to [the former Able Danger officers].  I wanted a copy of the chart, because much of my book was dealing with the importance of finding patterns in intelligence. So I asked them if they had another copy of the chart. They said no. So I asked them to recreate one—it was only then that they told me they had actually ID’d Atta and had recommended sharing it. What they told me and what I believe is the case that [the original chart] had a photo and name of Atta.

That ties in with this TIME magazine story, excerpted by Decision '08, Michelle Malkin, and Kevin Drum:

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

That answers one of my questions from Aug 13 - "When did Weldon learn that Able Danger had identified Atta - is that a fair question to put to him?"

On the other hand - we will soon have a new post on the latest NY Times story in which Weldon's key source identifies himself and claims that Pentagon lawyers blocked him from meeting with the FBI - a point which the Defense Dept. is not yet denying.

Waas On Rove And Plame

Murray Waas has extensive background on the Plame investigation, the Rove connection, and Ashcroft's recusal, all in the Village Voice, with more at his blog.  Comic highlight:

What has not been previously reported until now (a blog breaks news!?), is that not only could Rove not remember the name of the journalist who purportedly might have told him of Plame's CIA employment, but he also claimed to remember virtually nothing about the circumstances of the purported conversation. He could not even recall whether the conversation took place on the phone or in person.

If only it were September, we could add a soundtrack - "Try To Remember", or perhaps "Memories".  NO, "You Don't Send Me Flowers" can't be right!

I am currently blogging from an insecure remote location with a glitchy connection, but I expect to have some independent thoughts on this eventually.

UPDATE:  If I had a red pen, I would suggest some changes to this article:

Wilson reported back to the CIA that the allegations were most likely the result of a hoax.

What Wilson or anyone else knew about the Niger forgeries in March 2002 is a fascinating question.  Let's agree that Wilson said an actual sale was out of the question.

When Wilson sought out White House officials, believing they did not know all the facts, he was rebuffed. He then went public with his criticism of the Bush administration. It was then that senior administration officials began their campaign to discredit Wilson as a means of countering his criticisms of them.

Rove and Libby, and to a lesser extent then deputy National Security Council (NSC) adviser Stephen J. Hadley (who is currently Bush's NSC adviser), directed these efforts. Both Rove and Libby discussed with Novak, Cooper, and other journalists the fact that Wilson's wife worked for the CIA, and that she was responsible for sending him to Niger, in an effort to discredit him.

How do we know that Rove and Libby "directed" these efforts?  Why not Condi Rice, or Ari Fleischer, or Dick Cheney, Libby's boss?

Plame's employment with the CIA had been detailed in a highly classified State Department memorandum—circulated to senior Bush administration officials—in the days jut prior to conversations between Rove and Libby and journalists regarding Plame.

Dated June 10, 2003, the memo was written for Marc Grossman, then the undersecretary of state for political affairs. It mentioned Plame, her employment with the CIA, and her possible role in recommending her husband for the Niger mission because he had previously served in the region. The mention of Plame's CIA employment was classified "Secret" and was contained in the second paragraph of the three-page classified paper.

On July 6, 2003, Wilson published his now famous New York Times op-ed and appeared on "Meet the Press." The following day, on July 7, the memo was sent to then secretary of state Colin L. Powell and other senior Bush administration officials, who were scrambling to respond to the public criticism. At the time, Powell and other senior administration officials were on their way to Africa aboard Air Force One as members of the presidential entourage for a state visit to Africa.

TIME magazine was very tough on that timeline, noting that after a Walter Pincus article on June 13, the memo was much discussed in Admin circles.

As to "The mention of Plame's CIA employment was classified "Secret" ', well, not exactly.  Per the WSJ, her name was mentioned in a paragraph that was labeled secret.  However, folks who work with classified documents have explained that it may well have been some other element of the paragraph that attracted the classification.  For example, the paragraph may have mentioned the (once classified) information that the CIA sponsored a fact-finding trip to Niger.  It may be that Ms. Plame's name was what made that paragraph classified, but again, folks who do this for a living have found the idea that a NOC would be casually mentioned in an inter-agency memo to be absurd.

Finally, as to Rove's omission of his mention of his conversation with Matt Cooper about Ms. Plame - it is probably worth noting that an e-mail between Rove and Hadley noted their talk (but not the details), so it is quite possible that Rove's memory was jogged by a review of his own e-mails (by his lawyers, presumably), rather than by Fitzgerald's investigators.

Secondly, the first round of subpoenas in October 2003 did not mention Cooper or TIME (No, I can't explain why that was).  TIME was picked up (along with the White House Iraq Group e-mails, such as Rove-Hadley) in January 2004, after Fitzgerald took over.

Richardson '08

The LA Times profiles New Mexico's governor, Bill Richardson, and notes his Presidential ambition.  Our two cents - at a dinner party last Christmas, a Dem fundraiser assured me that Richardson had no hope as a Presidential candidate, because his personal life made Bernie Kerik look like a choir boy.

But what do I know?

MORE:  In anticipation of a failed link, we have some Bernie-bashing below the break.

Good Time Management Tip

Decision '08 has a new address.  If you think you don't have time to update your links (or add him now!), he has a GREAT time-management tip for bloggers everywhere.

Able Danger - The 9/11 Statement

The 9/11 Commission's statement on Able Danger is now available on their website.  The statement is a four page .pdf file which makes an even stronger case for the Commission than was suggested by the WaPo or NY Times stories - there is a lot more info about how the Commission followed up on the initial Able Danger briefing, and they do not seem to have been derelict, non-responsive, or uninterested.  [However, folks worried about the possible motives for a Commission cover-up will find the UPDATE to be *very* interesting!]

From the 9/11 statement, here is a headscratcher:

In 2004, Congressman Curt Weldon (R-PA) and his staff contacted the
Commission to call the Commission’s attention to the Congressman’s critique of the U.S. intelligence community. No mention was made in these conversations of a claim that Mohamed Atta or any of the other future hijackers had been identified by DOD employees before 9/11.

Well, we have noted that the Congressman did not mention Atta in his 2002 House floor speech either.  The Times did tell us this:

In the interview on Monday, Mr. Weldon said he had been aware of the episode since shortly after the Sept. 11 attack, when members of the team first brought it to his attention. He said he had told Stephen J. Hadley, then the deputy national security adviser, about it in a conversation in September or October 2001, and had been surprised when the Sept. 11 commission report made no mention of the operation.

Well, did "the episode" include Atta's name?  Maybe not - the same Times article told us that Mr. Weldon "said he had recognized the significance of the episode only recently..."

Baffling.  When did Weldon learn that Able Danger had identified Atta - is that a fair question to put to him?

The must-read Norristown Times-Herald, which interviewed Weldon back in June, carries a follow-up in response to the 9/11 Commission statement.  It's mostly background, but interesting.  And it is made more interesting by the *possibility* [confirmed!] that a key source for the Times Herald is also commenting as "Anon" at The Intel Dump.  I have more confidence in Phil Carter's crew anyway...

UPDATE:  [Reaction to the 9/11 memo from Jim Geraghty and John Podhoretz.  The Skeptic's Corner is never too crowded].  After the break, we have a longish excerpt describing the Commission response to the their first briefing on Able Danger in Oct. 2003.  But here is their opening sentence:

On October 21, 2003, Philip Zelikow, the executive director of the 9/11 Commission, two senior Commission staff members, and a representative of the executive branch, met at Bagram Base, Afghanistan, with three individuals doing intelligence work for the Department of Defense.

