JustOneMinute

Wafa Sultan - Real Hollywood Courage

The NY Times profiles Wafa Sultan, who provides an example of real courage to the folks in LA who think, for example, that it takes moral courage to condemn Joe McCarthy:

For Muslim Who Says Violence Destroys Islam, Violent Threats

By JOHN M. BRODER

LOS ANGELES, March 10 — Three weeks ago, Dr. Wafa Sultan was a largely unknown Syrian-American psychiatrist living outside Los Angeles, nursing a deep anger and despair about her fellow Muslims.

Today, thanks to an unusually blunt and provocative interview on Al Jazeera television on Feb. 21, she is an international sensation, hailed as a fresh voice of reason by some, and by others as a heretic and infidel who deserves to die.

In the interview, which has been viewed on the Internet more than a million times and has reached the e-mail of hundreds of thousands around the world, Dr. Sultan bitterly criticized the Muslim clerics, holy warriors and political leaders who she believes have distorted the teachings of Muhammad and the Koran for 14 centuries.

She said the world's Muslims, whom she compares unfavorably with the Jews, have descended into a vortex of self-pity and violence.

 

Her comment about the Jews had to sting:

Perhaps her most provocative words on Al Jazeera were those comparing how the Jews and Muslims have reacted to adversity. Speaking of the Holocaust, she said, "The Jews have come from the tragedy and forced the world to respect them, with their knowledge, not with their terror; with their work, not with their crying and yelling."

She went on, "We have not seen a single Jew blow himself up in a German restaurant. We have not seen a single Jew destroy a church. We have not seen a single Jew protest by killing people."

She concluded, "Only the Muslims defend their beliefs by burning down churches, killing people and destroying embassies. This path will not yield any results. The Muslims must ask themselves what they can do for humankind, before they demand that humankind respect them."

Fortunately for the easily offended in the Muslim world, they do not need to respond to her criticisms:

The other guest on the program, identified as an Egyptian professor of religious studies, Dr. Ibrahim al-Khouli, asked, "Are you a heretic?" He then said there was no point in rebuking or debating her, because she had blasphemed against Islam, the Prophet Muhammad and the Koran.

The Times also provides an entry in the never-ending Unintentional Irony contest:

Shortly after the broadcast, clerics in Syria denounced her as an infidel. One said she had done Islam more damage than the Danish cartoons mocking the Prophet Muhammad, a wire service reported.

Well, the cartoons were ignored at their initial publication.  One might even say that it has been the response to the cartoons that damaged the Muslim world.

Here are the MEMRI excerpts from the broadcast.  And let's give major props to Alexandra von Maltzan of All Things Beautiful, who picked up on this interview in February.

The Washington Times further popularized it with a March 4 editorial, and Michelle Malkin also joined in.

Investigating Barry Bonds

Now it is MSNBC reporting that Barry Bonds has so annoyed people that he may be investigated for perjury or tax fraud.  The San Francisco Chronicle also describes some Congressional pressure on Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig.

However, I have not yet seen reports that the baseball writers have commenced any sort of self-investigation.  As I noted a few days back, Bonds was voted the National League Most Valuable Player by the Baseball Writers Association of America a record-smashing four straight times, from 2001 to 2004.  My (rhetorical) question - were they utterly in the dark about allegations of his steroid use?  Or, if his steroid use was so outrageous, why did they keep voting him the MVP award?  Which was it, ignorance or indifference?  And can these awards be rescinded?  The San Fran Chroncicle explains the problems with deleting Bonds' home run records, but I see no obstacle at all to rescinding Bonds' MVP awards and re-presenting them to the second-place finisher.  Surely that would be a quicker punishment than waiting five years after his retirement and then electing him to the Hall of Fame with only 80% of the vote, which is the path we are probably on right now.

Libby To Get The Presidential Daily Briefs

This just in from the AP via Houston Chronicle:

Judge Says Libby Can See Bush Briefings

  By TONI LOCY     Associated Press Writer
  © 2006 The Associated Press  

WASHINGTON — A federal judge ordered the CIA on Friday to turn over highly classified intelligence briefings to Vice President Dick Cheney's former top aide to use in preparing the aide's defense against perjury charges.

U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton rejected CIA warnings that the nation's security would be imperiled if the presidential-level documents were disclosed to lawyers for I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Cheney's former chief of staff.

The judge said the CIA can either delete highly classified portions from the briefing material and provide what amounts to a "table of contents" of what Libby and Cheney received six days a week. Or, Walton said, the CIA can produce "topic overviews" of the matters covered in the briefings.

The judge also ordered the CIA to give Libby an index of the topics covered in follow-up questions that the former White House aide asked intelligence officers who conducted the briefings.

...

The lawyers want to use the briefings as the cornerstone of Libby's defense: to show that the former top White House aide had more important matters on his mind and could have easily forgotten or remembered incorrectly "snippets" of conversations he had about CIA operative Valerie Plame.

Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald opposed giving Libby any of the briefings and accused the defense of trying to derail the case by "greymail," a process where former government officials have forced dismissals of their cases because they threatened to reveal the nation's secrets at their trials.

"Neither party has it exactly right," Walton wrote.

Libby needs to know the gist of the intelligence briefings to put on a "preoccupation defense," the judge said. But, he said, the former White House aide should be able to refresh his memory by reviewing generalized versions of the intelligence briefings.

"It is inconceivable that the defendant's memory of matters of significance to him have totally vanished," Walton wrote.

The Bush Administration may resist releasing summaries of the PDB.  However:

The judge's order indicates he is ready for such a fight. He set a schedule for the Bush administration to file any objections by March 24.

This story does not say whether Libby is getting a full year's worth of summaries, or only summaries around the time periods gauged by the judge as relevant.  However, I am looking at the order (link to follow), and it is for restricted dates of about 58 days - June 7 to July 14 covers the in-house and leak period, and then other five day spans cover what we presume are the dates of Libby's FBI and grand jury testimony.  [But which of those days are Sundays?  I count eight Sundays plus Thanksgiving, Columbus Day, and Independence Day; 58 minus 11 is 47.]

The dates:  June 7 to July 14, 2003; Oct 12-16, 2003; Nov 24-28, 2003; Mar 3-7 2004; and Mar 22-26, 2004.  I see from the opinion that Libby testified twice to the grand jury in March 2004.

And why June 7, and not May 6 as Libby had requested?  The judge explains that, per para. 4 and 5 of the indictment, Libby only learned that Valerie Wilson was Ambassador Wilson's wife on or about June 9.  OK - the indictment leans towards June 11, but the defense presumably wanted the extra couple of days.

Here is the Opinion (25 page .pdf), the Order (2 page .pdf), and a bonus - Fitzgerald's filing on ExParte Submissions (13 page .pdf).

A ruling on two remaining outstanding issues - any CIA damage assessment of the leak, and Ms. Plame's employment status - will be deferred pending further consideration.

MORE:  From the ex Parte submission, we love this explanation for why Fitzgerald can't share classified info with Libby's defense team:

Underlying the crimes charged in Poindexter and George was the Iran Contra affair. Underlying the crimes charged in this case is the failure by a senior national security official to adequately safeguard sensitive classified information. This failure goes to the  very heart of the government’s concerns about sharing non-discoverable classified information with Mr. Libby and his defense team.

Oh, stop - this gives the defense a chance to argue, yet again, that Fitzgerald might need to show some evidence that Libby was actually aware of her status.  It is clear from the indictment that the report on Wilson's trip was classified, but it does not follow that the supplementary oral tidbits about the spousal connection were also classified.

That said, unless I am brain-locking the judge has already ruled in favor of Fitzgerald on this.

UPDATE:  Here is the Times coverage, which includes a dubious description of the Wilson op-ed:

Critics of the Bush administration have asserted that the destruction of Ms. Wilson's undercover status was an act of retaliation against her husband, Joseph C. Wilson IV. Mr. Wilson, who had been sent on an official fact-finding mission to Niger, wrote in an Op-Ed article in The New York Times that the Bush White House had lied when it propagated information that Saddam Hussein had been engaged in trying to import uranium from that country.

