JustOneMinute

Mark Foley Thread - Blurt Out Your Thoughts

Let's open it up on the Mark Foley story.

I'll start with an answer to "Why would the House leadership ever cover this up?" [Did I make it clear that the question is hypothetical, and that we don't yet know what the leadership knew or when they knew it?]

Answer - if the pages in question had been girls, Foley would have been shot at dawn.

However, picture this headline - "House Leadership Boots Allegedly Gay Republican On Trumped-Up Pedophilia Charges".  Ugly.  Worth Avoiding.  Listening to Andrew Sullivan decry the homophobes in the House would not have been worth it.  So they played it a bit too cautiously and slowly and here we are.

That is one bit of WILD SPECULATION.  Another theory is that we will find out that Foley was some sort of extraordinary fund-raiser, even by the standards of Florida Republicans.  Otherwise, I can't think of a reason not to quickly boot Foley in 2005 when indications of a problem first came to light.

MORE:  Times coverage - Re Hastert's performance, Nun dare call it "Papal".

The key bit seems to be that the e-mails they knew about were much less lurid than the ones that we all learned about after ABC News broke the story.  Helpful emphasis added:

Aides to the speaker and other Congressional Republican leaders said the messages, which an Alexander aide described to them as “overfriendly,” were much less explicit than the others that came to light after ABC News first disclosed the e-mail correspondence with Mr. Alexander’s page. The aides said Mr. Alexander’s office, at the request of the page’s family, did not show them copies of the messages. In those messages, sent after Hurricane Katrina, Mr. Foley asked about the well-being of the boy, a Monroe, La., resident. He wrote: “How are you weathering the hurricane. . .are you safe. . .send me a pic of you as well.” The page sent the note to a former colleague, describing it as “sick.”

In another message, Mr. Foley wrote, “What do you want for your birthday coming up. . .what stuff do you like to do.”

The e-mail exchanges that came to light after the first news reports were far more graphic. When he was confronted about them on Friday, Mr. Foley resigned. Republican leaders said they had not known about the other e-mail correspondence.

“No one in the speaker’s office was made aware of the sexually explicit text messages which press reports suggest had been directed to another individual until they were revealed in the press and on the Internet this week,” the statement from Mr. Hastert’s office said.

STILL MORE:  Re the "Allegedly gay" above - Andrew Sullivan says that Foley was a closeted gay, and discusses the possible psychological consequences:

Equally, the news about Mark Foley has a kind of grim inevitability to it. I don't know Foley, although, like any other gay man in D.C., I was told he was gay, closeted, afraid and therefore also screwed up. What the closet does to people - the hypocrisies it fosters, the pathologies it breeds - is brutal....

What I do know is that the closet corrupts. The lies it requires and the compartmentalization it demands can lead people to places they never truly wanted to go, and for which they have to take ultimate responsibility. From what I've read, Foley is another example of this destructive and self-destructive pattern for which the only cure is courage and honesty. While gays were fighting for thir basic equality, Foley voted for the "Defense of Marriage Act". If his resignation means the end of the closet for him, and if there is no more to this than we now know, then it may even be for the good.

I can not speak with any authority on Mark Foley's personal or political evolution.  However, the Defense of Marriage Act cited by Andrew was from 1996; although their website has been updated, the Google cache indicates that the Log Cabin Republicans had endorsed Mark Foley for the 2006 elections.

Why might that have been?  Here is a Sept 14, 2005 news release from the Log Cabin Republicans praising thirty House Republicans (including Foley) who sided with the Democrats to pass an amendment to a hate crimes bill, extending its coverage to LGBT Americans.

I have no idea what side Foley has taken on other issues over the years, but surely there have been some relevant votes since 1996; this could be a real opportunity for any Foley apologists who care to step forward.

WHERE ARE THE DEMS HEADED WITH THIS?  IF, I say IF, the House leadership only knew about the first, less suggestive batch of emails and let Foley slide with a warning, what will the Democrats complain about - will their position be that gay men who make one mistake should be barred from the House?  What next - just for openers, will they want to re-think their view of gay men leading Boy Scout Troops?  And just what law will they claim was broken of the pages were sixteen or older - it is not clear from this list that if Foley had consummated a relationship it would have broken a law.  [Ahh, apparently age 18 is the cutoff for hot internet chat - do, don't talk.]

Well, since there is no apparent crime here, this is clearly a case for Special Counsel Fitzgerald.  From Clarice Feldman:

Maybe Fitz can be appointed--then he can fail to ask CREW how they got the IM's, ignore their political motivations, conflate their partisanship with "whistleblowing" and nab Hasstert for forgetting when he went to the bathroom on the day he heard about the emails.

THE ABC TIMELINE:  How did the emails arrive in two waves?  Here is ABC News:

This all came to a head in the last 24 hours. Yesterday, we asked the congressman about some much tamer e-mails from one page, and he said he was just being overly friendly. After we posted that story online, we began to hear from a number of other pages who sent these much more explicit, instant messages. When the congressman realized we had them, he resigned.

Gee, who knew an on-line posting from ABC News could have such impact, and so quickly?  And who knew these high schol pages could establish contact with ABC News so easily?

This looks like the first ABC story.  How did they get the emails?  Via the Passive Voice:

In the series of e-mails, obtained by ABC News, from Rep. Foley (R-FL) to the former page, Foley asks the young man how old he is, what he wants for his birthday and requests a photo of him.

ABC followed with the ritualistic call for an investigation by Foley's opponent.

Well, journalistic integrity won't allow ABC to duvulge their sources, so readers will be left to their own imagination in wondering whether this was a political hit-job.

This Timeline at TPM is helpful. 

The key for the Attack Dems is to pretend that the House leadership knew about *all* the emails, especially the ones that were brought forward after the first ABC story.  Here is The Nation:

Fair enough. But what do these Republican leaders think about those who knew about Foley's undue interest in male pages, covered the fact up for months – perhaps years -- and then lied about what they knew. Should they, too, face "the full weight of the criminal justice system"?

When the news of Foley's emails broke in the media, Hastert declared, "I was surprised."

Really? That's strange.

Congressman Tom Reynolds, who chairs the Republican Congressional Campaign Committee, revealed on Saturday that he had informed Hastert months ago about concerns regarding Foley's habit of sending sexually suggestive – "strip down and get naked" -- e-mails and instant messages to male congressional pages.

Per ABC News a similar quote - "strip down and get relaxed" - was among the emails and IMs obtained by ABC *after* their initial story. 

We have no doubt The Nation will be in a hurry to correct their mis-quote and their false impression as to what the House leadership has admited to knowing.

Apparently, this is the website that started it all - StopSexPredators.blogspot.com.

Amazingly, the site author posted on Sept 4 about "skinterns".  That triggered some reader emails that were posted on Sept 21 and mentioned Foley was one of the "Terrible Three":

After reading your post on skinterns I wanted to fill you in on what really goes on in the halls of Congress.

I used to be a House LA on the Hill working.

When I was working up there, folks use to refer to the Terrible Three – Barney Frank, Mark Foley, and Jim Kolbe.

...neither Frank nor Kolbe have anything on Foley.

People were always talking about seeing Foley lurking in locker rooms around DC looking for sex, how he especially likes teenage boys, and frequents gay bars around D.C. and in his district.

And away we go.

Not that I have a suspicious mind, but if I had a story and was looking for a way to break it into the mainstream, this might be a good tactic.

Presumably someone will do the homework and figure out who the site author is and ask the obvious follow-ups - what did they know and when did they know it, who did the emails come from, how was that verified, etc.