And who is Philip Zelikow?  Currently he is with the State Dept., but at the time of the Commission, he was criticized for being too close to the Bush team, and especially Condi Rice - he coauthored a book with her, led the transition briefings on terror, and was allegedly instrumental in demoting Richard Clarke.  But that is not the interesting bit!

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

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

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

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

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

The full report is at the Markle Foundation website.  And the Washington Post, in their coverage of the Foundation press release, teases us with this:

The report also said the administration mishandled several promising programs to mine private sector databases for signs of terrorist activity by failing to set clear policy guidelines for the government's collection and use of data on Americans' everyday activities.

As time permits, I hope to read through the full effort.  However, this is what we have a blogosphere for...

Mark Steyn notes that the US border is semi-permeable, and that Atta may have been in the US even if INS records don't say so.  Eleven million undocumented aliens can't be wrong.

Excerpt from Commission statement below.

 

Tidbits On The Plame Investigation

Special Counsel Fitzgerald has a new boss, a forty year DoJ veteran; JeraLynn Merritt is unruffled, as am I.

And Judy Miller sits in jail, whining that she can not respond to her critics.  I heartily endorse Duncan Black's take on this - the Times will front page anything Ms. Miller wants to say, whenever she wants to say it.

And my own pet peeve - the "Judy Miller, First Amendment Champion" misinformation appears in both stories.

From the AP:

New York Times reporter Judith Miller has been jailed since July 6 for refusing to tell prosecutors to whom she talked about Plame.

And from the lead of the Newsday story on Judy in Jail:

It's been more than five weeks in a federal prison for New York Times reporter Judith Miller and there's little sign of any stand-down in the confrontation that caused her to be jailed for refusing to reveal her confidential sources in the Valerie Plame/CIA leak case.

Wrong, and wrong again!  But rather than rant yet again, we will have a flashback.  Our gist - Judy's subpoena names a government official, and the official has signed a waiver of confidentiality.  Judy, the judge, and Fitzgerald all know her source (and leaks say it is Lewis Libby).

Ms. Miller is *not* Bob Woodward protecting "Deep Throat", but this part of the Times PR campaign is working.

"Robbing Peter" - Maloney And Malkin Get Results!

The NY Times prints a correction to its "Air America" story:

An article yesterday about state and city investigations of a loan made by a Bronx social service agency to the liberal radio network Air America quoted incorrectly from comments made on the air by Al Franken, the host of an Air America program. Referring to Evan M. Cohen, a former official of the network whom Mr. Franken accused of having engineered the loan, from the Gloria Wise Boys and Girls Club, Mr. Franken said: "I don't know why they did it, and I don't know where the money went. I don't know if it was used for operations, which I imagine it was. I think he was robbing Peter to pay Paul." (He did not say: "I don't know why he did it. I don't know where the money went. I don't know if it was used for operations. I think he was borrowing from Peter to pay Paul.")

Now to tip off Brian Maloney and Ann Althouse.  Brian has links to other interested parties - it does appear that Michelle Malkin gets results (and she knows it!)

NOTE:  That link is to the current day's correction, so it is a one-day wonder.  We live in hope...

UPDATE:  Air America picked up by AP. 

Able Was I - The Commission Pushes Back

The embattled 9/11 Commission pushed back late on Friday against charges that they had failed to investigate important revelations from a secret Pentagon project code-named "Able Danger".  The stage is set for the Sunday talk-show brawls!  [The NY Times and the WaPo pick this up.  Focus on the Times, which buries two great tidbits.  See UPDATE]:

Here we go, from the AP:

The leaders of the 9/11 commission late Friday disputed a congressman's criticism that the panel did not adequately investigate a claim that four hijackers were identified as al Qaeda members more than a year before the attacks.

In a joint statement, former commission chairman Thomas Kean and vice chairman Lee Hamilton said a military official who made the claim had no documentation to back it up. And they said only 9/11 ringleader Mohamed Atta was identified to them and not three additional hijackers as claimed by Rep. Curt Weldon, vice chairman of the House Armed Services and Homeland Security committees.

"He could not describe what information had led to this supposed Atta identification," the statement said of the military official.

We also see a bit of haze about the quality of the briefing:

During the July 12, 2004, meeting with the military official, the officer said he recalled seeing Atta's name and photo on an analyst's chart made by the secret Able Danger unit, the statement released by Kean and Hamilton said.

The relevant data discussed by the officer showed Atta to be a member of an al Qaeda cell in New York City from February to April 2000, the statement said.

But the commission knew that according to travel and immigration records, Atta first obtained a U.S. visa on May 18, 2000, and first arrived in the United States on June 3, 2000, the statement said.

Kean, a former Republican New Jersey governor, and Hamilton, a former Democratic congressman from Indiana, said records had been sought from the U.S. Special Operations Command and none mentioned Atta or any other September 11 hijackers. They were requested after staff members from the commission were told about Able Danger during a meeting in Afghanistan.

Weldon said Friday that Atta's name was specifically mentioned during the Afghanistan meeting, but Kean and Hamilton denied that Friday in the statement.

So, no documentation from the July 12, 2004 briefer, and no documentation mentioning Atta from the Special Operation Center in response to a follow-up request after the Oct 2003 briefing.

And the briefer "recalled seeing Atta's name and photo on an analyst's chart".  That's just great - did he recall when the analyst *made* the chart?  Would he have a copy of the chart for the appropriate people to peruse?  Did the chart shown to Gen. Shelton at his Jan 2001 briefing also show Atta's name, or was that name added later?

[The WaPo has more:

According to the commission, the officer said he briefly saw the name and photo of Atta on an "analyst notebook chart." The material identified Atta as part of a Brooklyn al Qaeda cell and was dated from February through April 2000, the officer said.

"The officer complained that this information and information about other alleged members of a Brooklyn cell had been soon afterward deleted from the document," the statement says, because Pentagon lawyers were worried about violating restrictions on military intelligence gathering in the United States.

Oh, boy - the dog ate the documents.  And if the reference was deleted "soon afterward", what was in the briefing to Gen. Shelton in Jan 2001?]

With all that said, it does seem that the description of the briefing given here by Kean and Hamilton does not conflict with the version presented in the NY Times by Weldon's side.  Was Weldon's source failing to highlight some of the shortcomings of his briefing?

And from a different perspective - do we trust this Commission to investigate itself?  Do we need a new commission to investigate the old one?  [The Captain trusts this Commission about as far has he could throw all ten of them; MacMind is still in the Skeptic's Corner.]

There is no statement (yet) at the 9/11 Public Discourse Project website.

UPDATE:  [Reaction links with Betsy Newmark].  The Times has some great material at the end:

In an interview this week, a former senior military officer disputed that the unit members had ever presented to their superiors information that identified Mr. Atta or other suspected members of Al Qaeda.

Ahh!  Is the "former senior military officer" Gen, Shelton himself, or an aide?

And many have asked, how many names did "Able Danger" generate - a mini-phone book is not actionable.  Here we go:

The former defense intelligence official, who was interviewed twice this week, has repeatedly said that Mr. Atta and four others were identified on a chart presented to the Special Operations Command. The former official said the chart identified about 60 probable members of Al Qaeda.

On the main explanation offered by the Commission and covered by the AP, the Times is also stronger:

Judy On Hold

A few days back, Arianna passed along an e-mail on the Judy Miller question telling us that Times reporter Douglas Jehl "who is a dogged and respected reporter, has been assigned to do an in-house investigative report for the Times and that he is already cutting pretty close to the bone.  Several editors he has spoken to are now asking themselves why there wasn't more questioning of whether Miller's silence reflects a fear of incriminating herself rather than betraying a source. I predict this will start to unravel in the next couple of weeks -- if only because the Times is afraid of getting scooped again by outside rivals."