"Twisted the intelligence" is the preferred phrase, and Wilson focused in his op-ed
on the fact that no sale of uranium took place, rather than on whether Saddam had made the attempt.  And a good thing, too, since his oral report to the CIA did mention apparent Iraqi overtures on that subject in 1999.

And either my arithmetic and calendar skills have deserted me, or this is wrong:

Moreover, Judge Walton said the government should turn over only 46 days of those topic summaries.

I got 47 days - big deal.

MORE:  Here is the WaPo, with an odd conclusion:

The fight over the classified material has delayed the Libby proceedings and prompted prosecutor Fitzgerald to charge that Libby's defense team is requesting unobtainable documents in an effort to derail the trial.

Huh?  A lot of issues have delayed this trial; we expect more delays when various WaPo reporters contest their subpoenas, and when the ruling on whether Fitzgerald's appointment was Constitutional is appealed.

And Fitzgerald's "graymail" charge notwithstanding, the judge has agreed that summaries of some of these documents are relevant to the defense.

Ex-Justice Lawyer On NSA

The WaPo has a story on "David S. Kris, a former associate deputy attorney general who now works at Time Warner Inc." telling us that:

Ex-Justice Lawyer Rips Case for Spying
White House's Legal Justifications Called Weak

By Dan Eggen and Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, March 9, 2006; A03

A former senior national security lawyer at the Justice Department is highly critical of some of the Bush administration's key legal justifications for warrantless spying, saying that many of the government's arguments are weak and unlikely to be endorsed by the courts, according to documents released yesterday.

David S. Kris, a former associate deputy attorney general who now works at Time Warner Inc., concludes that a National Security Agency domestic spying program is clearly covered by a 1978 law governing clandestine surveillance, according to a legal analysis and e-mails sent to current Justice officials.

Kris, who oversaw national security issues at Justice from 2000 until he left the department in 2003, also wrote that the Bush administration's contention that Congress had authorized the NSA program by approving the use of force against al-Qaeda was a "weak justification" unlikely to be supported by the courts.

Paragraphs eight and nine continue the pile-on:

In sum, I do not believe the statutory law will bear the government's weight," Kris wrote in his paper, dated Jan. 25. ". . . I do not think Congress can be said to have authorized the NSA surveillance."

Eventually, in paragraph ten, we are reminded that the Administration has offered tow arguments - statutory authorization under the Authorization to Use Military Force, and the inherent Constitutional power of the President to wage war:

Kris refrains from passing final judgment on the government's constitutional argument, however, saying that more facts need to be known to reach a conclusion. The Justice Department says in its own "white paper" that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which governs clandestine surveillance within the United States, must be unconstitutional if it conflicts with the president's inherent authority during war.

Oh, now they tell us.  Anyone re-reading the WaPo lead will note the qualifiers and caveats, but will a casual reader pick up on the fact that this critic (who apparently was not briefed on the program) is unsettled on a key Administration rationale?

Winning Isn't Everything...

Jason Zengerle of TNR wonders when the Kos-crowd think they might actually back a winner.

Baseball Writers - Investigate This

Dave Anderson, Select sports columnist for the NY Times, reacts to the latest "revelations" about steroid use by Barry Bonds with the following suggestions for others:

With all this new and damaging information in "Game of Shadows: Barry Bonds, Balco and the Steroids Scandal That Rocked Professional Sports," written by the San Francisco Chronicle reporters Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams, it is time for:

¶The Congressional committee that held steroids hearings last year to schedule another hearing, subpoena Bonds and have him testify under oath.

¶The United States attorney's office in San Francisco to pursue a perjury indictment against Bonds for his testimony in the Balco investigation.

¶The Internal Revenue Service to investigate Bonds for tax evasion during his nine-year relationship with Kimberly Bell, a former mistress.

¶Major League Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig to appoint a special investigator to look into the book's allegations.

With all those bloodhounds on his trail, maybe Bonds will eventually crack, just as Pete Rose finally did. When Rose was accused of betting on baseball, he denied, denied, denied. But more than a decade after he agreed in 1989 to an indefinite suspension by Commissioner Bart Giamatti, he confessed in a ghost-written book that he had indeed bet on games as the Cincinnati Reds manager.

Let's just extend this list.  Maybe the Baseball Writers Association of America can investigate (a) why they awarded the National League MVP to Bonds four straight times, from 2001 to 2004, despite widespread allegations of his steroid use; and (b) whether the MVP can be re-awarded to the second place finisher.

Or perhaps the writers could investigate the merits of (c) Clean your own house or STFU.  Fans, owners, players and, yes, writers were all complicit in this steroids debacle - check the San Francisco Giants road attendance and see how baseball enjoyed the show.

The Baseball Crank has more thoughts, and his study of Young Bonds versus Old Bonds is fascinating.

UPDATE:  Jon Friedman of MarketWatch (the go-to source for sports reporting) joins me in the wilderness with "The media enabled Barry Bonds, too".  George Will, on the other hand, is unruffled:

Let Bonds' records stand

...It is still unclear if there will be judicially imposed punishment in this matter. But condign punishment for a man as proud as Bonds would be administered by the court of public opinion, and exclusion from the Hall of Fame.

In any case, Bonds' records must remain part of baseball's history. His hits happened. Erase them and there will be discrepancies in baseball's bookkeeping about the records of the pitchers who gave them up. George Orwell said that in totalitarian societies, yesterday's weather could be changed by decree. Baseball, indeed America, is not like that.

Besides, the people who care about the record book  --  serious fans  --  will know how to read it. That may be Bonds' biggest worry.

 

The NSA Deal - Views Differ

Messrs. Shane and Kirkpatrick of the NY Times reports on the Senate deal on NSA warrantless surveillance, but it is the reaction of the editors at the Times and WaPo that is most interesting.  Let's hear from the adults first:

What Were They Smoking When They Wrote This?

The WaPo has a feel-good article about the decline in smoking, but count us among the skeptics:

Smoking In U.S. Declines Sharply
Cigarette Sales At a 54-Year Low

Americans smoked fewer cigarettes last year than at any time since 1951, and the nation's per capita consumption of tobacco fell to levels not seen since the early 1930s, the association of state attorneys general reported yesterday.

Using data the federal government gathers when it collects taxes on cigarette sales, the group found a 4.2 percent decline in 2005 alone and an overall drop of more than 20 percent since tobacco companies reached a legal settlement with the states in 1998.

My goodness - if these results are based on tax data, shouldn't some mention be made of the possibility that folks are cheating on the taxes?  Especially since increased tax avoidance is a fairly predictable consequence of a tax increase.

Here are two straws in the wind - first, NY City noted a huge increase in bootlegged cigarettes after they raised the tax from $0.08 to $1.50 per pack.

And secondly, this national survey suggests that portion of adults who smoke leveled off in 2005 at 20.9%, the same as in 2004.  It is not clear how to compare that to the second paragraph of the article, which told us that "the group found a 4.2 percent decline in 2005 alone", but I am presuming that they found a 4.2% decline from 2004 to 2005.

Well, who knows?  Maybe smokers have not quit, but are cutting back.  Or could the under-18 set be driving this result?  Probably not -  this data (550 page .pdf), which goes to 2003, did show a drop-off of high school students who smoked from 28.5% in 2001 to 21.9% in 2003.  That said, the article tells us that "Federal studies show that about 21.7 percent of high school students still smoke, as do 20.9 percent of adults", so it appears that from 2003 to 2005 student smoking has been flat.

This strikes me as unreasonably optimistic:

Cheryl Healton, president of the American Legacy Foundation, a tobacco-control group initially funded by the legal settlement, said the continuing decline suggests that the national health goal of reducing smoking rates even further by 2010 is within reach.

"We're on target to exceed the national goal" of having no more than 15 percent of youths and 12 percent of adults smoking, Healton said. Few of the other national health goals adopted in 2000 appear to be achievable, she said, "but this is one battle we're winning."

12 percent of adults by 2010?  Has she looked at this chart?  From 1997 to 2005, the percent of adults who smoke has fallen from 25% to 21%.  Based on a 4% decline over the past eight years, she is now forecasting a 9% decline over the next four years?  Wow.