A particular reason to be suspicious is that the "skintern" post focused on scantily clad young women - one might have thiought the reader emails would have included a few more hetero dirty-old-man stories.  Instead, the only two that were printed focused on Foley.

Torture

Here are some disjointed thoughts on torture.

First, Andrew Sullivan:

One reason I became a conservative was because as a teenager in the 1970s, conservatives seemed the only people to grasp the true evil of the Sovet Union. At the core of its evil was its deployment of torture to break free people's souls and to obliterate their liberty by the brute force of the state. Now conservatives are the ones justifying torture - by the United States. They have become what they once fought. Unchecked power does that to you.

Help me with the parallelism here - Khalid Sheik Mohammed is a free person and the United States is trying to break his soul just to uhh, quash his thirst for freedom?  I wonder what Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn would say about that?

Powerline defends waterboarding; personally, I haven't read anything about waterboarding that makes me think I would find it to be especially terrifying - intellectually I appreciate the reports that most people submit in less than a minute, but emotionally, I don't feel it. 

And I do not say that because I harbor any sort of illusions about being a "tough guy".  Frankly, I think that if threatened with torture I would fold up like a cheap suitcase.  In fact, let me be more emphatic - I think I would fold up in a way that would burnish the reputation of cheap suitcases.  But "torture" for me is more like the Winston Smith with the rat/face-cage scenario from "1984" - ghastly and permanent trumps ghastly but transient. 

As I recall, John McCain said something similar about some of the stress positions inflicted on him by the North Vietnamese, where a prisoners arms would be bent up behind his back.  McCain's point was that, yes, it is painful but after a while the prisoner's arms go numb and the prisoner starts to worry about how much permanent damage is being done to him; some airman would have numb arms and shoulders for months afterward.

Well.  Back to Andrew for a link to David Corn for a post title "This Is What Waterboarding Looks Like".  Corn's theme is that waterboarding was the torture of choice for the Khmer Rouge and he offers some pictures as evidence.

Well, if a picture is worth a thousand words, this will be one of my longest posts.  Here is Vann Nath, an artist and former prisoner of the Khmer Rouge, and his drawings of various Khmer Rouge tortures (one of his pictures appears without credit in the Corn post, presumably through no fault of Mr. Corn).

So, let's play Find the Waterboard!  Not here; not here; not here; not here; not here; not here.  Hmm, those Khmer Rouge offered a wide variety of nasty, didn't they?  I don't think I am going to rank "waterboarding" at the top of the list provided by Vann Nath.

Let me lurch in a different direction:

Lou DiMarco (Lieutenant Colonel, USA Ret.) is a faculty member at the US Army Command and General Staff College, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, where he teaches military history and courses on urban warfare and warfare in the Middle East.

Here is a paper he offered on torture as it related to the French experience in Algeria.  One snippet highlights the absurdity of my own little exercise in attempting to estimate my own pain threshold:

...some French officers subjected themselves to electric shock to ensure they understood the level of violence they were applying to prisoners. What these officers did not understand was the huge difference between pain inflicted in a limited, controlled manner without psychological stress, and pain inflicted in an adversarial environment where the prisoner is totally under the control of the captor.

Well, yes.  Let's also note that the French were a bit indiscriminate:

...many French commanders tolerated or encouraged widespread and often random torture. By one estimate, 40 percent of the adult male Muslim population of Algiers (approximately 55,000 individuals) were put through the French interrogation system and either tortured or threatened with torture between 1956 and 1957. This action likely irrevocably alienated the entire 600,000 Muslim population of the city from the French cause.

My understanding is that the CIA will be employing "coercive interrogation" only with high value prisoners.
 

 

Was It "Stupid Day" In The Media?

Mickey Kaus catches the NY Times vaguely misrepresenting the contents of Bush's famous Presidential Daily Brief of Aug 6, 2001 but he missed Michael Duffy of TIME committing the same offense more egregiously.  From the Wednesday Times, second paragraph:

In unusually blunt terms, Senator Clinton questioned the current administration’s response to an intelligence briefing President Bush received about a month before the 9/11 attacks. It mentioned that Al Qaeda was intent on striking the United States using hijacked planes.

"Intent on striking the United States using hijacked planes" sounds a lot like the intent was to literally strike a building or something.  Of course, since most of have only seen one Presidential Daily Brief in our lives, we remember that the memo referred to a conventional hijacking for hostages scenario.  The key phrase:

We have not been able to corroborate some of the more sensational threat reporting, such as that from a ... (redacted portion) ... service in 1998 saying that Bin Ladin wanted to hijack a US aircraft to gain the release of "Blind Shaykh" 'Umar 'Abd al-Rahman and other US-held extremists.

Nevertheless, FBI information since that time indicates patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York.

(Sidebar - the 2001 brief recycled some stale reporting from 1998; per the 9/11 report the NY airports were put on alert for about eight weeks but nothing happened.  In that sense Hillary is absolutely correct - when the news was fresh, her husband acted.  Here is Chapter Four of the 9/11 Report; hint - search on "hijack").

Let's see how Michael Duffy of TIME mangles this - unlike the Times, he does not even cover himself with ambiguous language:

Sen. Clinton said her husband would not have sat on his hands if he had seen, as Bush did, an intelligence estimate in August 2001 suggesting that bin Laden might try to run some jetliners into skyscrapers.

Well, we don't need to speculate about what Mr. Clinton might have done with his hands in the summer of 1998.  The fact is, the 2001 memo said nothing about a plan to "run some jetliners into skyscrapers".

MORE:  What did Hillary say, anyway, that froze the minds of the media?

"I’m certain that if my husband and his national security team had been shown a classified report entitled ‘Bin Laden determined to attack inside the U.S.’ he would have taken it more seriously than history suggests it was taken by our current president and his national security team.”

MORE GUFF FROM DUFFY:  Michael Duffy really does not seem to be familiar with the material:

I think that clean accounting helps explain why Rice, who is now Secretary of State, jumped into this slapfest on Monday. That's when she charged that Clinton failed to leave behind a "comprehensive" strategy for dealing with bin Laden. If by that she means a plan to invade Afghanistan, she's partly right — Clinton's terror advisers presented a plan that stopped short of invasion. But even if invasion had been included, such a plan would have gone nowhere. Everyone knows the first thing the Bush team did was reflexively throw out anything that had Clinton's scent, much less his name, on it.

The first thing they did was throw it out?  Clarke presented a proposal that had not been vetted by any of the relevant departments, including State, Defense, and Treasury.  That process took time.  But here is Clarke himself speaking to the 9/11 Commission:

Clarke told the 9/11 Commission, "there's a lot of debate about whether it's a plan or a strategy or a series of options -- but all of the things we recommended back in January were those things on the table in September. They were done. They were done after September 11th. They were all         done. I didn't really understand why they couldn't have been done in February."

For an experienced bureaucrat like Clarke to wonder why a plan, parts of which had been kicking around since the embassy bombings in 1998, couldn't be adopted in the first full month of a new administration is a bit disingenuous.

Meanwhile, Here In Reality...

E.J. Dionne has a little trouble with his recent history in his latest column:

Why Bill Clinton Pushed Back

Bill Clinton's eruption on "Fox News Sunday" last weekend over questions about his administration's handling of terrorism was a long time coming and has political implications that go beyond this fall's elections.

By choosing to intervene in the terror debate in a way that no one could miss, Clinton forced an argument about the past that had up to now been largely a one-sided propaganda war waged by the right. The conservative movement understands the political value of controlling the interpretation of history. Now its control is finally being contested.