And it may be true!  But meanwhile, Doug Jehl's other assignment - babysit Congressman Curt Weldon and se why he is screaming about this "Able Danger" thing - has blossomed into a possible Pulitzer Prize.  OK, the whole story may fizzle out.  But if it eventually encompasses ghastly conflicts of interest on the 9/11 Commission and uncertainty about lead hijacker Mohammed Atta's travel schedule, (how sure are we he was not in Prague?) well... if we have to wait for Judy, we can stand it.

MORE:  Via the Captain, we see that John Podhoretz of The Corner is also on this, with a summary of the main points.  Hmm, but now we can't play the normal game, which would be to scream until the Times picks up on this...

Well, we have some useful links (and a Skeptic's Corner) below.  And yes, my heart and my head are divided on this story - sue me.

STILL MORE:  Captain V, a former intelligence officer, provides a useful perspective.

Able Was I - A Skeptics Corner On "Able Danger"

We have a long post below on the Thursday NY Times story telling us that the 9/11 Commission now admits to having been briefed twice about "Able Danger", the secret Pentagon data-mining project that identified Mohammed Atta in the summer of 2000.

A couple of days back, I noted a lot of holes in the original Times story.  Well, I am not throwing in the towel now, but I'll admit that I am checking it for heft and "tossability".  However, skeptics in need of some spine-stiffening will be bucked up by MacRanger, who has done military intel for a living and wants to learn more before climbing onto this bandwagon.

Eric Umansky, who had a big "Not So Fast" article at Slate on Tuesday, waves some more yellow flags at Slate and his own blog.  Eric credits another reporter, and I will credit some of my commenters with promoting this caveat to the Able Danger briefing:

I was talking about this story with LAT reporter Terry McDermott, who recently published  a history of the 9/11 hijackers,  Perfect Soldiers.  He pointed out a key bit of context missing from the Times' story:   If the Pentagon's secret data-mining program really did finger some of the future hijackers, how many other names were on the  list? Tens, hundreds, thousands?

If  it was closer to thousands, maybe officials presumably (rightly? wrongly?) that they were dealing with too many false positives and the info was, essentially, not of high enough quality to be actionable. And, just guessing here, maybe there were  so many names on the list that nobody noticed Atta's et. al until recently.

Let's advance the Times story, which told us that the 9/11 staffers now remember hearing Atta's name only at the second briefing in July 2004 - this is from Fox:

On Thursday, Weldon told FOX News that the military official, who was under cover when he was in Afghanistan for the October 2003 briefing, is certain he told the staffers about Atta at that time.

     

The military intelligence officer who attended that meeting with staffers "kept notes of that meeting and will testify under oath that he not only told" the staffers about Able Danger's mission, but about Atta.

I do not want to be forced to absorb more revisions to the 9/11 Commission's story.

And for "fair and balanced", here is the Captain, who thinks the 9/11 Commission is discredited.  I'll say this, contra MacRanger - even if the Commission staffers weren't convinced about the veracity of Able Danger, it is hard to understand how they failed to mention it in the final report, especially since they recommended better communication and an attempt at data-mining.  Well, let's find out.

For background, here are some interesting links:

Rep. Weldon speaks about "Able Danger" to the House, May 21, 2002.  No use of the phrase "Able Danger", and no mention of Atta.  Was it still classified, or did the Able Danger team only learn later that they had Atta on their list?  Ahh!  Per Weldon, the Able Danger team briefed Gen. Shelton in January 2001, but what did they say?  Presentation, notes, recollections, testimony please.

Laura Rozen links to video of a similar speech to the Heritage Foundation, also May 2002.

Rep. Weldon addresses the House on "Able Danger", June 2005.

TIN FOIL SPECIAL - I found this while Googling around, and have not had a moment to evaluate it, but...

From the Times:

Mr. Felzenberg confirmed an account by Mr. Weldon's staff that the briefing, at the commission's offices in Washington, had been conducted by Dietrich L. Snell, one of the panel's lead investigators, and had been attended by a Pentagon employee acting as an observer for the Defense Department; over the commission's protests, the Bush administration had insisted that an administration "minder" attend all the panel's major interviews with executive branch employees. Mr. Snell referred questions to Mr. Felzenberg.

Now, in trying to find out about Mr. Snell, I came across this, which I pass on *WITHOUT ENDORSEMENT*:

But Philip Zelikow, Executive Director of the 9/11 Commission, shocked [Peter] Lance, [author of "Cover Up", about the 9/11 Commission] with the news that his information would be taken privately by Commission team leader Dietrich Snell. For in 1996, when he was Assistant U.S. Attorney, Snell himself had helped to prosecute Yousef in the Bojinka trial, in a way that systematically excluded not only Scarpa's testimony but all reference to both KSM and Bojinka II.

As Lance wrote later in Cover Up,

Under objective circumstances, Snell would have made an important witness before the Commission. But in the heavily conflicted world of the Commission staff, he was hired to be one of its senior attorneys and team leaders. [37]

The cover-up Lance wished to discuss with Snell was not over.

[The Commission's] Staff Statement No. 16, co-written by Dietrich Snell, concluded that KSM didn't begin planning the 9/11 attacks until 1996. There was no mention of Yousef's involvement in the plot. . . . If this take on the story were true, it would let the Justice Department and the FBI off the hook for ignoring the evidence presented to them . . . in 1995 -- evidence showing that Yousef and KSM . . . were planning to hijack airliners and fly them into six U.S. buildings . . . including the WTC. [38]

I have NO IDEA if that is credible or relevant, and I hate to wander into tin foil territory, but - I do want to know a bit more about whether Mr. Snell might have been a Gorelick crony - otherwise, I cannot understand Ms. Gorelick's seemingly extraordinary power over this commission.

MORE:  RedState is intrigued by Mr. Snell; they also note that the question of our ability to pin down Atta's travels was politically fraught, since it ties to the question of whether he met with an Iraqi intelligence agent in Prague on April 9, 2001.  See the 9/11 Report, Ch. 7.

Able Was I Ere I Saw "Able Danger"

The Times tells us on Thursday that the 9/11 Commission simply needed its collective memory prodded a bit - yes, the Commission was briefed about "Able Danger", and yes, Mohammed Atta was mentioned.  Folks who wondered about Congressman Curt Weldon's credibility (Yes, that included me) will need a moment to regroup.  The Captain, on the other hand, has shivered his timbers and is keel-hauling the Commission.  From the Times:

The Sept. 11 commission was warned by a uniformed military officer 10 days before issuing its final report that the account would be incomplete without reference to what he described as a secret military operation that by the summer of 2000 had identified as a potential threat the member of Al Qaeda who would lead the attacks more than a year later, commission officials said on Wednesday.

The officials said that the information had not been included in the report because aspects of the officer's account had sounded inconsistent with what the commission knew about that Qaeda member, Mohammed Atta, the plot's leader.

...The briefing by the military officer is the second known instance in which people on the commission's staff were told by members of the military team about the secret program, called Able Danger.

The meeting, on July 12, 2004, has not been previously disclosed. That it occurred, and that the officer identified Mr. Atta there, were acknowledged by officials of the commission after the congressman, Curt Weldon of Pennsylvania, provided information about it.

Mr. Weldon has accused the commission of ignoring information that would have forced a rewriting of the history of the Sept. 11 attacks. He has asserted that the Able Danger unit, whose work relied on computer-driven data-mining techniques, sought to call their superiors' attention to Mr. Atta and three other future hijackers in the summer of 2000. Their work, he says, had identified the men as likely members of a Qaeda cell already in the United States.