There may actually be a story here for an investigative reporter - "Hey dude, where are my tax receipts?" comes to mind.  But this article is not getting it done.

UPDATE:  But then again - one day later in the Times:

Study Says Teenagers Are Avidly Shunning Cigarettes
By SEWELL CHAN 

Smoking among New York City teenagers has shown a startling decline over the last four years, with a survey of smoking habits finding that just 11 percent of public high school students now smoke.

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, who announced the findings yesterday, attributed the decline to higher cigarette taxes, which have raised the price of a pack to as high as $8, and to a ban on workplace smoking. But the declines were also reflective of nationwide trends showing that teenagers are increasingly shunning smoking.

The city's study showed that 30,000 out of 280,000 high school students had smoked at least one cigarette in the last month and that the figure had fallen by half since 1997, when 23 percent of students smoked. In 2001, that proportion had fallen to 18 percent.

By comparison, the 2003 National Risk Behavior Survey, the most recent national survey available, concluded that 21.9 percent of high school students in the United States smoked. The next such survey is to be released later this year.

 

 

It's Hard Out Here For A Fool

Jabari Asim of the WaPo pushes back against the Academy clown show that gave Three 6 Mafia an Oscar.

Details Of The NSA Deal

Once Arlen Specter signs up, the Senate deal with the White House on NSA monitoring is expected to look something like this.

Libby, The CIA, and the PDBs

The CIA response to the Libby defense request for a years worth of Presidential Daily Briefs was unsealed yesterday (Bloomberg, Breitbart).  The CIA estimated it would take nine months to comply with the defense request for nearly a year's worth of PDBs, and three months to comply with the judge's suggestion for summaries over a restricted time period of about 40 days.  From Bloomberg:

The request for more than 10 months of the President's Daily Brief would impose an ``enormous burden'' on the agency because it would have to ensure that any classified information in the reports stayed secret and because the request would take nine months to comply with, the Central Intelligence Agency said in court documents unsealed today in Washington.

``Any disclosure of the PDB beyond its intended narrow audience -- the President and his most senior advisers -- increases the possibility of damage to the national security,'' Marilyn Dorn, information review officer at the CIA's National Clandestine Service, said in a sworn affidavit.

From Breitbart:

But Dorn estimated it would take about three months to comply with a more streamlined request of about 40 days of the briefings that U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton suggested. That period would cover when Libby allegedly spoke to three reporters, along with two days before and after he was interviewed by FBI agents and testified before the grand jury.

"While the size of the task would be reduced if the time periods were restricted, the process is nevertheless time-consuming and laborious," Dorn said.

Three months sounds OK to me, especially since I don't have to do the work.

Eyes Wide Shut

Pat Roberts, Chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, led the Senate Republicans closer to a compromise with the White House on the NSA warrantless surveillance program: 

The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence voted along party lines yesterday to reject a Democratic proposal to investigate the Bush administration's domestic surveillance program and instead approved establishing, with White House approval, a seven-member panel to oversee the effort.

Chairman Pat Roberts (R-Kan.) told reporters after the closed session that he had asked the committee "to reject confrontation in favor of accommodation" and that the new subcommittee, which he described as "an accommodation with the White House," would "conduct oversight of the terrorist surveillance program." The program, which became public in December, has allowed the National Security Agency to monitor phone calls and e-mails between U.S. residents and suspected terrorists abroad without first obtaining warrants from a secret court that handles such matters.

Senate Democrats grumbled from the back of the bus:

Emerging from a closed-door session in which Democrats lost two party-line votes, Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), the vice chairman of the committee, said the outcome pushed the panel "further into irrelevancy" and reflected the influence of the Bush administration.

Rockefeller did not comment on whether his own attempt to politicize the SSCI a few years ago also contributed to its current status.

Olympia Snowe, a Republican moderate who provided a key swing vote, defended the deal:

The agreement, hashed out in weeks of negotiations between Vice President Dick Cheney and Republicans critical of the program, dashes Democratic hopes of starting a full committee investigation because the proposal won the support of Senators Chuck Hagel of Nebraska and Olympia J. Snowe of Maine. The two, both Republicans, had threatened to support a fuller inquiry if the White House did not disclose more about the program to Congress.

"We are reasserting Congressional responsibility and oversight," Ms. Snowe said.

The proposed legislation would create a seven-member "terrorist surveillance subcommittee" and require the administration to give it full access to the details of the program's operations.

Ms. Snowe said the panel would start work on Wednesday, and called it "the beginning, not the end of the process."

"We have to get the facts in order to weigh in," she said. "We will do more if we learn there is more to do."

The agreement would reinforce the authority of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which was created in 1978 to issue special warrants for spying but was sidestepped by the administration. The measure would require the administration to seek a warrant from the court whenever possible.

If the administration elects not to do so after 45 days, the attorney general must certify that the surveillance is necessary to protect the country and explain to the subcommittee why the administration has not sought a warrant. The attorney general would be required to give an update to the subcommittee every 45 days.

Arlen Specter, Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, may not be on board yet - but he wants to be:

It is not clear whether all the Republican critics will back the deal. Senator Arlen Specter, the Pennsylvania Republican who is chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has said Congress should seek a court ruling on the legitimacy of the program in addition to new oversight.

In a separate Senate committee hearing on Tuesday, Mr. Specter said, "We're having quite a time in getting responses to questions as to what has happened with the electronic surveillance program."

He said he put the administration "on notice" he might seek to block its financing if Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales did not give more information.

Mr. Specter said in statement later that he hoped for a solution that would avoid resorting to such an extreme action.

Mike Huckabee For President

Is the nation ready for another Arkansas Governor turned President?  Can we handle Hillary running against a real Arkansan?

Mike Huckabee has the diet book, the ambition, and an interesting new health care plan (There should be more at the Arkansas Health and Human Services website, but good luck.)

The diet book was an excuse for a national tour, and resulted in a plug from Nick Kristof  (excerpted here).  Obviously, the diet book also ties in to the health insurance plan.

And perhaps most important - the unofficial blog is up and at 'em.

I'm not ready.

Do You Believe In Science (II)

Back in the heat of the Presidential campaign in Oct 2004 we asked "Do You Believe in Science"?  My launching point was a NY Times magazine article which wondered whether the intersection of race and science (specifically the study of the human genome) was too hot for society to handle.  Here is an illustrative quote:

Some critics worry that the more we find out about genetic differences among people of different racial groups, the more such information will be misinterpreted or abused. Already there are fears that the biological measures of racial differences might lead to pronouncements about inherent differences in such complex traits as intelligence, athletic ability, aggressiveness or susceptibility to addiction. Once such measures are given the imprimatur of science, especially genomic science, loathsome racist stereotypes can take on the sheen of received wisdom.

With that in mind, how will folks react to this latest from the Times?  Its gist - some interesting science suggest that human evolution can be detected as having occurred withing the last ten thousand years, well after different groups had separated into Asia, Africa, and Europe.  And, in a nightmare for the folks worried that this research will be misused by racists, one of the detectable differences involves genes that seem to regulate brain size:

Three populations were studied, Africans, East Asians and Europeans. In each, a mostly different set of genes had been favored by natural selection. The selected genes, which affect skin color, hair texture and bone structure, may underlie the present-day differences in racial appearance.

...Dr. Pritchard also detected selection at work in brain genes, including a group known as microcephaly genes because, when disrupted, they cause people to be born with unusually small brains.

Dr. Bruce Lahn, also of the University of Chicago, theorizes that successive changes in the microcephaly genes may have enabled the brain to enlarge in primate evolution, a process that may have continued in the recent human past.

Last September, Dr. Lahn reported that one microcephaly gene had recently changed in Europeans and another in Europeans and Asians. He predicted that other brain genes would be found to have changed in other populations.

Dr. Pritchard's test did not detect a signal of selection in Dr. Lahn's two genes, but that may just reflect limitations of the test, he and Dr. Lahn said. Dr. Pritchard found one microcephaly gene that had been selected for in Africans and another in Europeans and East Asians. Another brain gene, SNTG1, was under heavy selection in all three populations.