Finally?  Does Dionne really think this is new?  Apparently he does - this is the only example of Democratic attempts to write history that he notes:

Moreover, when Democrats, notably former House minority leader Richard Gephardt, finally put their heads up in the late spring of 2002 to ask questions about that Aug. 6, 2001, memo warning of the possibility of terrorist attacks, the Republican pushback was furious.

Oh, please - in 2002 Gephardt was (I'll bet) joining in on the Sandy Berger fantasy as told to TIME magazine and retracted by Berger a bit later.  Berger's story to TIME was that Richard Clarke, terror czar, had delivered a comprehensive plan to Condi Rice when the Bush team took over in 2001.  Later Berger backpedaled, telling a Congressional committee this:

But there was no war plan that we turned over to the Bush administration during the transition. And the reports of that are just incorrect.

Just to resolve the confusion - Clarke turned over what might be called a proposal.  Since it had not been reviewed, approved, budgeted and staffed by the relevant arms of the bureaucracy, including but not limited to State, Defense, and Treasury, calling it a "plan" would have been wildly premature.  In fact, By Sept 10 the Bush team had adopted many of the Clarke proposals, although that was not exactly timely; that said, earlier adoption probably would not have disrupted the hijacking plot.

Moving on, the Democrats tried to revive the "Clarke had a plan" theme during the Kerry campaign, which overlapped neatly with the 9/11 hearings that starred Richard Clarke; Clarke also introduced the notion that terror had no higher priority under Clinton but was back-burnered under Bush.  This notion was also beaten back.

Evidently these episodes did not register with Mr. Dionne.

A Christmas Stocking Stuffer

Becasue it is never to early to start your holiday shopping, we have a recommendation for the person who has everything - nothing!

But if your intended recipient can wait a few days, on Dec 28 Murray Waas will have a new book out - What Cheney Told Libby: Dispatches from a White House on Trial: A Field Guide to the Trial of Scooter Libby, Former Chief of Staff to the Vice-President (Paperback).

Murray Waas has done outstanding investigative work on the Libby story, with his work appearing primarily in the National Journal.

Mr. Waas tilts left so I have no doubt I will quarrel with his emphasis and inferences.  However, he is sure to have some interesting hard news and I expect that amongst the few, the proud, the Plamaniacs this will be a must-read.

Dems Can Hide If They Want To Run

Carl Hulse provides a rather counter-intuitive view of the behavior of the Democratic Senators in positioning themselves on the detainee bill:

Democrats See Strength in Bucking Bush

By CARL HULSE

WASHINGTON, Sept. 28 — The Democratic vote in the Senate on Thursday against legislation governing the treatment of terrorism suspects showed that party leaders believe that President Bush’s power to wield national security as a political issue is seriously diminished.

The most vivid example of the Democratic assessment came from the party’s many presidential hopefuls in the Senate. All of them voted against the bill, apparently calculating that Mr. Bush’s handling of Iraq has undercut the traditional Republican strength on national security and will insulate them from what are certain to be strong attacks from Republicans not only this year but also in 2008.   

...

Over all, 32 Democrats voted against the measure while 12, including some of those in the most difficult re-election fights, backed it. Among the latter was Senator Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut, whose perceived support for Mr. Bush has brought him political trouble at home.

It was a stark change from four years ago, when Mr. Bush cornered Democrats into another defining pre-election vote on security issues — that one to give the president the authority to launch an attack against Iraq. At the time, many Democrats felt they had little choice politically but to side with Mr. Bush, and a majority of Senate Democrats backed him.

The Democrats see strength in bucking Bush?  An alternative view is that four years ago, Democratic "leaders" such as John Kerry mis-underestimated the anti-war winds blowing within their party when choosing to side with the President on the Iraq war resolution.  The fairly obvious calculation in yesterday's vote is that no prospective Democratic candidate who hopes to survive the caucuses and primaries can support this bill.  That says very little about their sense of the effectiveness of this issue in a general election.

However, the article does provide two strong clues about Democrat's sense of the national mood:

Over all, 32 Democrats voted against the measure while 12, including some of those in the most difficult re-election fights, backed it.

And a bit later:

There is no doubt the vote will be injected into the final weeks of the midterm campaigns. Republicans have been working to draw Democrats into a fight over security legislation. But a division among Republicans allowed Democrats to stay out of the fray until the moment of truth arrived this week.

As we have been noting for a while, Dems have been hiding behind John McCain on this issue for weeks.  In TimesWorld, that is because they see great value in bucking the President and think they can best achieve that value by, hmm, keeping their opposition very, very quiet.  Please.

Safe seat Dems who want to preserve the path to a Presidential nomination quietly opposed this bill; Dems in trouble supported it.  Obviously Bush is not as powerful on national security issues as he was in 2002 but it is still a battlefield the Dems would prefer to avoid.

Here is the Times coverage of the bill itself.  More on the habeas corpus issue from the WaPo.

Dean Esmay On Islam

Dean Esmay got an Insta-link to a bizarre post in which he called on Michelle Malkin specifically and conservatives generally to demonstrate their conscience with respect to Islam:

Question for Michelle Malkin: Does the Conscience of a Conservative Still Exist?

I'm publicly calling out Michelle Malkin, someone whom I often disagree with but usually respect. I hope she will think about it and respond thoughtfully and not angrily or flippantly.

...

Recently, I noticed that some of Iran's unelected and illegitimate leaders have said that Islam is incompatible with democracy. Gary Metz has more right here.

This very statement--that Islam is incompatible with democracy--is why I fight so hard with many of my friends on the Right: accepting that statement means we have to declare war on the entire Muslim world if we're to hope for human freedom to survive.

To me it would be akin to, in World War II, declaring ourselves at war with "Germanic People," "Latin People," and "Southeast Asians." Not Nazi Germany and Mussolini's Italy and Tojo's Japan. No, we would have declared that we were at war with anyone of Germanic or Latin descent, and anyone who happened to be short, yellow, and slant-eyed (to put it rudely and crassly).

There are some on the Right who believe this. But I think they're badly hurting our efforts. I think such people on the Right are hurting the war effort and not helping it.

...I'm making an open appeal to your conscience, Michelle Malkin, and to the conscience of conservatives everywhere: shouldn't you start making a distinction between Muslims who hate us and want to kill us, and Muslims who believe in freedom, democracy, and religious tolerance?

If the comment moderator at Dean's site ever sets me free, my response will appear roughly as follows:

(1) "Germanic" is an ethnic identity and hard to change; "Muslim" represents a belief system, which may be changeable.  Would it have been OK with Dean if the Allied goal in WWII was to kill or re-educate all the Nazis?

(2) Prior to the Reformation and the Enlightenment there was a serious question as to whether Christianity was compatible with democracy.  Now, Western societies have struck a balance amongst religion, art, science, politics, and the law.  However, many have noted that Islam has not undergone a similar transformation - does Dean allow for a discussion of the implications of this?  Max Boot follows the Pope into that very minefield and is optimistic about islam.

(3) Karzai of Afghanistan was an honored guest at a Bush State of the Union and was lauded (was it only yesterday) at both Hot Air and Ms. Malkin's site for his push-back against an AP reporter.  yes, we think he is one of the good guys.

Michell Malkin responds and rounds up others; Donald Sensing does a much better job of presenting my answer, but please pardon my redundancy.

And in the comments at Mr. Sensing's site was this gem:

Somebody, somewhere in all of the discussions spawned by Esmay’s post, has noted that the question is improperly framed: Islam is perfectly compatible with democracy: A majority-Muslim community can vote in Islamic law and live happily ever after. What Islam is *not* compatible with is individual liberty, the idea that the individual posseses rights that transcend the powers of the government under which he lives. *That’s* the real conflict.