In a letter sent Wednesday to members of the commission, Mr. Weldon criticized the panel in scathing terms, saying that its "refusal to investigate Able Danger after being notified of its existence, and its recent efforts to feign ignorance of the project while blaming others for supposedly withholding information on it, brings shame on the commissioners, and is evocative of the worst tendencies in the federal government that the commission worked to expose."

Al Felzenberg, who served as the commission's chief spokesman, said earlier this week that staff members who were briefed about Able Danger at a first meeting, in October 2003, did not remember hearing anything about Mr. Atta or an American terrorist cell. On Wednesday, however, Mr. Felzenberg said the uniformed officer who briefed two staff members in July 2004 had indeed mentioned Mr. Atta.

The Congressman's tirade currently appears to be justified.

Now, why did the Commission give the Able Danger briefing short shrift?

Mr. Felzenberg said the commission's staff remained convinced that the information provided by the military officer in the July 2004 briefing was inaccurate in a significant way.

"He wasn't brushed off," Mr. Felzenberg said of the officer. "I'm not aware of anybody being brushed off. The information that he provided us did not mesh with other conclusions that we were drawing" from the commission's investigation.

Mr. Felzenberg said staff investigators had become wary of the officer because he argued that Able Danger had identified Mr. Atta, an Egyptian, as having been in the United States in late 1999 or early 2000. The investigators knew this was impossible, Mr. Felzenberg said, since travel records confirmed that he had not entered the United States until June 2000.

"There was no way that Atta could have been in the United States at that time, which is why the staff didn't give this tremendous weight when they were writing the report," Mr. Felzenberg said. "This information was not meshing with the other information that we had."

But Russell Caso, Mr. Weldon's chief of staff, said that "while the dates may not have meshed" with the commission's information, the central element of the officer's claim was that "Mohammed Atta was identified as being tied to Al Qaeda and a Brooklyn cell more than a year before the Sept. 11 attacks, and that should have warranted further investigation by the commission."

"Furthermore," Mr. Caso said, "if Mohammed Atta was identified by the Able Danger project, why didn't the Department of Defense provide that information to the F.B.I.?"

Not a bad question. 

Mr. Felzenberg goes on to explain that the Able Danger briefing was also put to one side because a dog nearly ate the Commission's report:

The Sept. 11 commission issued its final report on July 22, 2004. Mr. Felzenberg noted that the interview with the military officer had taken place in the final, hectic days before the commission sent the report to the printers, and said the meeting reflected a willingness by the commission to gather facts, even at the last possible minute.

"Lots of stuff was coming in over the transom," Mr. Felzenberg said. "Lots of stuff was flying around. At the end of the day, when you're writing the report, you have to take facts presented to you."

Yes, you go to the printer with the report you have - who almost said that?

Well, at this point we ought to await a description of the one hour condensed briefing that, per Weldon, was given to Gen. Hugh Shelton in January 2001 - that would seem to represent a clear, contemporaneous version of the Able Danger product.  It is still dimly possible that the Able Danger briefing given to the 9/11 Commission conflated the initial effort with some post-9/11 updating, and that the original Able Danger briefing either had no names, or too many names to have been useful.  Very dimly possible. 

But assuming for a moment that Weldon is holding aces, how monumental an intelligence debacle is this, and who will be blamed?  The obvious whipping boys of summer would be Clinton/Berger/Gorelick, for fostering an overly legalistic approach to the War on Terror; Bush/Tenet/Rice for failing to draw this information from the system in the summer of 2001, when we were at a high terrorist threat level and Tenet's hair was on fire; and Gen. Hugh Shelton and the Pentagon.  Gen. Shelton (ret.) was Chairman of the JCS in Jan 2001 - if he heard and downplayed the Able Danger briefing then, he and the Pentagon might prefer to see it buried now.

As to how significant an error this was - obviously, after the fact Mohammed Atta was very important.  Although I assume Able Danger did not offer any specific projections about hijacking planes, if Atta had been put under closer surveillance, the 9/11 plot might have been disrupted.  Still, a point to ponder - was Atta noted by Able Danger as a key Al Qaeda figure even in 2001, or was he just one name among fifty, or five hundred?

I suspect that Congressional hearings into this will be forthcoming.

MORE:  9/11 Commissioner Gorelick is a particular target of the right.  Here are a couple of posts about her conflicts of interest with this assignment, and let's note that Dwight Meredith started this.

STILL MORE:  Jack Risko gives us more on Gorelick and the "wall" separating intelligence gathering from law enforcement.  Kevin Drum picks up the coverage, cautiously:

Bottom line: This is an intriguing story, but my guess is that Weldon and his source may be considerably embroidering the scope and reliability of what the Able Danger team actually uncovered in 2000 — as people are often wont to do after the fact. Stay tuned.

OK.

I DON'T THINK THAT WORD MEANS WHAT YOU THINK IT MEANS:  From Fox:

Hamilton confirmed that commission staff members learned of Able Danger during a meeting with military personnel in October 2003 in Afghanistan, but that the staff members do not recall learning of a connection between Able Danger and any of the four terrorists now mentioned. He also said no mention made of Atta.

It was "inconceivable" that staffers would have missed such a reference, Hamilton told FOX News.

Well, they didn't seem to care at the July 12, 2004 meeting.

Jim Geraghty at TKS says that "if Rep. Curt Weldon is right, a political earthquake is about to hit Washington."

Judy Miller, First Amendment Champion!

As Times reporter Judy Miller serves her sentence for civil contempt she continues to collect plaudits as a Free Press Champion of the Free World.  This ties in to the notion that being in jail has been a good career move for Ms. Miller.  From the AP, by way of the WaPo:

A leading defender of press freedom in the Western Hemisphere said Wednesday he is concerned that the imprisonment of New York Times reporter Judith Miller could set a "terrible example" for the cause of press freedom in Latin America.

Alejo Miro Quesada, a Peruvian who is head of the Inter-American Press Association, said, "No journalist should be forced to disclose his sources of information."

...Miro Quesada, president of the Peruvian daily El Comercio, was leading an IAPA delegation that planned meet with Miller Wednesday night at the Alexandria Detention Center in suburban Virginia, where she has been since July 6.

The delegation hoped to tell Miller she was sending an important message to Latin Americans by refusing to disclose her sources in the Valerie Plame case.

Emphasis added.  We have previously noted that Ms. Miller and the Times seem to prefer to cast her in this light - Ms. Miller bravely concealing her sources from the government, standing tall on behalf of a latter day "Deep Throat".

In a very broad sense, this may be true - folks are scratching their heads wondering just what is driving Ms. Miller, and there may well be some source somewhere she is ultimately hoping to protect. 

However, and more prosaically, Ms. Miller is currently in jail for defying a subpoena which names a government official and orders her to testify about her conversations and dealings with that specific official.  Further, the official in question (leaks say it is Lewis Libby) has already testified to his side of the story.  This court order does not oblige her to testify about any of her sources other than the named official.

The WaPo was quite clear about this in a helpful Q&A:

Q: Doesn't Fitzgerald know the identities of Miller's and Cooper's sources? Haven't the sources signed waivers that allow the reporters to talk to the prosecutor?

Yes and yes. But Miller, who did some reporting but never wrote a story, says that the waiver is not voluntary under these circumstances and that she is upholding the journalistic principle of never breaking a promise of confidentiality to a source.

Able Danger - Something There, But What?

[UPDATE:  OK, the 9/11 Commission was lying waiting for someone to jog their memory.  More in a post to follow, but the Times has a new story for Thursday:

The Sept. 11 commission was warned by a uniformed military officer 10 days before issuing its final report that the account would be incomplete without reference to what he described as a secret military operation that by the summer of 2000 had identified as a potential threat the member of Al Qaeda who would lead the attacks more than a year later, commission officials said on Wednesday.