"It seems like a really interesting gene, given our results, but there doesn't seem to be that much known about exactly what it's doing to the brain," Dr. Pritchard said.

Dr. Wells said that it was not surprising the brain had continued to evolve along with other types of genes, but that nothing could be inferred about the nature of the selective pressure until the function of the selected genes was understood.

The four populations analyzed in the HapMap project are the Yoruba of Nigeria, Han Chinese from Beijing, Japanese from Tokyo and a French collection of Utah families of European descent. The populations are assumed to be typical of sub-Saharan Africa, East Asia and Europe, but the representation, though presumably good enough for medical studies, may not be exact.

Well.  I understand that variations within groups are much, much larger than variations across groups.  And I understand that finding race-based differences in brain design is not at all the same as finding that one design is "better".

However - far be it from me to impede the march of science, but this is getting close to the border of "I Don't Want To Know".

MORE:  More on race and ethnicity from the Times; speaking for the "Race is a social construct" crowd:

In articles in the current issue of the journal Nature Genetics, scientists at Howard, a center of African-American scholarship, generally favor the view that there is no biological or genetic basis for race. "Observed patterns of geographical differences in genetic information do not correspond to our notion of social identities, including 'race' and 'ethnicity,' '' writes Dr. Charles N. Rotimi, acting director of the university's genome center.

And for the "Race is a useful proxy for something" view:

But several other geneticists writing in the same issue of the journal say the human family tree is divided into branches that correspond to the ancestral populations of each major continent, and that these branches coincide with the popular notion of race. "The emerging picture is that populations do, generally, cluster by broad geographic regions that correspond with common racial classification (Africa, Europe, Asia, Oceania, Americas)," say Dr. Sarah A. Tishkoff of the University of Maryland and Dr. Kenneth K. Kidd of Yale.

UPDATE:  Andrew Sullivan is in the mix, twice.  And The Poorman notes that Sully once proudly cited his publication of excerpts from "The Bell Curve" in order to provoke debate.  Hmm, over to Brad DeLong.

Kirby, We Hardly Knew Ye

If I'm ever nominated for the Baseball Hall of Fame, I'd love to have the Baseball Crank write my nominating speech.  He's good with eulogies, too.

The Solomon Amendment - Dare We Ask?

The Supreme Court upholds the Solomon Amendment which obliges colleges (and law schools) to host military recruiters.

Ann Althouse and Prof. Bainbridge have thoughts, the ScotusBlog digs deep, but I have an unrelated notion:

It strikes me as entirely likely that many of the law school profs that backed this resoundingly defeated challenge to the Solomon Amendment also back the notion that the NSA warrantless surveillance program is blatantly illegal.

Does anyone else think it might be fun and/or informative to try and match up professors and opinions on those two issues?  After all, folks who could take seriously a bunch of arguments that were shot down 8-0 might be slightly less credible on other legal issues where their own political agenda is clear.

It's just a thought, and time does not currently permit me to tackle this.

UPDATE:  Harvard's own Laurence Tribe joined an amicus brief in support of FAIR (30 page .pdf), and thinks the Admin position on the NSA is "poppycock".

The Taxprof Blog rounds up some blogger reaction.

Let's Not Misunderestimate Jon Stewart

A bitter controversy may be raging somewhere about one of Oscar host Jon Stewart's quips.  hip hop arrived at the Oscars, and we will let the LA Daily News set the scene:

Top 5 Oscar moments

...The performance of "It's Hard Out Here for a Pimp," followed by the winners' exuberantly incoherent acceptance speech and Jon Stewart's amused response: "Apparently, it's getting easier out here for a pimp," and "Martin Scorsese: zero Oscars; Three 6 Mafia: one."

So, just what did Mr. Stewart mean by the Scorsese comment?  Currently there are two interpretations on offer:

(a)  Where have we arrived that a brilliant artist like Scorsese has no Oscars while these street punks, whose next track is almost certainly about either offing pigs or slapping hos, have one?

(b)  Hey, the street punks won, get over it - Scorsese made a career out of glorifying Italian thugs, so why shouldn't these guys ride the gangsta gravy train?

Views differ - my impression from Stewart's face when Three 6 Mafia won is that he was thinking to himself, hmm, I have about four very funny career ending quips here, maybe I'll take a moment to reflect.

With Its Metaphor Masher On Overdrive...

The NY Times editors deliver a wonderfully inapt metaphor today as they renew their criticism of the NSA warrantless surveillance program:

Kabuki Congress 

Imagine being stopped for speeding and having the local legislature raise the limit so you won't have to pay the fine. It sounds absurd, but it's just what is happening to the 28-year-old law that prohibits the president from spying on Americans without getting a warrant from a judge.

It's a familiar pattern. President Bush ignores the Constitution and the laws of the land, and the cowardly, rigidly partisan majority in Congress helps him out by rewriting the laws he's broken.

"Being stopped for speeding"?  My goodness, has the courage of the Times editors abandoned them?  Have they really been screaming at the Administration for three months about a minor infraction that is comparable to a crime "everyone" has committed at one time or another?

Oh, I doubt the editors really think the NSA program is just a minor infraction; my guess is that reality intruded just long enough for the editors to step back from the cliff's edge and avoid the suggestion that General Hayden and others have willfully committed obvious, serious crimes.

General Hayden, as he noted at the National Press Club, has taken an oath to uphold the Constitution, as have many of the fine men and women who served in the NSA under him.  The General also consulted separately with three top NSA lawyers before proceeding with the program, so he is far from offering a "Just following orders" defense.

Beyond that, the General participated in briefings to Congressional leadership over a four year period without being warned that he was breaking both the law and his oath.

So for the Times to suggest that the NSA program is analogous to willful lawbreaking is ridiculous.  Politically delightful, of course, and I hope leading Dems pick up on this - a suggested soundbite is, "We support the troops defending us, except the ones we arrest".

MORE:  The editorial says this:

Mr. Specter then loyally produced a bill that actually grants legal cover, retroactively, to the one spying program Mr. Bush has acknowledged. It also covers any other illegal wiretapping we don't know about — including, it appears, entire "programs" that could cover hundreds, thousands or millions of unknowing people.

As to the possibility of unknown unknowns, AG Gonzalez denied it in a phone call with Rep. Jane Harman:

Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales told a key House Democrat yesterday that the administration is not conducting any warrantless domestic surveillance programs beyond the one that President Bush has acknowledged, the Democrat said in an interview.

Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.) said Gonzales was responding to a fax she sent him Wednesday after she read a news account of his Feb. 28 letter to two senators. In the letter, Gonzales appeared to suggest there might be domestic wiretap operations that extend beyond the outlines Bush acknowledged in December. Gonzales asked to clarify his Feb. 6 testimony that the president's acknowledged use of the National Security Agency for domestic surveillance "is all that he has authorized." "I did not and could not address . . . any other classified intelligence activities," Gonzales wrote to the senators.

Harman, the ranking Democrat on the House intelligence committee, said she sent Gonzales a fax "seeking clarification about his written testimony, which has left room for the possibility of an additional program or a broader program" of surveillance without court approval.

White House counsel Harriet Miers called Harman on Wednesday, and Gonzales phoned yesterday, Harman said. She said both of them "assured me that there is not a broader program or an additional program out there involving surveillance of U.S. persons."

MORE:  Cool - check the Google targetted ads, which are currently offering help with your speeding ticket or DUI.  What happened, did I do a post on Ted Kennedy?

Iran - How Long To Go Nuclear?

The Times has a fascinating article on Iran's probable nuclear strategy and the problems it may face in attempting to implement it.

Estimates of Iranian capability and strategy vary, but - per the British International Institute of Strategic Studies, Iran is probably not interested in sprinting to the nuclear finish line and building a one or two weapons, although if they went down that path they might be able to produce a bomb by 2010.  Instead, Iran is developing a large, complicated industrial infrastructure that, upon completion, should enable them to build roughly a dozen bombs a year.  The critical facility is a large underground uranium enrichment site that is designed to employ as many as 50,000 centrifuges.  On this timetable, and if technical problems can be overcome, Iran should be capable of making weapons after a decade.