And To Be Fair - there is also this comment from a regular at the Esmay site:

I see Instapundit linked this post. In case there are Instapundit readers who are new to Dean's world, and who bothered to read down this far into the comments, let me assure you that Dean's comments in this thread are not typical of Dean's normal posting style, nor are they typical of the level of discourse that usually graces these pages.

I think it is a mistake to judge a person by the most ghastly thing they have written, and it is certainly not a standard by which I would care to be judged.

Keith Olbermann's Anthrax Scare - Cui Bono?

Keith Olbermann was the recipient, at home, of an envelope containing white powder.  For whatever reason, the Page Six reporters of the NY Post (or here) chose to treat this as a big joke, which shows a deplorable lack of judgment.  [And see "CORNYN, TOO" Update, below]

The Moderate Voices have a round-up of reaction (i.e,. condemnation of the Post) from across the political spectrum.

That said, let me take some whacks at Keith Olbermann, who has chosen to politicize and exploit the incident and the Post coverage in his response:

The Rupert Murdoch-owned newspaper, The New York Post, may have just impeded an FBI investigation into terroristic threats.

I know this because I was a recipient.

Oh, boy, it's Valerie Plame redux!  From another view, a newspaper may have printed news.

The Bureau asked us not to report any of the details so that the person or persons responsible would not know any of the threats had been received by any of the targets -- and we of course complied.

I still cannot confirm many of the specifics -- again in order to make the jobs of the FBI and the New York Police Department a little easier.

An alternative division of labor would have the police do the police work and Olbermann pretend to be a journalist reporting news.  The same people who trumpet leaks that affect our national security suddenly become close-mouthed when it is their personal safety that is in play - imagine my surprise.

Let's skip right to Olbermann's political exploitation:

In fact, I was there ten hours before they permitted me to leave, even after several forceful requests by me and my employers to the New York Department of Health, that I should be released.

Incidentally, I apologize if those were too forceful.

Apologize for the requests -- not the commentaries that obviously inspired the event I'm talking about, and the Post's mocking of police and FBI efforts, and its endorsement of terroristic threats from the Radical Right.

We will not be intimidated here.

Oh, the threat came from the Radical Right?  Does Olbermann know this because the police have an iron-clad case against a suspect already in custody?  Or is he just making stuff up?

Let's ask the standard question here - cui bono?  Six weeks before the election Keith Olbermann, lefty loudmouth and wanna-be media sensation with dismal ratings, gets a DEATH THREAT INTENDED TO INTIMIDATE HIM!  But Olbermann is a hero, by golly - tune in tonight for even more unrelenting, demented Bush-bashing!  Check your local listings.

Is it ever so vaguely possible that one of Olbermann's admirers thought this stunt might give Olbermann both a ratings boost and an opportunity to bash Bush, the right, and the climate of fear?  If I were a bettor I would back the "right-wing nut job" theory, but I would certainly not present it as fact on an MSNBC "news" site.

Certainly Olbermann has thought about the advantages of creating one's own story - this is also in his response to the Post:

It's interesting too that Murdoch's paper was able to get a jump on this story so quickly -- nearly as quickly, as if they'd known it was coming.

Again, does Olbermann have any basis of all for the insinuation that the Post is behind this letter?  Of course not!  That is why he is a hero to the reality-based community.

As to how the Post found out so quickly, Olbermann unwittingly provided a clue, which I will repeat:

I was there ten hours before they permitted me to leave, even after several forceful requests by me and my employers to the New York Department of Health, that I should be released.

Incidentally, I apologize if those were too forceful.

Also incidentally, if you make a clown of yourself shouting at cops and ER technicians, they are a bit more likely to drop a dime on you and call Page Six.  And since Page Six lives for these sorts of calls, they hand out plenty of dimes.  Olbermann is ostensibly a newsman - why does he need this explained to him?

Well, I think it is fair to say that Team Murdoch does not like Keith Olbermann and vice versa (I doubt that Olbermann calmed the waters by calling Chris Wallace a "monkey" last Tuesday).  Of course, that does not excuse the Post - they do their readership a disservice by stooping to Olbermann's level.

MORE BACKSTORY?  Bill O'Reilly (Keith Olbermann's bete noir) told Barbara Walters in a recent interview that he has received death threats, including threats from Al Qaeda.  Here was Olbermann's concerned and respectful initial reaction:

That‘s ahead, but first time for COUNTDOWN‘s latest list of nominees for “Worst Person in the World.”

...

But the winner, Bill Orally.  In an interview with Barbara Walters he tells her, “The FBI came in and warned me and a few other people at FOX News that al Qaeda had us on a death list.”

Hey, fella! Were they targeting you or where they just expecting you to help?

By the next day enough folks had kicked this around enough that perhaps a bit of skepticism was warranted.  Still, call me gullible but in the era of Salman Rushdie and the Danish cartoons, I don't know why O'Reilly's fear of being targeted by Al Qaeda is so unreasonable.

I TACKLE THE TOUGH RHETORICAL QUESTIONS:  Over at Hot Air, a commenter asks:

This is not funny and should be condemned.  Would we laugh if it was O’Reilly or Limbaugh?  I doubt it.

Well, Ronald Reagan made jokes as they wheeled him into the hospital after he was shot - that set the bar for conservatives pretty high.  I'll just guess that rather than engage in extended whining and finger-pointing as Olbermann did, O'Reilly or Limbaugh would make a joke out of it ("It's going to take a lot more than this bit of soap to clean up my act" or "Thanks a lot - the next time I meet [insert foul-mouthed politico here] I'll be prepared".)

But Olbermann is campaigning for King of the Moonbats and for that role, being an oppressed, victimized truth-teller is key.

GOOD QUESTION: Do Moonbats have a King?  Shouldn't they have a more democratic, egalitarian social structure?

CAN'T TELL THE PLAYERS... No, Howard Dean is King of the Leprechauns.

CORNYN, TOO:  From the Dallas Morning News:

WASHINGTON — Aides to Sen. John Cornyn were stuck in their offices at midday Thursday after an intern opened an envelope containing a suspicious powder. Capitol police were testing to see if it was anything dangerous.

    

“It’s some sort of a powdery substance,” said Sgt. Kimberly Schneider. “The hazmat team is testing the substance.”

    

False alarms and scares are not uncommon at the Capitol. No one was evacuated, though everyone in the vicinity was asked to remain in place, presumably to avoid the spread of any potential contaminant. Access to part of Mr. Cornyn’s office suite was blocked pending the outcome of the tests.

The Wonkette reminds us that it is the fifth anniversary of the first anthrax scare.

 

Mickey Kaus - Next Week's CW Yesterday

The Thursday NY Times trumpets the Wednesday Kaus theme - the Senate is in play for the Dems.

I had a bunch of betting numbers market-based probabilities at the end of this post.  In short, current markets have the probability of the Reps keeping the House at 58% and 81% for the Senate.  Let's see if the Times story changes anything.

Hug-A-Thug

The WSJ has an article about a seemingly effective tactic for disrupting open-air drug markets.  Mark Kleiman was not involved with this project but gets quoted and has more thoughts here. 

Let me capture the flavor of the program with this from the WSJ:

For over three months, police investigated more than 20 dealers operating in this city's West End neighborhood, where crack cocaine was openly sold on the street and in houses. Police made dozens of undercover buys and videotaped many other drug purchases.

They also did something unusual: they determined the "influentials" in the dealers' lives -- mothers, grandmothers, mentors -- and cultivated relationships with them. When police felt they had amassed ironclad legal cases, they did something even more striking: they refrained from arresting most of the suspected dealers.