The officials said that the information had not been included in the report because aspects of the officer's account had sounded inconsistent with what the commission knew about that Qaeda member, Mohammed Atta, the plot's leader.

...The briefing by the military officer is the second known instance in which people on the commission's staff were told by members of the military team about the secret program, called Able Danger.

...Al Felzenberg, who served as the commission's chief spokesman, said earlier this week that staff members who were briefed about Able Danger at a first meeting, in October 2003, did not remember hearing anything about Mr. Atta or an American terrorist cell. On Wednesday, however, Mr. Felzenberg said the uniformed officer who briefed two staff members in July 2004 had indeed mentioned Mr. Atta.

The meeting, on July 12, 2004, has not been previously disclosed. That it occurred, and that the officer identified Mr. Atta there, were acknowledged by officials of the commission after the congressman, Curt Weldon of Pennsylvania, provided information about it.

OK, our skepticism about Weldon needs to be dialed back a bit.]

As of Wednesday, the Times follows up on Tuesday's front-pager, giving us more info on the Pentagon's data-mining project called "Able Danger".  The Times has certainly set off a scramble, if that was the goal.  But we still wonder why Congressman Curt Weldon is telling us this now.

Laura Rozen provides a fascinating clue - Rep. Curt Weldon was describing the "Able Danger" project and showing part of its product - an organizational chart of Al Qaeda - back in 2002.  Ms. Rozen links to a Heritage Foundation video; let me toss in this floor speech Weldon gave on May 21, 2002, which seems to be quite similar.  And here is some press reaction (Fox News) from May 2002.  (Oh, why not, here is Weldon's floor speech from June 2005 as well.)

Now, as we listen for non-barking dogs - in May 2002, Weldon says that the Pentagon identified five Al Qaeda cells in the US.  However, he does *not* mention Mohammed Atta by name, nor is the phrase "Able Danger" mentioned.

By 2005, Atta is described as appearing on the Al Qaeda org chart.  Why the evolution in Weldon's presentation?  I would have thought that Atta's name was highly significant in May 2002.  [Ahh, but was the fact that we gleaned it through data-mining still classified?  Good point!  And we thank AJ Strata, who lays out the possible Clinton/Berger conspiracy and has an update.]

Mickey has good background on the data-mining tussle and the policy implications.

The Captain tells us that the existence of "Able Danger" has been confirmed - I certainly agree that some team must have doing something - we have reporters telling us about documents and 9/11 staffers admitting to having been briefed.  And I am wide open to the possibility of a bipartisan cover-up, or a Pentagon cover-up, or a Clinton/Berger cover-up.

An excerpt from Weldon's 2002 speech appears after the break:

UPDATE:  More raw material - Weldon mentioned "Able Danger" in passing on Meet The Press, June 12, 2005, while discussing his new book.  That was two weeks before his House floor speech, and Atta went unmentioned.  OK, the subject was CIA credibility, but I find this to be puzzling.  Although I bury the lede all the time.

Roberts - "Settled Law" Not So Settled

Confirming the recent comments by Attorney General Gonzalez, Supreme Court nominee John Roberts told Sen. Wyden of Oregon that, despite his assertion during his 2003 hearing that Roe v. Wade was "settled law":

"settled law depends to a degree on the bench on which you sit," meaning that while it may be settled for a circuit judge, the same may not be true for justices of the Supreme Court.

"His definition of settled law based on what he told me this afternoon is not settled," Mr. Wyden said, adding, "That is certainly something that needs to be followed up on."

Let the brawl begin resume.

Malfeasance, Cover-up, or Fantasy? [Multiple UPDATES]

The Times, happily leaking double secret classified information again, tells us that a Pentagon intelligence unit identified four of the nineteen 9/11 hijackers operating in the United States in the summer of 2000, but sat on the warning rather than share it with the FBI.

But what are they really telling us?  I guess they felt obliged to report this story - their primary sources are a US Congressman and one of the Pentagon operatives involved - but I sense robust skepticism leaking though the ink of the Old and Tired Gray Lady.  Here we go:

Four in 9/11 Plot Are Called Tied to Qaeda in '00 

By DOUGLAS JEHL

 

WASHINGTON, Aug. 8 - More than a year before the Sept. 11 attacks, a small, highly classified military intelligence unit identified Mohammed Atta and three other future hijackers as likely members of a cell of Al Qaeda operating in the United States, according to a former defense intelligence official and a Republican member of Congress.

In the summer of 2000, the military team, known as Able Danger, prepared a chart that included visa photographs of the four men and recommended to the military's Special Operations Command that the information be shared with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the congressman, Representative Curt Weldon of Pennsylvania, and the former intelligence official said Monday.

The recommendation was rejected and the information was not shared, they said, apparently at least in part because Mr. Atta, and the others were in the United States on valid entry visas. Under American law, United States citizens and green-card holders may not be singled out in intelligence-collection operations by the military or intelligence agencies. That protection does not extend to visa holders, but Mr. Weldon and the former intelligence official said it might have reinforced a sense of discomfort common before Sept. 11 about sharing intelligence information with a law enforcement agency.

OK, this should open the door to some Clinton-era bashing - 9/11 Commissioner Jamie Gorelick was involved in constructing the walls that separated law enforcement from intelligence gathering, as the Captain explains.

However, one wonders - how did this tidbit escape the attention of the 9/11 Commission?  And why are we only hearing about it now?  The Times gets different answers from different people - the Pentagon operative says that Commission staffers were told, but the Commission staffers say they were not.   Let's play "Dueling Excerpts":

For the Pentagon data-miners:

The former intelligence official said the first Able Danger report identified all four men as members of a "Brooklyn" cell, and was produced within two months after Mr. Atta arrived in the United States [on June 3, 2000]. The former intelligence official said he was among a group that briefed Mr. Zelikow and at least three other members of the Sept. 11 commission staff about Able Danger when they visited the Afghanistan-Pakistan region in October 2003.

The official said he had explicitly mentioned Mr. Atta as a member of a Qaeda cell in the United States. He said the staff encouraged him to call the commission when he returned to Washington at the end of the year. When he did so, the ex-official said, the calls were not returned.

For to the Commission:

Mr. Felzenberg, the former Sept. 11 commission spokesman, said on Monday that he had talked with some of the former staff members who participated in the briefing.

"They all say that they were not told anything about a Brooklyn cell," Mr. Felzenberg said. "They were told about the Pentagon operation. They were not told about the Brooklyn cell. They said that if the briefers had mentioned anything that startling, it would have gotten their attention."

As a result of the briefing, he said, the commission staff filed document requests with the Pentagon for information about the program. The Pentagon complied, he said, adding that the staff had not hidden anything from the commissioners.

"The commissioners were certainly told of the document requests and what the findings were," Mr. Felzenberg said.

And Rep. Weldon joins the fray with perhaps the least likely comment of all (emphasis and links added:

Mr. Weldon is an outspoken figure who is a vice chairman of both the House Armed Services Committee and the House Homeland Security Committee. He said he had recognized the significance of the episode only recently, when he contacted members of the military intelligence team as part of research for his book, "Countdown to Terror: The Top-Secret Information That Could Prevent the Next Terrorist Attack on America and How the C.I.A. Has Ignored It."

Mr. Weldon's book prompted one veteran C.I.A. case officer to strongly dispute the reliability of one Iranian source cited in the book, saying the Iranian "was a waste of my time and resources."