Exhaustive detail is also available in this Oct 2005 study (322 page .pdf), "Getting Ready for a Nuclear-Ready Iran", by the Strategic Studies Institute (described here).  They mention a 12 to 48 month horizon before Iran can acquire a nuclear bomb.

Well.  We may have some time, and we hope that President Hillary (or President Obama) deals with this wisely.

But let's also hark back to this earlier Times assessment of our gloomy military options against Iran.  A key point was that whatever we do, whether it is sanctions or military strikes or something else, we do not want to provoke a patriotic backlash and drive the Iranian people and their current government closer together.

Ten years is not a lot of time, but it may be enough time for the reigning mullahs to be tossed out.  That said, it would be nice to have a credible Plan B.

But Blond Jokes Will Never Die!

The NY Times is the latest to bite on an apparently old chestnut:

How Blonds Evolve

Roger Dobson and Abul Taher report  in The London Times (www.timesonline.co.uk) on a study suggesting blonds began having more fun in the Ice Age.

According to the study, North European women evolved blond hair and blue eyes at the end of the Ice Age to make them stand out from their rivals at a time of fierce competition for scarce males.

The study argues that blond hair originated in the region because of food shortages 10,000 to 11,000 years ago. Until then, humans had the dark brown hair and dark eyes that still dominate in the rest of the world. Almost the only sustenance in Northern Europe came from roaming herds of mammoths, reindeer, bison and horses. Finding them required long, arduous hunting trips in which numerous males died, leading to a high ratio of surviving women to men.

Fair enough, but here is the fun bit:

However, the future of the blond is uncertain.

A study by the World Health Organization found that natural blonds are likely to be extinct within 200 years because there are too few people carrying the blond gene. According to the W.H.O. study, the last natural blond is likely to be born in Finland during 2202.

John Hawks swooped on this urban legend last week, and unearthed a WaPo debunking from Oct 2002:

Extinction of Blondes Vastly Overreported
Media Fail to Check Root of 'Study'

...The World Health Organization says there is no such study -- and that most journalists didn't call to check.

"We've certainly never conducted any research into the subject," WHO spokeswoman Rebecca Harding said yesterday from Geneva. "It's been impossible to find out where it came from. It just seems like it was a hoax."

John Hawks supplies the appropriate withering put-downs

 

 

Action And Reaction

The WaPo has a long report on the Administration's war on leaks to the press:

White House Trains Efforts on Media Leaks
Sources, Reporters Could Be Prosecuted

By Dan Eggen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, March 5, 2006; A01

The Bush administration, seeking to limit leaks of classified information, has launched initiatives targeting journalists and their possible government sources. The efforts include several FBI probes, a polygraph investigation inside the CIA and a warning from the Justice Department that reporters could be prosecuted under espionage laws.

In recent weeks, dozens of employees at the CIA, the National Security Agency and other intelligence agencies have been interviewed by agents from the FBI's Washington field office, who are investigating possible leaks that led to reports about secret CIA prisons and the NSA's warrantless domestic surveillance program, according to law enforcement and intelligence officials familiar with the two cases.

Numerous employees at the CIA, FBI, Justice Department and other agencies also have received letters from Justice prohibiting them from discussing even unclassified issues related to the NSA program, according to sources familiar with the notices. Some GOP lawmakers are also considering whether to approve tougher penalties for leaking.

It is only down in the twentieth paragraph that the Plame leak is mentioned, and only as follows:

But the vice chairman of the same committee, Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), complained in a letter to the national intelligence director last month that "damaging revelations of intelligence sources and methods are generated primarily by Executive Branch officials pushing a particular policy, and not by the rank-and-file employees of the intelligence agencies."

As evidence, Rockefeller points to the case of Valerie Plame, a CIA officer whose identity was leaked to the media. A grand jury investigation by Special Counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald resulted last year in the jailing of Judith Miller, then a reporter at the New York Times, for refusing to testify, and in criminal charges against I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, who resigned as Vice President Cheney's chief of staff. In court papers, Libby has said that his "superiors" authorized him to disclose a classified government report.

Others may recall that Democrats, led by Sen. Chuck Schumer, pleaded for an investigation into the Plame leak.  And the significance of that investigation is featured a bit more prominently in the current issue of the Atlantic:

Leak Prosecutions: The Gathering Storm

Some officials are itching to use the threat of long jail terms and massive fines to force reporters to finger their confidential sources.

The news media's ability to use leaks to keep the White House honest is threatened as never before by the unanticipated consequences of the investigation into the White House's own leaks of classified information to discredit a critic.

Some government officials are itching to exploit that investigation as a precedent for using the threat of long jail terms and massive fines to force reporters to finger their confidential sources. The precedent was set, ironically, by the special counsel investigating leaks by White House officials, including (we now know) Karl Rove and I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby.

This consequence of the Plame investigation was not exactly hard to predict - in fact, I made this very point in July of 2003, which suggests that I would wallop Chuck Schumer at chess.  Or checkers, even - heck, any game requiring the ability to look even one move ahead.

MORE:  Kevin Drum wants a Federal journalist shield law, but since he gets a check from the prestigious Washington Monthly, he probably would be covered by it.  Oh, I'm kidding, sort of, but who is a journalist, anyway?

Folks will like this from Kevin:

Historically, leaks have virtually never harmed national security in even a minor way, despite plenty of shrill commentary to the contrary.

Again, no mention of Plame.

UPDATE:  In a related story, the NY Times covers the AIPAC case, with its expansive interpretation of the Espionage Act.

Which One Does Not Belong?

It is the season of the SAT tests, and Bush's nuclear deal with India has given Congress has a chance to join in the pre-test prep - as a practice question, Congress can puzzle over which of the following countries does not belong with the other two:

Perhaps the strongest and most discussed critique of the deal goes like this: Mr. Bush's timing could not be worse. In the eyes of his critics, he is creating a double standard by legitimizing an Indian weapons program that only eight years ago led Washington to impose huge sanctions, while demanding, in the same week, that Iran and North Korea give up any capacity to make their own nuclear fuel.

My goodness, a double standard where we treat responsible democracies differently than we treat rogue states!  Whatever will Bush think of next?

Let's reach back a few days for Administration reaction to the "double standard" criticism:

"The comparison between India and Iran is just ludicrous," R. Nicholas Burns, the under secretary of state for political affairs, said Thursday in a telephone interview. "India is a highly democratic, peaceful, stable state that has not proliferated nuclear weapons. Iran is an autocratic state mistrusted by nearly all countries and that has violated its international commitments."

The Times also covers the unsurprising non-deal with Pakistan.

God Lied, People Died?

Alan Cowell of the NY Times takes his criticism of British PM Tony Blair to a higher level:

Blair Invokes God in Decision to Send British Troops to Iraq

By ALAN COWELL

LONDON, March 3 — Prime Minister Tony Blair has indicated that God influenced his deliberations when he committed British troops to fight alongside American forces in Iraq.

The remarks, which surprised some antiwar campaigners, were made in an Independent Television talk show to be broadcast Saturday night. A transcript was released by the ITV station on Friday.

"God influenced his deliberations"?  That is not even supported by the interview excerpts presented by Mr. Cowell.  Mr. Blair makes two points - history, other people, and, if you believe in the concept, God will judge Blair's decision to go to war with Iraq; and yes, Tony Blair prays.

Mr. Blair drew plenty of criticism in Britain, but the thrust was different:

The BBC:

PM attacked on Iraq 'God' remarks
Anti-war campaigners have criticised Tony Blair after he suggested his decision to go to war in Iraq would ultimately be judged by God.

The prime minister told ITV1's Parkinson chat show: "If you believe in God (the judgement) is made by God."

The Independent:

Blair: 'God will be my judge on Iraq'
Tony Blair has proclaimed that God will judge whether he was right to send British troops to Iraq, echoing statements from his ally George Bush.

An Independent editorial:

For Mr Blair to invoke God as the ultimate arbiter of his decision to go to war in Iraq suggests marks a change. In the past, the Prime Minister took the secular view that history would be his judge. With history turning against him in Iraq, perhaps God offers the prospect of greater mercy.