In a counterintuitive approach, police here are trying to shut down entire drug markets, in part by giving nonviolent suspected drug dealers a second chance. Their strategy combines the "soft" pressure from families and community with the "hard" threat of aggressive, ready-to-go criminal cases. While critics say the strategy is too lenient, it has met with early success and is being tried by other communities afflicted with overt drug markets and the violence they breed.

My two cents?  One of the best quotes from the article is this:

The High Point strategy was the brainchild of David Kennedy, a 48-year-old professor at New York's John Jay College of Criminal Justice. In the 1990s, when he was at Harvard University, Mr. Kennedy helped develop Boston's anti-gang strategy, a community-involvement approach credited with drastically reducing violent crime.

But the drug initiative was a much harder sell. Mr. Kennedy says he had been trying for more than five years to convince police departments across the country to try it. When Mr. Kennedy first approached Winston-Salem, "We all told him he was crazy," says Police Chief Patricia Norris. Mr. Kennedy says he would ask, "When do you think what you're doing now is going to start working?"

The basic theory was this:

..."A market is something that requires a large number of actors," says Mr. Reuter, who is an economist as well as an illicit-drugs expert. "If can you can get all the actors out, you can disrupt the system."

And did that work?

Randy Dejournette, one of the alleged dealers invited to come to the second-chance meeting at the police station in 2004, says "everybody's gone" from the streets in the West End -- and that's one reason he says he doesn't deal now. "I'm not going to go out there by myself and sit on the corner and look dumb."

However, the truly bad guys do not get off easy:

he High Point police knew who were the lookouts, the runners, the petty dealers and the big wheels. Analyzing the overall market led them to suppliers they might not have found otherwise. Assistant Chief Sumner points to Kevin Cotton, a six-foot-two man with a tattoo that read "thug life," who was a major source of drugs in a neighborhood targeted by police. An informant told them that he not only supplied dealers, but robbed and intimidated them. He "controlled the market," Mr. Sumner says. But because he didn't live in the area, "we probably never would have focused on him." Police made enough undercover buys to warrant federal charges, then arrested Mr. Cotton because they felt his record was too violent for him to be offered a second chance. He's now serving 20 years in federal prison.

Arresting violent offenders is one key to making the initiative work. It removes the dominant actors in the market and sets a powerful example. But the other key is that police refrain from arresting suspects who haven't become hardened, violent criminals. These are often young people -- Mr. Dejournette, for example, was 19 when he was invited to the second-chance meeting. For them, police try to implement a communitywide intervention, choreographed to send three clear messages: If they return to dealing, they'll go to jail; their community will help them turn their lives around but won't tolerate drug crime any longer; and the police and community are working together to combat dealing.

MORE:  CBS News provided the Cliff Notes version in June.

The NIE - Where is Israel/Palestine?

Having glanced through the newly-declassified portions of the NIE, I am wondering whether one needs a decoder ring to make sense of this - nowhere does this report mention the Israel/Palestine conflict as a source of tension, a motivation for jihadists, or a factor in global anti-American sentiment.

Is this just one of those topics that is not discussed in polite circles within the intelligence community?  Or should the Administration be claiming "victory" with its hands-mostly-off approach to the West Bank problem?

Here is the key non-mention:

Declassified Key Judgments of the National Intelligence Estimate “Trends in Global Terrorism: Implications for the United States”
dated April 2006

...Four underlying factors are fueling the spread of the jihadist movement: (1) Entrenched grievances, such as corruption, injustice, and fear of Western domination, leading to anger, humiliation, and a sense of powerlessness; (2) the Iraq “jihad;” (3) the slow pace of real and sustained economic, social, and political reforms in many Muslim majority nations; and (4) pervasive anti-US sentiment among most Muslims— - all of which jihadists exploit.

Maybe the West Bank issue is part of (1), "entrenched grievances".  But that hardly is suggested by the balance of that sentence, which cites "corruption, injustice, and fear of Western domination".

Do the authors of our current NIE really not want to include among their key judgments that the Israel/Palestine problem fuels jihadists?  Why not?

If this is some sort of Washington-insider Political Correctitude in play, well, fine - could someone please help those of us among the Great Unwashed back onto the road to understanding?

Or if Bush was so determined to see a report that justified his relative disengagement with the Palestine problem that he sent Dick Cheney to terrorize the Intel Community with tough questions and invitations for hunting trips, let's get that story.

Or if the Israel-Palestine problem is not a driver of jihad, doesn't that merit a headline or two?  Certainly the conventional wisdom a few years ago was the solving the Palestine problem was the key to just about every other Middle East problem.

Baffling.

AN ODD SEGUE:  I liked this in the NIE:

Anti-US and anti-globalization sentiment is on the rise and fueling other radical ideologies.

Why the sudden switch to US domestic politics?  But there is more:

The radicalization process is occurring more quickly, more widely, and more anonymously in the Internet age, raising the likelihood of surprise attacks by unknown groups whose members and supporters may be difficult to pinpoint.

• We judge that groups of all stripes will increasingly use the Internet to
communicate, propagandize, recruit, train, and obtain logistical and financial
support.

Who can doubt it?

"Spineless Democrats Deserve to Lose"

Jack Balkin, who is assuredly not a spineless Democrat, assails his party for moral cowardice on the terror bill:

I am puzzled by and ashamed of the Democrats' moral cowardice on this bill. The latest version of the bill blesses detainee abuse and looks the other way on forms of detainee torture; it immunizes terrible acts; it abridges the writ of habeas corpus-- in the last, most egregious draft, it strips the writ for alleged enemy combatants whether proved to be so or not, whether citizens or not, and whether found in the U.S. or overseas.

This bill is simply outrageous. I doubt whether many Democratic Senators or staffs have read the bill or understand what is in it. Instead, they seem to be scrambling over themselves to vote for it out of a fear that the American public will think them weak and soft on terror.

This is the same dynamic that led such calculating "leaders" as John Kerry, John Edwards, and Hillary Clinton to vote for the Iraq war resolution in 2002.  At a different level, it is the same dynamic that prompted John Kerry to dress up like a hunter and blaze away at some hapless waterfowl during the 2004 election. 

Look, Democrats are afraid to be who they are, or at least, who the base wants them to be.  Republicans, one might argue, had a similar problem in the 80's when candidates like Bush 41 tried with mixed success to convince the Republican base of their commitment to tax cuts and a pro-life agenda.  However, my impression is that on the big issues Republicans have managed to reconcile the base and the party, so that what you see is roughly what you get.

At the local level, politicians such as Nancy Pelosi don't have this problem.  But a national Democrat has to run as opposed to gun control, supportive of the death penalty, and opposed to gay marriage, just to rattle three issues off the top of my head (and I welcome suggestions here, especially those within the realm of physical possibility).

In fact, one of my favorite moments in the 2000 election was watching Al Gore try to straddle a death penalty question during on of the televised debates.  As I recall, his position amounted to, I support the death penalty as long as no one gets hurt.  (I double-checked that once, and Big Al was not nearly that nonsensical in the transcript, but who ya gonna believe, my jaundiced memory or your lying eyes?)

Let's go back to the other Jack B for a bit more:

The reason why the Democrats have not been doing very well on these issues, however, is that the public does not believe that they stand for anything other than echoing what the Republicans have been doing with a bit less conviction. If the Republicans are now the Party of Torture, the Democrats are now the Party of "Torture? Yeah, I guess so." Not exactly the moral high ground from which to seek office.

Come 2008, they will be against "torture", known as coercive interrogation in these parts.  And on the Evil Rep side, we will greet them with "They were for torture before they were against it".

Send in the clowns.