Mr. Weldon said that he had discussed the Able Danger episode with Representative Peter Hoekstra, the Michigan Republican who is chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, and that at least two Congressional committees were looking into the episode.

In the interview on Monday, Mr. Weldon said he had been aware of the episode since shortly after the Sept. 11 attack, when members of the team first brought it to his attention. He said he had told Stephen J. Hadley, then the deputy national security adviser, about it in a conversation in September or October 2001, and had been surprised when the Sept. 11 commission report made no mention of the operation.

Weldon's book is a Regnery Publishing effort that came out in June 2005 (and frankly, based on the review the word "kooky" comes to mind).  So, Weldon learned of this Pentagon success shortly after 9/11, discussed it with Stephen Hadley, but only recently realized its significance.  Really?

I presume the Times is chatting with Representative Peter Hoekstra, to learn what progress two House committees have made in probing this - however, a confirming quote of any kind is painfully absent from this story.  And I don't see a "no comment" or anything else from Hadley, either.  Well, I guess everyone has a "To-Do" list.

Dare I guess as to what is going on?  Well, the Times had to know this was pretty weak soup, but they front-paged it anyway.  Maybe they figure they will go with what they have, and see if they can shake something loose.

Meanwhile, we await their fully sourced coverage, comprehensive coverage of Air America.

UPDATE:  Phil Carter is intrigued, but also sends us to Eric Umansky of Slate, who is even more skeptical than I.  More reax at Memeorandum (who need to fix their auto-link to Phil Carter's "Intel Dump" - I'll put that reminder on my "To Do list", which is much less exciting than Mr. Jehl's.)

UPDATE 2:  Here is an eerily prescient article by Daniel Pipes from May 2001 reprising the Al Qaeda embassy bombing trial in New York.  Put it in the "Shoulda, coulda, woulda" file.

FOLLOWING UP:  Here is Weldon's chat with the Norristown Times Herald from June 19, 2005.  Weldon's doubters will seize on this:

...when officials asked Special Operations Command (SOCOM) to advise FBI agents of the "Able Danger" operation, the legal counsel shot down the plan, according to U.S. Rep. Curt Weldon, R-7th Dist., dumbfounding those managing the covert effort.

... According to the congressman, SOCOM had advised the FBI during the law enforcement agency's ill-fated siege of the Branch Davidian compound, in Waco, Texas, in 1993, that resulted in more than 80 deaths after Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agents raided the compound. Following the fiery debacle, all the federal participants in the siege, including SOCOM, were harshly criticized.

Fear of suffering the fallout if "Able Danger" backfired, Weldon said, explains SOCOM's reluctance to assist the FBI.

 

Blaming it on Waco...

Here is the Aug 2005 Government Security News article

In September 2000, one year before the Al Qaeda attacks of 9/11, a U.S. Army military intelligence program, known as “Able Danger,” identified a terrorist cell based in Brooklyn, NY, one of whose members was 9/11 ringleader Mohammed Atta, and recommended to their military superiors that the FBI be called in to “take out that cell,” according to Rep. Curt Weldon, a longtime Republican congressman from Pennsylvania who is currently vice chairman of both the House Homeland Security and House Armed Services Committees.

...The officer was very disappointed when lawyers working for Special Ops decided that anyone holding a green card had to be granted essentially the same legal protections as any U.S. citizen. Thus, the information Able Danger had amassed about the only terrorist cell they had located inside the United States could not be shared with the FBI, the lawyers concluded.

...DoD lawyers may also have been reluctant to suggest a bold action by FBI agents after the bureau’s disastrous 1993 strike against the Branch Davidian religious cult in Waco, TX, said Weldon and the intelligence officer.

Finally, and most imnportant - the AP follows up with the news that the 9/11 Commission will look at this:

The Sept. 11 commission will investigate a claim that U.S. defense intelligence officials identified ringleader Mohammed Atta and three other hijackers as a likely part of an al-Qaida cell more than a year before the hijackings but didn't forward the information to law enforcement.

...Sept. 11 commission co-chairman Lee Hamilton said Tuesday that Weldon's information, which the congressman said came from multiple intelligence sources, warrants a review. He said he hoped the panel could issue a statement on its findings by the end of the week.

"The 9/11 commission did not learn of any U.S. government knowledge prior to 9/11 of surveillance of Mohammed Atta or of his cell," said Hamilton, a former Democratic congressman from Indiana. "Had we learned of it obviously it would've been a major focus of our investigation."

...Defense Department documents shown to an Associated Press reporter Tuesday said the Able Danger team was set up in 1999 to identify potential al-Qaida operatives for U.S. Special Operations Command. At some point, information provided to the team by the Army's Information Dominance Center pointed to a possible al-Qaida cell in Brooklyn, the documents said.

However, because of concerns about pursuing information on "U.S. persons" — a legal term that includes U.S. citizens as well as foreigners admitted to the country for permanent residence — Special Operations Command did not provide the Army information to the FBI. It is unclear whether the Army provided the information to anyone else.

The command instead turned its focus to overseas threats.

The documents provided no information on whether the team identified anyone connected to the Sept. 11 attack.

If the team did identify Atta and the others, it's unclear why the information wasn't forwarded. The prohibition against sharing intelligence on "U.S. persons" should not have applied since they were in the country on visas — they did not have permanent resident status.

Let's take the cheap shot - a possible Al Qaeda cell in Brooklyn?  What's the next breakthrough, IRA sympathizers in Boston?  C'mon, the 1993 WTC terrorists went to a mosque in Brooklyn:

Brooklyn’s Atlantic Avenue is only thirty minutes away by the Number 4 train from the World Trade Center...  The mile stretch of Brooklyn seems a much closer cousin to downtown Cairo than Wall Street. It is a neighborhood overcrowded with the city’s densest concentration of Arabs.

...“This area is known as an Arab enclave throughout the world,” boasts Sam Moustapha, a co-owner of the family-run Oriental Pastry and Grocery Company.

...Inside the tiny room, dense with thick and heady smoke from hours of chain-smoking, Egyptians, Syrians, Jordanians, and Lebanese sit, packed elbow to elbow, discussing the terror attacks. Many have lived through years of crises, including four Arab-Israeli wars, the arrests of local Hamas bomb makers, the nearby murder ten years earlier of radical Jewish activist Rabbi Meir Kahane, the Gulf War, and the now legendary neighborhood tales of the first World Trade Center bombers who lived and worshiped along these very streets.

Glad we figured that out.

STILL MORE:  The Strata-Sphere makes the case for cover-up.  It is certainly true that if the Able Danger story is true, no one who ignored it lacks for motive.  One question to ponder - did Terror Czar Dick Clarke liase with the military, and does he mention data-mining or other creative military initiatives?  Setting aside my feelings for the man, I can't see him ignoring this, and I would think that if the military had any contact with him at all, they would have found a way to leak it to him.  (Well, maybe they did, and now he's covering...)

John Tierney On Meth

For perspective you must read Mark Kleiman, who responds to John Tierney's piece about methamphetamine.  Mark Kleiman, as many know, is an expert in this area [his book, and a hostile libertarian review]; for additional perspective you ought to read TBogg, who apparently has acquired an informal expertise.

UPDATE:  John Cole has thoughts, and points us to Jack Shafer; lots of reaction to Tierney at Memeorandum; Steve Chapman of the Chicago Tribune on meth as the crisis drug du jour.

Waas On Plame And Libby

Investigative reporter Murray Waas has been doing a terrific job on the Plame story for months.  Today he has a piece in TAP which wraps up some of the latest developments in the Judy Miller saga, and fluffs the Tim Russert story.  JeraLynn Merritt of TalkLeft does the heavy lifting on the main points:

(1)  Ms. Miller is in jail for declining to testify about her conversations with Lewis Libby; the WaPo told us this on July 16, although they waffle sometimes.