CNN International:

LONDON, England -- British Prime Minister Tony Blair says God and history will judge whether he was right to go to war in Iraq, according to the transcript of a television interview to be broadcast Saturday.

The Times is in their own choir on this one.

The BBC offers a more complete excerpt.

UPDATE:  Via Matt Drudge, we see that the NY Times has the AFP, if not God, on their side:

Blair under fire for evoking God in Iraq war decision

LONDON (AFP) - Tony Blair triggered strong reactions from parents of soldiers killed in Iraq and the political opposition, after the British prime minister evoked God in his decision to go to war.

  Details emerged Friday of Blair's interview on an ITV1 television talk show where he said God and history would judge his action in joining the US-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003.

"That decision has to be taken and has to be lived with, and in the end there is a judgment that -- well, I think if you have faith about these things then you realise that judgment is made by other people," Blair said in the interview with host Michael Parkinson which will air Saturday night.

Pressed to clarify what he meant, Blair, a devout Christian, replied: "If you believe in God, it's made by God as well."

When The Levee Breaks

MKau tackles "topping" versus "breaching" a levee, which puts him way ahead of the MSM:

After Katrina, Bush said "I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees." In the video, Patterico points out, Bush is warned by hurricane expert Max Mayfield that there's a chance the "levees will be topped." Topping is different than breaching, no? When a levee's "topped," or "overtopped," some water sloshes over it and into the city. Then the storm passes and that's it. When a levee's "breached," there's a hole in the levee and Lake Pontchartrain pours in the gap and keeps pouring in until the city is completely flooded.

Mickey's thought is that the media is deliberately suppressing the specifics of the warning in order to hype the "Bush Lied" meme.  Peter Baker and Spencer Hsu of the Friday WaPo illustrate that perfectly:

Three days after Hurricane Katrina wiped out most of New Orleans, President Bush appeared on television and said, "I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees." His staff has spent the past six months trying to take back, modify or explain away those 10 words.

The release of a pre-storm video showing officials warning Bush during a conference call that the hurricane approaching the Gulf Coast posed a dire threat to the city and its levees has revived a dispute the White House had hoped to put behind it: Was the president misinformed, misspoken or misleading?

The video leaves little doubt that key people in government did anticipate that the levees might not hold.

Emphasis added, and gosh, may I have choice (d) - The President was spot on?  Thanks.  This story leaves little doubt that key editors at the Washington Post might not be doing their jobs.

For another perspective, i.e., a perspective that is either utterly ignorant or indifferent, here is CNN's coverage of the warning to Bush about the imminent threat to New Orleans last fall:

Bush has been accused of showing poor leadership after the disaster, and for indicating, along with Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, that no one could have anticipated that the flood protection system for New Orleans, Louisiana, would be breached.

However, transcripts from video conferences on August 28 and 29 show that National Hurricane Center Director Max Mayfield expressed concern that Katrina might push its storm surge over the city's levees and flood walls.

"I don't think anyone can tell you with confidence right now whether the levees will be topped or not, but that's obviously a very, very great concern," Mayfield says in one.

In a September 1 television interview, Bush said, "I don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees," a statement Chertoff agreed with three days later.

Does the CNN reporter even realize tha there is a difference between "topping" and "breaching" a levee?  I don't know.

But here's a smart guy who might be expected to make these fine distinctions - PKru himself:

Many people have now seen the video of the briefing Mr. Bush received before Hurricane Katrina struck. Much has been made of the revelation that Mr. Bush was dishonest when he claimed, a few days later, that nobody anticipated the breach of the levees.

On the flip side, let's also give props to Scott Shane and David Kirkpatrick of the NY Times, who did *NOT* mangle this story yesterday.

And a bonus - this bit from the briefing seems to be underplayed.  Max Mayfield is speaking for the National Hurricane Center at an August 28 briefing:

"And the current track and the forecast we have now suggests that there will be minimal flooding in the city of New Orleans itself, but we've always said that the storm surge model is only accurate within about 20 percent.

If that track were to deviate just a little to the west it would -- it makes all the difference in the world.  I do expect there will be some levees over top even out here in the western portions where the airport is."

MORE:  The Captain has lots, including some HKur coverage.  And more excerpts from the fateful "I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees" interview with Diane Sawyer is here.  Let's clip this:

"I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees. They did anticipate a serious storm. But these levees got breached. And as a result, much of New Orleans is flooded. And now we are having to deal with it and will."

Finally, the White House issues a press release to "set the record straight", but they skip right past this issue.

Here is some background on the levee failures and successes in New Orleans - the distinction between topping and breaching is clear. lest there were skeptics.

CLARITY:  Via Matt Drudge, from the AP:

Clarification: Katrina-Video story
ASSOCIATED PRESS

WASHINGTON (AP) _ In a March 1 story, The Associated Press reported that federal disaster officials warned President Bush and his homeland security chief before Hurricane Katrina struck that the storm could breach levees in New Orleans, citing confidential video footage of an Aug. 28 briefing among U.S. officials.

The Army Corps of Engineers considers a breach a hole developing in a levee rather than an overrun. The story should have made clear that Bush was warned about floodwaters overrunning the levees, rather than the levees breaking.

The day before the storm hit, Bush was told there were grave concerns that the levees could be overrun. It wasn't until the next morning, as the storm was hitting, that Michael Brown, then head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, said Bush had inquired about reports of breaches. Bush did not participate in that briefing.

A NOTE:  Some commenters seem to think that because Bush was briefed about the possibility of breaches at *other* meetings, it is OK for the media to misrepresent the significance of the meeting on which they are reporting.  FWIW, these commenters seem to be representatives of the self-invented reality community.

But let's turn that logic around and imagine that Bush really did understand the difference between overtopping and breaching, even if his critics do not.  Let's also acknowledege that (a) Bush was speaking in a live interview, not delivering a legal brief, and (b) an accepted meaning of "anticipate" is "expect".

Would the media even have begun to offer up this latest "Bush lied" if he had said something ever so slightly different to Diana Sawyer:

"I don't think anybody [expected] the breach of the levees - I know the National Hurricane Center predicted overtopping but not breaching. They did anticipate a serious storm."

And a last thought - saying that Bush did not lie about this is different from saying that the Federal response to Katrina was A-OK.

It's Not A Secret If Everyone Knows

Murray Waas has a new article generating lots of buzz at Memeorandum.  His gist - prior to the war with Iraq Bush was secretly briefed that (1) the aluminum tubes may have a non-nuclear purpose, and (2) Saddam was unlikely to attack the United States.  Let's hand the mike to Mr. Waas for point (2):

The second classified report, delivered to Bush in early January 2003, was also a summary of a National Intelligence Estimate, this one focusing on whether Saddam would launch an unprovoked attack on the United States, either directly, or indirectly by working with terrorists.

The report stated that U.S. intelligence agencies unanimously agreed that it was unlikely that Saddam would try to attack the United States -- except if "ongoing military operations risked the imminent demise of his regime" or if he intended to "extract revenge" for such an assault, according to records and sources.

The single dissent in the report again came from State's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, known as INR, which believed that the Iraqi leader was "unlikely to conduct clandestine attacks against the U.S. homeland even if [his] regime's demise is imminent" as the result of a U.S. invasion.

On at least four earlier occasions, beginning in the spring of 2002, according to the same records and sources, the president was informed during his morning intelligence briefing that U.S. intelligence agencies believed it was unlikely that Saddam was an imminent threat to the United States.

However, in the months leading up to the war, Bush, Cheney, and Cabinet members repeatedly asserted that Saddam was likely to use chemical or biological weapons against the United States or to provide such weapons to Al Qaeda or another terrorist group.

And how secret was the notion that Saddam would not attack us?  Here is George Tenet writing in Oct 2002, declassifying some information to aid the Congressional pre-war debate:

Baghdad for now appears to be drawing a line short of conducting terrorist attacks with conventional or C.B.W. chemical and biological weapons against the United States.