DE-ENERGIZING THE BASE, CONT: Atrios on Balkin:

It is the very definition of weakness to cowardly enshrine tyranny in statute. It the very definition of cowardice to be unable to stand up for what is so obviously right.

Louise Slaughter is a patriot..  Do we have any more in Congress?

Glenn Greenwald:

Even if Democrats support the torture bill in substantial numbers (which I think is likely), I still believe, for reasons I've set forth here, that the outcome of the election is important. But it is increasingly difficult to argue too strenuously with those, such as Balkin, for whom a pro-torture-and-detention position is an electoral deal-killer.

MORE ON CLOWNS:  Mickey has an intriguing point for pundits and punters - the Dems ought to have a better chance of snagging the Senate than the House.

Since in both the Iowa market and at Tradesports the Rep prospect of keeping the House is at about 58%, versus an 81% chance of keeping the Senate, punters will want to Buy the House and sell the Senate, figuring either the 58% has to rise or the 81% has to fall.

Or, their is a more direct trade at Iowa, which offers 4 contracts that as a group reflect the four possible outcomes - Reps win House and Senate, Reps win Senate/lose House, Reps lose Senate/win House, Reps lose House and Senate.

Right now, Reps win House and Senate is at 59%; win Senate/lose House - 25%; lose Senate, win House - 5%; lose both, 12%.  (OK, that adds to 101% - sue me, or Iowa.)

If Mickey is right, the contract currently at 5% is a steal.

That said, the current NY Times election guide shows the Reps with 47 safe seats and 3 leaning Rep, with 4 more as toss-ups.  The Dems have 39 safe seats and 7 leaners.

So to pick up the Senate, the Dems need to hold all their safes and leaners, win all four toss-ups, and pick up a Rep leaner.  Not easy.

Mickey was looking at the Slate scoreboard, which, after re-scaling to match the Times categories, breaks the races down as follows:

Safe Dem - 44; Leaning Dem - 3; Toss-up - 4; Leaning Rep - 8; Safe Rep - 40

Based on this, the Dems need to hold their leaners and collect 4 toss-ups.  That is a bit easier than the Times view.

For comparison, the Times breaks the House down as follows:

Safe Dems - 190; Leaning Dem - 17; toss-up - 15; leaning Rep - 22; Safe Rep - 191.

To collect the 218 needed to win the House the Dems need their safes and leaners as well as 11 of 15 toss-ups.  By these Times charts, that ought to be easier than their Senate challenge of collecting 4 toss-ups and a Rep leaner.

Good News, Bad News On SWIFT Program

The NY Times follows up on the damage done by their revelation of the SWIFT program which monitored the internbational money movements of terrorists:

Europe Panel Faults Sifting of Bank Data

By ERIC LICHTBLAU

WASHINGTON, Sept. 25 — A European Union panel has serious doubts about the legality of a Bush administration program that monitors international financial transactions, the group’s leader said Monday, and plans to recommend tighter controls to prevent privacy abuses.

“We don’t see the legal basis under the European law, and we see the need for some changes,” said Peter Schaar, a German official who leads the panel, in a telephone interview. The group is to deliver a final report this week in Brussels, and Mr. Schaar said he expected it to conclude that the program might violate European law restricting government access to confidential banking records.

The program, started by the Bush administration weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks, allows analysts from the Central Intelligence Agency and other American intelligence agencies to search for possible terrorist financing activity among millions of largely international financial transactions that are processed by a banking cooperative known as Swift, which is based in Belgium.

The European Union panel will not call for the program to be stopped, officials said. But it is expected to recommend that additional safeguards be put in place to check how financial records are shared with American intelligence officials. For the last three years, a Washington consulting firm, Booz Allen Hamilton, has audited the program, but Mr. Schaar said his panel would recommend that an outside auditor from Europe be brought in to protect against abuses.

“That’s a crucial point for us,” he said. “There must be independent supervision. We don’t see such independent supervision under the current situation, and this must be established.”

   

Well, it could have been worse - this sounds like there will be grumbling but the program will continue essentially unchanged.  Per Bill Keller of the Times

The central argument we heard from officials at senior levels [of the Administration] was that international bankers would stop cooperating, would resist, if this program saw the light of day.

So far they have not.

Tha Captain has more and highlights this from paragraph seven:

Although one government intelligence analyst was removed from the Swift team for conducting improper searches, officials at the Treasury Department and Booz Allen say they have not found any broader instances of abuse in the program.

Barrel-Fishing With Glenn Greenwald

Glenn Greenwald, lefty fabulist extraordinaire, brings his story-telling talents to the question of whether Bill Clinton's debacle in Somalia emboldened Osama Bin Laden.

My post this morning on Salon concerns the accusation voiced this weekend by Chris Wallace in his Fox News interview with President Clinton (a favorite accusation of neoconservatives) that Clinton "emboldened" Al Qaeda when he withdrew American troops from Somalia as soon as we suffered casualties, which (so the neoconservative mythology contends) led Osama bin Laden to believe that we were weak and could be defeated.

Pardon me, it is "neoconservative mythology" that Osama was emboldened by Somalia?  Well then, based on this interview, Osama must be a neocon, yes?

After a few blows, [the United States] forgot all about those titles and rushed out of Somalia in shame and disgrace, dragging the bodies of its soldiers.  America stopped calling itself world leader and master of the new world order, and its politicians realized that those titles were too big for them and that they were unworthy of them.  I was in Sudan when this happened.  I was very happy to learn of that great defeat that America suffered, so was every Muslim....

The gist of Greenwald's argument is that following the Black Hawk Down debacle in Oct 1993, Clinton's conservative critics wanted to abandon Somali immediately.  Clinton, however, insisted that the immediate Cut and Run would make America appear weak.  Clinton's proposal amounted to Cut and Walk: here is the description provided by PBS in 1995:

Oct 7, 1993:  Clinton's response: withdraw troops
President Clinton decides to cut his losses. He sends substantial combat troops as short term reinforcements, but declares that American troops are to be fully withdrawn from Somalia by March 31. The hunt for Aidid is abandoned, and US representatives are sent to resume negotiations with the warlord. Two weeks later, in a letter to President Clinton, General Garrison accepts full responsibility for what happened in the battle.

I'm just guessing, but apparently that charade did not exactly terrify Osama Bin Laden.

Mr. Greenwald builds at least part of his pro-Clinton case on the use of selective excerpts.  For example, the Times story noted below cited Bob Dole as a Senate leader of the group supporting the President's plan to stay an additional six face-saving months in Somalia.  However, Greenwald gave us this snippet to make his contra-historical argument that Dole was in the Cut and Run contingent:

GOP Minority Leader Sen. Robert Dole, Senate speech, October 5, 1993

I think it is clear to say from the meeting we had earlier with--I do not know how many Members were there--45, 50 Senators and half the House of Representatives, that the administration is going to be under great pressure to bring the actions in Somalia to a close.

Oh, please.  Let's go with a longer excerpt, shall we?

I think it is clear to say from the meeting we had earlier with--I do not know how many Members were there--45, 50 Senators and half the House of Representatives, that the administration is going to be under great pressure to bring the actions in Somalia to a close. It is up to the administration to give us a plan--a plan--not a U.N. plan, an American plan, that will stress American interests because I do think if we just say, `OK, we are out of there,' and everybody packs up and goes home, we place American hostages in danger, of course. We also, I think, would jeopardize anything else we might be involved in from this time for the next 5 or 10 years.

Any questions?

As to Mr. Greenwald's other excerpts, his links are not supported by the LOC software.  Folks who want to double-check him can go to this page, then select the 103rd Congress, the specific Senator in question, and try a search word like "Somalia".