(2)  There was apparently a face-to-face meeting between Libby and Miller on July 8, so in addition to a conversation, there may (or may not) be a document involved.  The document may have been shown by Libby to Miller, or vice versa.  Since the document is mentioned in the subpoena, and Libby has testified, we are inclined to think there is something to this, since who else would know?

(3)  Ms. Miller is stuck on the question of a personal, credible, uncoerced waiver.  Mr. Waas presents both views (Miller intransigent / Libby uncooperative), but in my humble right-wing opinion, he gives too much play to the "Libby uncooperative" theory.  It is not up to Libby's attorneys to open private negotiations with Ms. Miller's team about the circumstances under which she will testify - folks would have good reason to scream "Collusion!"

On the other hand, if Fitzgerald orders Libby to negotiate and/or oversees the effort, any resulting deal may (Miller might argue) be viewed as coerced.  A conundrum.  But let's note four things:

(a) Libby and Fitzgerald have managed to work out deals with four other reporters;

(b) no one has shown evidence that Libby is declining to cooperate with Fitzgerald; and

(c) no one has offered any evidence that Miller is reaching out and looking for a deal.

[However, we have this from E&P:

Adam Liptak, who reports on legal affairs for The Times, stated to NPR's Terry Gross on August 2: "Judy and her lawyers have declined to answer the question of whether they have done anything at all to contact the source and try to obtain a satisfactory waiver" that would permit her to break confidentiality and testify before the grand jury.]

(d) folks have suggested motives (book deal, reputational rehab) for Ms. Miller to play first-amendment martyr.  (And Arianna breaks news - the Times may do an expose on Miller, to avoid being scooped!) As Fitzgerald noted in one of his filings, a woman who spent time as an embedded reporter in the Iraqi desert may not be afraid of four months in jail.

(4)  Murray Waas, in an aside, clears Tim Russert of passing the information about Ms. Plame to Libby.  Since he has nothing in quotes, we fear that he has fallen prey to the Isikoff trap of recycling the too-specific Aug 2004 NBC press release without paying attention to the nuances.  This was reported in Aug 2004:

Russert told Fitzgerald that he did not know Plame’s name or that she was a CIA operative and that he did not provide that information to Libby, it said.

And here is what Mr. Liptak of the Times got when he tried to update the story this July:

Mr. Russert's testimony last August provides intriguing clues. A statement issued by NBC at the time suggests that Mr. Libby had told Mr. Fitzgerald that he had heard about Ms. Wilson from Mr. Russert.

According to the statement, lawyers for Mr. Russert and Mr. Fitzgerald reached an agreement under which Mr. Fitzgerald questioned Mr. Russert only about Mr. Russert's end of a conversation in early July 2003 with Mr. Libby. That would be an unusual way to go about pursuing a leak inquiry, but it is consistent with an attempt to try to establish that Mr. Russert provided information to Mr. Libby.

Mr. Russert, however, according to the NBC statement, said "he did not know Ms. Plame's name or that she was a C.I.A. operative and that he did not provide that information to Mr. Libby." Indeed, the statement said, Mr. Russert first learned the information from Mr. Novak's column.

A spokeswoman for NBC declined to elaborate on the statement yesterday.

Well, fine, but did Russert tell Libby that Wilson's wife worked for the CIA, and was involved in sending him on the trip?  No name, no "operative" - and no comment from NBC.

Until a reporter gets something specific and in quotes, we should hold off on clearing Mr. Russert.  (And did it happen on "Meet the Press" today?  Harry Shearer says it did not.)

And I would love to ask Mr. Waas about this, if his contact info were available.  I don't see it at his blog.

UPDATE:  On Russert, let's keep Bloomberg in the mix:

Lewis ``Scooter'' Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, told special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald that he first learned from NBC News reporter Tim Russert of the identity of Central Intelligence Agency operative Valerie Plame, the wife of former ambassador and Bush administration critic Joseph Wilson, one person said. Russert has testified before Fitzgerald that he didn't tell Libby of Plame's identity, the person said.

Emphasis added.  Too specific.  And why do we need leaks from Russo-philic NBC Weasels to wriggle him off the hook?  Let the man speak!

UPDATE 2:  The Anonymous Liberal wants to know why we aren't hearing more (or any!) "Don't blame me, it's her fault" leaks from Libby or his camp.  Good question.  A possibility - as usual, the press has moved on and Libby has drawn little heat, so riding out this stalemate may be a winning play.  That said, we thank Murray Waas for the kind words and learn that Congressman John Conyers is trying to create some heat for Libby.  Without coercing him, of course.

An "Aggressive Partisan And Hothead"

The NY Times delves into the long friendship bewtween Karl Rove and Robert Novak, two people they chooses to describe as "two men [who] share a love of history and policy, as well as reputations as aggressive partisans and hotheads."

Perhaps a typesetting error prevented the Times from breaking real news - maybe Novak and Rove have reputations as "potheads".

Otherwaise, I would be curious to know whther the Times has ever characterized some of Wahington's other well known partisans with a temper as "hotheads" - Bill and Hillary get heated up ocassioally, I have read.  I bet James Carvile can get riled from time to time.  I even heard a rumor that Sen. Harry Reid once took off his glasses and said "That really bothers me".  OK, maybe that shouldn't count. 

But the list could go on, even though I am not.  But I bet Dick Cheney would have something to say to this.

Coming soon - the Times probes the reporting relationship between Judy Miller and Lewis Libby.  Oh, wait, what's the point - her being in jail isn't really news, and the Times doesn't know who she is protecting...

At The Risk Of Over-Generalizing...

Paul Krugman sends a couple of strawmen into the fray today.  First, he is helpful enough to define supply side economics:

Mr. Kristol led by example, using The Public Interest to promote supply-side economics, a doctrine whose central claim - that tax cuts have such miraculous positive effects on the economy that they pay for themselves - has never been backed by evidence.

Strawman Alert!  I suspect that supply-siders will have a less dramatic definition focusing on the incentive effects of taxes and regulation on output and savings.  These two articles give a more balanced flavor, and we like this:

George Bush, in the days when he was an opponent of Ronald Reagan in the 1980 primaries, referred to an extreme version of this theory espoused by Reagan as "voodoo economics." In this version a cut in tax rates was predicted to result in an increase in tax revenue, and thus not increase the government deficit (the famous Laffer Curve effect).

Emphasis added.  Characterizing an entire school of thought by its most extreme views... tut, tut. 

In any case, there are small examples which perfectly validate the concept that higher taxes can quash a business- the famous tax on luxury boats, for example, which raised very little revenue as prospective boat owners simply switched their discretionary income to other purchases.  However, the tax was credited with increasing unemployment at boatyards and marinas throughout the country, and its repeal almost certainly was a net revenue raiser.  OK, the recession muddied the statistical waters, but are there still defenders of this tax experiment out there?

And here goes Krugman on global warming:

You might have thought that a strategy of creating doubt about inconvenient research results could work only in soft fields like economics. But it turns out that the strategy works equally well when deployed against the hard sciences.

The most spectacular example is the campaign to discredit research on global warming. Despite an overwhelming scientific consensus, many people have the impression that the issue is still unresolved.