Should Saddam conclude that a U.S.-led attack could no longer be deterred, he probably would become much less constrained in adopting terrorist actions. Such terrorism might involve conventional means, as with Iraq's unsuccessful attempt at a terrorist offensive in 1991, or C.B.W.

Saddam might decide that the extreme step of assisting Islamist terrorists in conducting a W.M.D. attack against the United States would be his last chance to exact vengeance by taking a large number of victims with him.

Regarding the 2 October closed hearing, we can declassify the following dialogue:

Senator Levin Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan : . . . If (Saddam) didn't feel threatened, did not feel threatened, is it likely that he would initiate an attack using a weapon of mass destruction?

Senior Intelligence Witness: . . . My judgment would be that the probability of him initiating an attack -- let me put a time frame on it -- in the foreseeable future, given the conditions we understand now, the likelihood I think would be low.

Senator Levin: Now if he did initiate an attack you've . . . indicated he would probably attempt clandestine attacks against us . . . But what about his use of weapons of mass destruction? If we initiate an attack and he thought he was in extremis or otherwise, what's the likelihood in response to our attack that he would use chemical or biological weapons?

Senior Intelligence Witness: Pretty high, in my view.

In the above dialogue, the witness's qualifications -- "in the foreseeable future, given the conditions we understand now" -- were intended to underscore that the likelihood of Saddam using W.M.D. for blackmail, deterrence, or otherwise grows as his arsenal builds. Moreover, if Saddam used W.M.D., it would disprove his repeated denials that he has such weapons.

The TimesSelect Select can read the NY Times coverage from October 9, 2002, complete with Administration rationalizations:

But a new element was injected into the debate by a C.I.A. assessment that Saddam Hussein, while now stopping short of an attack, could become ''much less constrained'' if faced with an American-led force.

...Mr. Tenet said tonight that ''there is no inconsistency'' between the C.I.A. views in the letter and those of the president. He emphasized the Iraqi leader's use of such weapons against his own citizens.

Senior administration officials insisted that the letter did not contradict President Bush's assertions on the imminent threat posed by Mr. Hussein. They pointed to another section of the letter that noted that the likelihood of Mr. Hussein's using weapons of mass destruction ''for blackmail, deterrence, or otherwise, grows as his arsenal builds.''

The letter also cited credible reporting that Al Qaeda leaders sought contacts in Iraq who could help them acquire weapons of mass destruction and that Iraq has provided members of the terrorist group with training in the areas of poisons, gases and bomb making.

Well.  It is reassuring that President Bush got the same news the rest of us did.  As to whether Bush argued that Saddam was an "imminent threat", please don't let's start that again.  And on the prospect of an Al Qaeda - Saddam hook-up, well, Tenet probably thought it was a virtual slam-dunk.

UPDATE:  Jack Balkin normally does a terrific job with his coverage but we have caught him with his declassified briefs showing here:

Although the Administration had multiple justifications for invading Iraq, the most important in garnering public and Congressional support was the imminent danger that Saddam posed to the United States. If Congress had known that intelligence services did not believe that Saddam posed such a threat, support for an authorization to go to war to overthrow Saddam would have been far smaller, and indeed, the President might not have been able to get a majority of Congress behind him.

Hmm, the Congressional ignorance excuse won't fly; can we agree on "gutless"?

MORE:  Cecil Turner pushes back on the aluminum tubes in the comments.

This Just In...

Over at EmptyWheel the latest Fitzgerald response to the Libby defense team is getting the full forensic treatment, and it is well done as usual.  Early indications are that Richard Armitage, the people's choice as the mystery source for Bobs Woodward and Novak, provides the best fit in the redacted document,  but keep a candle flickering for Don Rumsfeld as the Mystery Man.

Yes, I love this game.  Today. 

More later.

MORE:  Folks who believe that Fitzgerald has a lot more under investigation will thrill to this (ii):

2. The information and items responsive to Libby’s demands and which we are not producing generally consists oftestimony, information and items which: (i) reveal the identity of  REDACTED

ii) concern others subjects of the investigation and numerous witnesses who testified about their knowledge of the conduct ofthose subjects, often focusing on conversations after July 14, 2003, during which various persons referenced events of spring 2003 not relevant to defendant Libby;

The notion that conversations from the fall of 2003 (and later) are also a subject of investigation re-appears on p. 14:

The discovery provided in those two letters in subsiantial part moots the defendants’ motion, though granting Libby’s motion would trigger production ofmany items pertinent to the investigation of other subjects — and particularly their conduct in the fall of 2003 and later — because their conversations in some way reference back to the events of spring 2003, as described in detail at pages 2 to 12.

Well...yike.  If Fitzgerald is seriously probing some sort of cover-up, that might explain the silence of Bob Novak.  And there is surely *something* going on - on p. 2 Fitzgerald promises a detailed overview of the investigation on pages 2-12, all of which are redacted.  [NOTE - well, there was something going on at one time - maybe this is water under the bridge now.  Fitzgerald did say in a Miller-related filing that his investigation was substantially completed, except for the testimony of Cooper and Miller.]

So, is this all about the Karl Rove angle, with Matt Cooper and the missing Hadley email?  Or is there more, and might that "more" explain Novak's continued silence?

And what is Fitzgerald learning as his investigation continues, or is he hoping to out-wait Libby and strike a deal with him?

STILL MORE:  Apparently Fitzgerald has already given the defense the affidavits and/or testimony transcripts for Walter Pincus, Glenn Kessler, Tim Russert, Matt Cooper, and Judy Miller.  A redacted version of Bob Woodward's testimony (minus Armitage's name and the non-Libby related testimony) has also been handed over.  And some reporter's names have been redacted from this list - Andrea Mitchell has been mentioned in several of these filings, and is mentioned in this one, so let's put her in the mix.

UPDATE:  A helpful and irrefutable analysis here.

Dueling E-mails

The mystery of the "missing" White House emails has been solved - twice!

Let's go to Jason Leopold:

Details Emerge in Latest Plame Emails
The White House confirmed Tuesday that it recently turned over to Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald 250 pages of emails from the Office of Vice President Dick Cheney related to covert CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson and her husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, a vocal critic of the Bush administration's pre-war Iraq intelligence. The emails were not submitted three years ago when then-White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales ordered White House staffers to turn over all documents that contained any reference to Valerie and Joseph Wilson.

...News of the 250 pages of emails was revealed to Libby's attorneys during a court hearing Friday.

...Attorneys for Libby and the US District Court reporter in the Libby case, William McAllister, reading from Friday's transcript of the hearing, confirmed that Libby's defense attorneys were told during Friday's hearing that the emails were recently turned over by the White House to Fitzgerald. At the time this story was published, McAllister said he was still preparing the transcript of Friday's hearing.

A spokesman for Cheney would only confirm the accuracy of what was said in court: that the White House recently turned over the emails. The spokesman would not comment further.

Remarkably, other than a brief citation buried inside an Associated Press story, Friday's development about the White House's "discovery" of the 250 pages of emails was not covered by any major news media.

And here is a blurb in the Wall Street Journal that somehow got over their firewall:

Email Mystery Solved: The Office of the Vice President didn't mysteriously delete a slew of emails sought by the special prosecutor in the CIA leak probe, after all.

Earlier this year, U.S. prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald disclosed on the last page of a 16-page letter to defense attorneys for former vice presidential aide I. Lewis Libby that some 2003 emails sought from the Vice President's Office and the Executive Office of the President didn't turn up on the White House computer system.

That stirred questions about how and why these emails disappeared and speculation about whether they contained a smoking gun. But the Office of Administration has since found them. They were turned over to Libby's defense team on Feb. 6, Fitzgerald said in court last Friday. The emails apparently weren't archived in the normal way. As for the content, Libby's attorneys said the emails didn't contain anything pertinent to the case or investigation.