And I have a question - are any of the Senators on offer really "neocons", as per the Greenwald vision?  In the interview Clinton focused on "conservatives", which could certainly include the isolationist wing of the Republican Party.  The names we are given are Kay Bailey Hutchison, Dirk Kempthorne (my go-to guy on darn near every issue), Bob Dole (dinged!), and Jesse Helms.

Now, Clinton's observation was that his "plan" in Somalia was opposed by conservatives.  Yes it was, but... it was also opposed by liberals.  In an post decrying "historical revisionism", one might have thought that Greenwald would want to bring clarity to that point.  Instead, we get this from Greenwald:

...it was primarily conservatives in Congress -- mostly Republican Senators and some conservative Southern Democrats -- who were demanding that American troops be withdrawn immediately...

For support, Greenwald offers this snippet of reporting from Tom Friedman:

As hundreds of additional United States troops with special weapons and aircraft began heading to Somalia, a wave of hostility toward the widening operation swept Congress. . . . But Mr. Aspin and Mr. Christopher were besieged by skeptical lawmakers, who scorched them with demands for a clear road map for an exit from Somalia, coupled with bitter complaints that the policy goals were unclear or unrealistic.

Probing behind the ellipsis, JH Hanes found this (emphasis added):

As hundreds of additional United States troops with special weapons and aircraft began heading to Somalia, a wave of hostility toward the widening operation swept Congress. The opposition led the White House to send Secretary of Defense Les Aspin and Secretary of State Warren Christopher to Capitol Hill to try to calm critics from the left and right of both parties and to beg lawmakers for additional time to draw up a new policy.

Angry Legislators

But Mr. Aspin and Mr. Christopher were besieged by skeptical lawmakers, who scorched them with demands for a clear road map for an exit from Somalia, coupled with bitter complaints that the policy goals were unclear or unrealistic.

On the left I have found Russ Feingold and Paul Simon in the Cut and Run crowd (to be fair, Simon may be better placed as a "Cut and Walk" advocate).  As to whether Clinton's opposition was "primarily" conservatives, the jury is out.

CUT AND RUN v. CUT AND WALK: Let's be crystal clear - Congress was not debating a strong response (e.g., send more troops and capture Aideed) versus a weak response (Cut and Run).  Instead, Congress was debating a weak response (end offensive military action and re-open talks with Aideed) versus a weaker response (pick up our prisoners and leave.)  The Clinton plan did not impress PBS and it did not impress Osama Bin Laden.

FOR WHAT IT'S WORTH:  The lesson I took from Somalia is that the US won't fight if its vital interests are not at stake.  Apparently the lesson Osama took is that the US won't fight at all.

A QUESTION ANSWERED:  Per Greenwald, John Kerry supported Bill Clinton's extended troop commitment in Somalia.  I can't wait to read Kerry's speech just to see his answer to the question "How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?"

And having read through his speech, here is Tall John's concluding sentence:

I think the President's plan, as currently outlined, will allow us to step aside.

Bold words.

THE DOG ATE MY CUT AND RUNNERS: A software glitch or operator error has swallowed this original update, but briefly let me hit the highlights - Russ Feingold was "Cut and Run".  Carl Levin, Nancy Kassebaum, and Dianne Feinstein were "Stand and Fight".  Paul Simon called for a bridge over troubled waters, i.e., a resumption of the political process and a de-emphasis of a military solution - let's call that "Cut and Walk". 

The Times has more about Clinton's Cut and Walk approach:

U.S. Is Reported to Be Seeking An Informal Truce With Somali

The White House's special representative in Somalia said today that the United States was seeking an informal truce in its undeclared war with Gen. Mohammed Farah Aidid that would make it possible to begin withdrawing American troops by early next year.

...Spelling out some of the implications of the Administration's new emphasis on a political settlement, Mr. Oakley said the United States would not engage in any mission to arrest the general, even though he remains on a United Nations "wanted" list for his forces' alleged role in an ambush in June in which 24 Pakistani peacekeepers were killed.

And a United States commander said today that he had ordered his troops not to take any actions that might be considered offensives against Somalis.

Mr. Oakley said an independent commission should determine whether General Aidid's forces had carried out the ambush of the Pakistanis. The envoy thus endorsed a proposal made by General Aidid himself in a letter last summer to former President Jimmy Carter.

...The envoy, making his first extensive comments since he arrived on Sunday, said he had made some progress in persuading supporters of General Aidid that President Clinton was genuine in his desire to shift the focus of the United States military mission away from the faction leader.

...Mr. Oakley also said his talks with Somali leaders left him optimistic that a United States helicopter pilot held captive here since Oct. 3 might be released this week. He stressed that he had made no deals for the release of the prisoner, Chief Warrant Officer Michael Durant of the Army.

...Mr. Oakley said his objective in Mogadishu was to restore the status that prevailed in May, before the United States turned over military control here to the United Nations. Since then, 28 Americans have been killed in action as the United Nations stepped up it campaign against General Aidid.

Specifically, the attack on the Pakistani peacekeepers set off the bloody undeclared war here as United Nations forces tried to hunt down General Aidid and to carry out a Security Council resolution that those responsible for the killings be captured.

The portrayal by Mr. Oakley of the new restraint toward General Aidid was echoed by both a top United States commander and a senior United Nations official.

The American officer, Brig. Gen. Greg Gile, who commands most United States troops here who are not under United Nations command, said that over the past week, his soldiers had been ordered to restrain from any operations that could be considered as an offensives.

"What we are doing differently is, we're trying to allow the political process to take the lead," General Gile said. He said the 1,300 personnel in his "quick reaction force" of infantrymen and helicopters had halted its searches of buildings suspected of being weapons caches or sites used by General Aidid's forces as bases for mortar attacks. Rethinking by the U.N.

See, what Clinton did with his forceful commitment to Six Months And Out was make it clear that if you killed American troops in combat the consequences would be swift and unpleasant - long talks with Presidential envoys, letters from Jimmy Carter, and hanging over everything: the threat of a visit from Madeleine Albright.

How Osama could ever have interpreted this as weakness will be an enduring puzzle.

THE METAPHOR MANGLER:  Yes, sailors weep when they see "Cut and Walk", but I have moved on.  Dot Tom.

Fact-Checking Bill Clinton - We Give Him The Byrd

The Bill Clinton - Chris Wallace interview has brought out the fact-checkers:

Patterico finds that, contra Clinton, Fox News has asked a Bush official the same "connect the dots" questions that were put to Clinton;

Jim Geraghty at NRO pummels Clinton's notion that Osama was not part of the Somalia story;

And I will take a swing at Clinton's claim that his problems with Somalia were compounded by right-wing critics:

CLINTON:  And I think it’s very interesting that all the conservative Republicans, who now say I didn’t do enough, claimed that I was too obsessed with bin Laden. All of President Bush’s neo-cons thought I was too obsessed with bin Laden. They had no meetings on bin Laden for nine months after I left office. All the right-wingers who now say I didn’t do enough said I did too much — same people.

They were all trying to get me to withdraw from Somalia in 1993 the next day after we were involved in Black Hawk down, and I refused to do it and stayed six months and had an orderly transfer to the United Nations.

Let's cut to the NY Times summary of the discussion in Oct 1993 following the "Black Hawk Down" debacle:

President Clinton and Senate leaders struggled today to beat back a proposal that would require United States troops to pull out of Somalia earlier than the timetable the President has set.

It was a day of lengthy closed-door meetings, deal-making, competing compromises and hints that the White House might speed up the removal of the forces from Somalia.