"The issue is still unresolved".  I guess his point is that "the issue" is, in fact, resolved.  But what is the issue?  Offhand, four come to mind:

(1)  The global climate has been warming over the last century;

(2)  the global climate has been warming and man-made emissions of greenhouse gases are a significant contributer to the phenomenon;

(3) man-made greenhouse gases are important, per (2), and the Kyoto Protocol, if implemented, would significantly reduce or eliminate man-made warming (i.e., Kyoto is effective);

(4) In addition to being effective, Kyoto is efficient - the environmental benefits of implementing Kyoto exceed the likely costs of lost growth and income.

I doubt that there is, as Krugman says, "an overwhelming scientific consensus" on points (3) or (4); my impression is that point (1) has been accepted by all but a few hold-outs, and that (2) is still in dispute.  In any case, if Krugman or his acolytes could tell us what "the issue" is on which a consensus has emerged, we are all ears.  Or eyes.

Road Rage

The NY Times irritates and alienates Yankee fans with this uncritical recycling of dubious statistics:

The Red Sox are baseball's biggest roadside attraction. On its tour through 12 cities, the self-styled posse of scruffy idiots is leading Major League Baseball in road attendance, a category the Yankees have won the last three seasons.

...Through Wednesday's games, Boston's 56 road dates averaged 38,673 in attendance, more than the Yankees' 38,140 average in 51 games. The Yankees have the record for road attendance, 3.3 million, set last year.

Oh, stop it!  The Red Sox road attendance includes six sell-outs at 55,000 seat Yankee Stadium; the Yankees' figure includes six sell-outs at 35,000 seat Fenway Park.

Adjust for that, and the Yankees are still the best show in The Show. 

Bad News on the Mental Fitness Front

Novakula suspended after stalking off CNN set.  The world wonders - what chased him off?  Was it garlic, a silver cross, what?

Mickey is way ahead of the pack - per the video capture, it looks as if the interviewer had plunked a copy of "Who's Who" on the table.  We also have a photo of the Who's Who volume, taken from the publisher's website.  The Captain has commentary; we are just disappointed that our "Just Say 'No' To Novak" campaign has been flipped upside-down: we can hardly boycott Novak if he is boycotting us. 

More:  Wizbang has a photo of Wilson's Who's Who entry; a CNN spokesperson confirms to the Chicago Sun-Times that a Who's Who was on the table.

Good News On The Physical Fitness Front

We are roughly one month into the latest spasm on the Plame investigation, and there is excellent news on the physical fitness front - Mark Kleiman and Kevin Drum seem to have reclaimed their ability to leap to conclusions.

Mr. Kleiman flexes first; we will strip away his caveats in order to justify our tiresome, union-mandated snark:

Buried in the fifth paragraph of a story buried below the fold on page eighteen of the New York Times is this little land mine:

At one point, the aides were asked why Mr. Cooper's call to Mr. Rove was not entered in Mr. Rove's office telephone logs. There was no record of the call, the person who has been briefed said, because Mr. Cooper did not call Mr. Rove directly, but was transferred to his office from a White House switchboard.

If you believe that explanation, I'll tell you another. Obviously, call logs aren't of any value unless all calls are logged: the whole point is to allow someone to say, months later, "No, I know I didn't talk to X on that date; I've checked my call logs." This reads to me like strong evidence that Rove and his crew knew at the time they were doing something they didn't want to get caught doing.

In prosecutorese, that's called "evidence of consciousness of guilt," and it's extremely helpful in proving intent.

First, I am not an expert on the procedures employed by the White House in maintaining call logs, and I doubt Mr. Kleiman is, either; I decline to speculate as to how such an oversight might have occurred.

However, if Mr. Kleiman seriously thinks Karl ordered his aides into his office and said "That call never happened - remember that", and they dutifully replied "What call?", then let me ask him this - what foolish impulse prompted Karl to send an e-mail to Hadley documenting his chat with Cooper?  I think that by 2003, most people realized that e-mails are subject to subpoena.

Well, if the secret staff meeting to doctor the call log was evidence of criminal intent, I guess the e-mail is evidence of... a desire to get caught?  That's it!

Let's see where Mr. Drum manages to leap in his Big Finish:

Mark may have a point. After all, we know that in his initial testimony Rove lied and said he hadn't spoken to Cooper at all. We know that when he later recanted that testimony, he continued to lie by claiming the call was actually about welfare reform and that Plame only came up incidentally. And now we know that he failed to log his call with Cooper. Since call logging is standard procedure, this could only happen if Rove specifically asked one of his aides not to log the call.

Oh, boy - we don't know that "in his initial testimony Rove lied and said he hadn't spoken to Cooper at all".  What we think we know (per Newsweek, p. 3) is that Rove did not mention Cooper in his testimony initial chat with the FBI.  There is no reason to think he specifically denied speaking to Cooper, as implied by Drum, and it may well be that he offered caveated, "as best I recall" testimony saying he spoke about Ms. Wilson only to Novak.

We also certainly don't know that Rove "continued to lie by claiming the call was actually about welfare reform and that Plame only came up incidentally".  Per Cooper, the call only lasted about two minutes; per Rove's e-mail to Hadley, the initial subject, brought up by Cooper, was welfare reform:

"Matt Cooper called to give me a heads-up that he's got a welfare-reform story coming," Mr. Rove wrote Mr. Hadley, who since has risen to the top job of national security adviser.

"When he finished his brief heads-up, he immediately launched into Niger. Isn't this damaging? Hasn't the president been hurt? I didn't take the bait, but I said if I were him, I wouldn't get Time far out in front on this."

Byron York has more on this - per Cooper's own account, he may have left a message for Rove earlier in the week asking for a chance to talk about welfare reform.  Possible?  The President signed an extension of the welfare bill on June 30, so the subject was topical.

And unlike Mr. Drum, I am simply not enough of an authority on White House procedures to make this statement:

Since call logging is standard procedure, this could only happen if Rove specifically asked one of his aides not to log the call.

That is the *only* way a breakdown in procedures could occur?  The Reality-Based Team seems to be rounding into mid-season leaping form.

Here is Technorati for the posts from Mark and Kevin - they have not swept the blogosphere, but they did find an audience.  And that audience includes Arianna herself - well done!  We also note the skepticism from The Crank.

MORE:  A puzzle to ponder - just when did Fitzgerald develop an interest in the Rove-Cooper relationship?  Cooper was originally subpoenaed with Russert, Kessler, and Pincus to talk about Libby.  After he complied with that subpoena, he was slapped with a second one for Rove.

So, had Fitzgerald been sitting on that subpoena, did something in the "Libby Round" of testimony trigger an interest in Rove, did something else happen at about the same time (e.g., they finally found the Rove-Hadley e-mail), or what?

If we thought we could solve this (color us pessimistic), it *might* hint at whether Karl remembered Cooper under his own power, or whether his memory was jogged by e-mails and testimony from, say, Hadley.

MORE:  OK, based on the Newsday story reporting subpoenas for the White House Iraq Group e-mails in Jan 2004, I will Boldly Assert that Rove's lawyers, Rove, and presumably Fitzgerald learned about the Hadley-Rove e-mail and hence the Rove-Cooper conversation by March 2004.  More links in this comment.

The Brookings Institute On Iraq

Via the BarcePundit, we are guided to this Brookings Institute assessment of Iraq.

I have not even had the nerve to open the 41 page .pdf file until I get to a friendlier computer, but let me soundbite our man in Barcelona:

...it's all very readable charts with data making clear that, while obviously Iraq today is not like Switzerland, progress is clear and noticeable...

Here is a Technorati search, but if this Brookings report has hit the big time, Technorati is not noticing.

Well, if someone could take a minute to tell me what to make of this, that would be great.  Comment away.

UPDATE:  Glenn has some links, but I like this from PostWatch: "what you seek, you shall find. As in good news or bad news."  Bring in the cherry-pickers!