The federal judge hearing the case against Libby, who is charged with five counts of lying and obstructing justice in the CIA leak probe, Monday issued an order severely limiting Libby's requests to obtain almost a year's worth of Presidential Daily Briefings. Instead, the judge suggested that general accounts of the highly secret intelligence briefings for a few relevant time periods would suffice. Libby's defense team had sought almost a year's worth of the briefings. The judge asked Fitzgerald to advise the court on how difficult it would be to obtain this information without derailing the trial. --Anne Marie Squeo

We eagerly await a transcript to resolve a possible factual dispute - per Leopold:

William McAllister, reading from Friday's transcript of the hearing, confirmed that Libby's defense attorneys were told during Friday's hearing that the emails were recently turned over by the White House to Fitzgerald.

Per Squeo:

They were turned over to Libby's defense team on Feb. 6, Fitzgerald said in court last Friday.

Of course, both may be true - quite possibly the White House turned them over to Fitzgerald, who promptly forwarded them to Libby's defense team.  The WSJ story is clear that the emails turned up following the Fitzgerald letter, which was written Jan 23 (Ex. C) and publicized on Jan 31.

 

If I Took This Seriously...

If I took this attack on Alito seriously, I would conclude that every "political" figure (broadly defined to include Supreme Court justices) could be attacked for holding the views of the whackiest group of supporters he (or Hillary!) thanks.

This would be fertile soil for Partisan Attack Repubs, if it weren't already another type of fertilizer.

George Will, Frustrated With Iraq

From George Will's latest:

Wars are not won simply by facing facts, but facing them is a necessary prerequisite.

Mr. Will takes his inspiration from this quote from Churchill following the evacuation at Dunkirk in May 1940:

When late in the spring of 1940 people of southeastern England flocked across the Channel in their pleasure craft and fishing boats to evacuate soldiers trapped on Dunkirk beaches, euphoria swept Britain. So Prime Minister Winston Churchill sternly told the nation: "We must be very careful not to assign to this deliverance the attributes of a victory. Wars are not won by evacuations."

And his Big Finish:

Today, with all three components of the "axis of evil" -- Iraq, Iran and North Korea -- more dangerous than they were when that phrase was coined in 2002, the country would welcome, and Iraq's political class needs to hear, as a glimpse into the abyss, presidential words as realistic as those Britain heard on June 4, 1940.

I have not been tracking the arc of Mr. Will's outlook on Iraq (and would welcome a reminder), but he sounds here like yet another prominent conservative (sorry, former conservative turned liberal) who wonders just how long this bus ride might last.

UPDATE:  Mr. Will's journey.

Dubai Ports World

The NY Times editors firmly straddle the Dubai Ports World question today:

Legitimate security questions have been raised that can be answered only by a genuinely fresh evaluation whose scope and results are transmitted to Congress and to a perplexed public as well.

At this point there is little hard evidence that Dubai Ports World is especially vulnerable to infiltration by terrorists or lax on security. The company's home country, United Arab Emirates, has rightly been blistered in the past for taking inadequate steps to close down terrorist financing and stop a renegade Pakistani scientist from shipping nuclear technology to rogue nations. But in recent years, the country seems to have cooperated with American efforts in the war on terror, and it was one of the first to join American efforts to check containers abroad for dangerous weapons before they are loaded onto ships headed for the United States.

That doesn't mean Congress is being irrational in wanting a closer look. The deal was approved by an obscure committee of second-level officials. The committee is headed by a Treasury official whose department focuses on promoting trade rather than on security requirements. When concerns were raised, they were never flagged for higher-ups.

...if the controversy is treated correctly, it should provide new security benchmarks that could be applied to any company that wishes to manage American ports. (The Coast Guard expressed concerns about intelligence even when a British company held the terminals contract.) A serious inquiry could also provide a basis for ensuring that port security, a notoriously weak spot in the nation's defenses against terrorism, is actually enhanced. The deal's opponents ought to use this opportunity to negotiate for additional, and much needed, financing for that purpose.

The WaPo tells us that Congress is strongly inclined to block this deal, or at least give itself the final say.  On the other hand, the AFP says that Congress has given up on this one and is looking to expand its oversight of future deals.

For a tiebreaker, let's turn to the NY Times - Carl Hulse and Scott Shane detect a lot of "angst" on the Republican side.

OK, then - Congress is currently planning to stay involved,

Well, I Read It There First...

Good job by the Anon Lib, who was a month ahead of the latest Administration pronouncement on the NSA surveillance program.

And let's double down!  The Anon Lib also tackles Byron York's latest article on the Plame investigation - let me pull out one cogent bit, and one that strikes me as less so.  Cogent first:

The endless confusion over whether or not Plame was covert stems from a misunderstanding of the term "covert." The term "covert" (at least as I understand it) is not a real world designation used by the CIA to describe its agents. Rather, it is a statutory term used by the Intelligence Identities Protection Act to describe the type of agents it is intended to cover, i.e., agents who have served in an undercover capacity within the last five years, etc. etc. In other words, there is no document that says whether or not Plame was a "covert agent." That's a matter of statutory interpretation which only a judge can determine. ...Given there have been few, if any, prosecutions under the IIPA, there is virtually no case law interpreting its various provisions. That means it would be very hard to predict how a judge would decide the issue. Long story short, the question of whether or not Plame was "covert" is a difficult legal question that will, most likely, never be decided by a court, and therefore, never have a definitive answer.

And less so:

Federal prosecutors never turn over discovery material they are not required by law to turn over. This is particularly true when that material is both classified and potentially very sensitive. Given that everyone (including York) acknowledges that Plame was at one time a CIA officer operating under non-official cover, doesn't it stand to reason that any damage assessments might contain highly sensitive and classified information? Why in the world would Fitzgerald just hand that material over to Libby's defense team when he has no obligation to do so? Wouldn't that be pretty careless?

Well, the defense team has security clearances and is proceeding under the Classified Information Procedures Act, so "careless" may not be the mot juste here.

Eventually I intend to gather my guesses about the various defense discovery requests in one post but for now, let me Boldly Predict that Fitzgerald will lose on both the CIA damage assessment of the leak, and on information pertaining to Ms. Plame's status.

Let me come back to Fitzgerald's assertion in his filing regarding the importance of compelling Judy Miller's testimony - "To date, we have no direct evidence that Libby knew or believed that Wilson's wife was engaged in covert work."

Now, the meaning of that statement is not crystal clear, and it is possible that Fitzgerald means that he has evidence that one or more of the people who discussed Plame with Libby mentioned her classified status, but nothing in Libby's notes or subsequent conversations confirms that he heard and understood that.

But an equally reasonable interpretation is that none of the people who discussed Plame with Libby mentioned that her status was classified.

If Libby offers his "busy man, failed memory" defense, he will be making two points - other things, such as mentioned in the PDBs, were very important, and Ms. Plame's CIA affiliation was never flagged to me as being important.

And will that second claim be credible?  One might think that the documentary evidence of her status and the actual harm done would confirm (ex post) the judgments made by Cheney, Grossman, the CIA briefer, and others who discussed Plame with Libby - this was no big deal.

In one of their filings, Fitzgerald argued, in effect, that facts don't matter - it was only Libby's state of mind as to the importance of Plame that is relevant.

But if Libby's story is that he inferred from the words, body language, and demeanor of his various confidants that Ms. Plame's CIA affiliation was not critical, and the facts support him, that seems exculpatory.  Put another way, if the documents flatly contradict him one might expect the prosecution to present them as contradicting his story - how, they might ask, could all these people have been so wrong about her status, and isn't it easier to believe that Libby is misrepresenting their conversations?

Of course, it may be that the documents do contradict Libby.  But if anyone actually mentioned Ms. Plame's classified status to him, that fact is missing from the indictment, and seems to be inconsistent with the excerpt from the Miller filing.

Time will tell, and my money's down.

MORE:  FWIW, the closest the indictment gets to a hint of Libby worrying about classifed info is here:

13. Shortly after publication of the article in The New Republic, LIBBY spoke by telephone with his then Principal Deputy and discussed the article. That official asked LIBBY whether information about Wilson's trip could be shared with the press to rebut the allegations that the Vice President had sent Wilson. LIBBY responded that there would be complications at the CIA in disclosing that information publicly, and that he could not discuss the matter on a non-secure telephone line.

But since Wilson's trip was itself classified, that may be all Libby had in mind.