The arguments heard in the Senate created some of the oddest alliances on Capitol Hill in recent memory. Two of Mr. Clinton's strongest critics, Bob Dole, the Republican leader, and Sam Nunn, Democrat of Georgia, sided with the President to turn back a effort by Senator Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia, one of the most partisan Democrats in Washington. Clinton Deadline May Shift

Mr. Dole and Senator George J. Mitchell of Maine, the majority leader, worked to win support for a proposal that would essentially grant formal approval to the limited mission Mr. Clinton spelled out last week. The two leaders predicted tonight that they and Mr. Byrd would come to a compromise on Thursday.

...

The Senate leadership is hoping to avoid an embarrassing defeat for the President that they fear would undercut the military in Somalia and in future crises. Mr. Dole argued that if an early date were set, Gen. Mohammed Farah Aidid, the Somali faction leader being hunted by the United Nations, could lie in wait and strike as soon as the United States troops leave.

But they conceded today that the strong tide of public opinion against military involvement required some further narrowing of the mission.

Led by Senator Byrd, several influential lawmakers have been mobilizing to cut off money for military operations in Somalia by Jan. 1, and winning overwhelming constituent support for their efforts. Byrd Wants Feb. 1 Cutoff

Seeking a compromise, Mr. Byrd rose on the Senate floor today to introduce a resolution that would set such a cutoff date at Feb. 1, and limit military operations to self-defense and securing the flow of relief supplies. The Byrd resolution would strictly prohibit efforts at "any extended nation-building or national reconciliation."

The Senator said his measure "gives the military ample time to conduct an orderly phase-out, reduce the possibilities of U.S. casualties that might occur over a more extended time period, and it provides times for the Administration to secure replacement forces for our combat units."

The proposal was a far cry from Mr. Byrd's call last month for an immediate withdrawal. But with the encouragement of the White House, Senator Mitchell and Senator Dole tried to come up with a resolution that would leave the President with the prerogatives they think he deserves as Commander in Chief. Warning About Starvation

As Senator John Glenn, Democrat of Ohio, put it, "I don't think anyone wants us to bug out and put Somalia in a starvation mode again."

Now to be fair, it may be that various conservatives and neocons had abandoned Dole and were hiding behind Byrd's skirts as he led the "Out Now" faction.  But the Times evidently overlooked them, and the picture was a bit more nuanced than depicted by Clinton.

As to Clinton's notion that no one knew about Osama at the time if the incident in Oct 1993, well - this March 28, 1993 NY Times story headlined "Muslim Militants Share Afghan Link" mentions Osama Bin Laden:

Yemeni officials contend that Afghanistan veterans in Yemen, financed by Osama Binladen, a wealthy Saudi militant and former Afghan guerrilla now living in Khartoum, Sudan, have been behind a series of attacks, including two bombs in Aden hotels last year that killed an Australian tourist.

The article also mentions Muslim militants who trained in Afghanistan "the Afghans" as operating terror groups in "Algeria, Egypt, Yemen, Tunisia, Jordan, Turkey and other predominantly Muslim states".  Somalia is not cited, however.

Here is the Clinton quote from the interview:

OK, now let’s look at all the criticisms: Black Hawk down, Somalia. There is not a living soul in the world who thought that Osama bin Laden had anything to do with Black Hawk down or was paying any attention to it or even knew Al Qaida was a growing concern in October of ‘93.

As to whether there was a known link in 1993 between Osama and Somalia, I await further research.  However, Osama as a source of trouble was a growing concern, or should have been.

MORE:  Jake Tapper of ABC News sets Clinton straight on the notion that evil righties did not support his cruise missile attack into Afghanistan abd the Sudan in 1998.

But let me add this!  Mr. Tapper presents the "next-day" reaction to the attacks; as questions emerged about just what target we had hit in the Sudan (pharmaceutical factory? milk factory?), critics also emerged.  Chris Hitchens certainly comes to mind, as does Jimmy Carter; Clinton's defenders will want to probe a bit to support his assertion that the criticism came from the right. 

This summary from Ryan Hendrickson, written in 2002, agrees with Mr. Tapper's point that the Reublican leadership was on board and reinforces his point that Clinton's real problem was with the press:

Although Clinton had the backing of Congress and the American public for the strikes against targets in Afghanistan and Sudan, in the days and months following the attacks journalists and others began to raise questions about the intelligence used to justify the action in Sudan. ... On August 29, the New York Times reported that the CIA's intelligence on al-Shifa may have been flawed, and at minimum incomplete. It was unclear whether the agency had reported to the president that al-Shifa had a pharmaceutical contract with the United Nations and was Sudan's largest producer of medicines. Moreover, the report suggested that the plant was not the tightly guarded facility described by Pentagon officials in the hours immediately following the strike. While journalists had begun exposing some of the controversial aspects of the intelligence gathered by the CIA, defenders of the strike continued to maintain that al-Shifa was a legitimate target and that even with questionable evidence it still would have been targeted.[63] The questions raised, however, were convincing enough for former president Carter to call for an investigation of the plant and the United States' decision to target it.[64] The last major challenge in 1998 to the administration's actions again came from the New York Times. Reporters Tim Weiner and James Risen reiterated concerns about Bin Laden's precarious connection to al-Shifa and raised further questions about U.S. policy toward Sudan, which had been a major source of disagreement among Clinton officials during the preceding two years.[65]

David Corn On Plame Case - "The Investigation Is Over"

David Corn and Byron York square off in a brutal BloggingHeads smackdown covering 'Hubris' and the Valerie Plame investigation.   Byron York has been working the Plame case for NRO and has both important hair and a straight-faced, droll style that works well visually (I'm thinking Chevy Chase).  David Corn, who launched the Plame criminal case with his July 16 2003 column, has a passionate personality which is perfect for print.

For folks unfamiliar with the Blogging Heads format, let me offer a viewing suggestions - right click on "Options" and increase the play speed to "Fast".  Some high-tech process will then speed up the voices without turning everyone into Mickey Mouse.

The result will be that Byron York is transformed from low-key to, well, low-key and amusing.  The high-speed David Corn, on the other hand, becomes kryptonite to Starbucks - you'll never want a cup of coffee again after seeing him rant endlessly and patronizingly about whatever he was going on about.

Anyway, a bit of non-news was delivered at the end - Corn was trying to argue that, since Armitage has finally come forward with a televised mea culpa and Rove has not, Rove is the bad guy.  York's rejoinder was that the White House and its officials, including Rove, will not be commenting on an ongoing criminal investigation.  At which point Corn announced that, per his reporting, the active investigation is over.

For most of the world, this is not news - both the WaPo and the NY Times reported that after the story broke that Rove would not be indicted.  However, I believe there are still a few candles flickering on the left coast of Dean Island, where the inhabitants are awaiting indictments of Cheney, Rove, and a cast of thousands.  Presumably Corn will clarify his remarks to allow them to Keep Hope Alive.

LOST OPPORTUNITY: At another point in the debate, Corn was lecturing on the question of whether Ms. Plame was involved in choosing her husband for the 2002 trip.  Corn was quite emphatic that Douglas Rohn, the INR representative at the meeting "apparently" convened by Ms. Plame, told Corn a different story for the book -   apparently Rohn was late for the meeting and had no particular conviction as to Ms. Plame's actual role.  Consequently, the State Dept may have had a misimpression about her involvement.

However, the lost opportunity was this - York did *not* ask him about this passage in Libby's indictment:

7. On or about June 11, 2003, LIBBY spoke with a senior officer of the CIA to ask about the origin and circumstances of Wilson's trip, and was advised by the CIA officer that Wilson's wife worked at the CIA and was believed to be responsible for sending Wilson on the trip.

The senior CIA officer was Robert Grenier - was he also relying on a faulty State Dept. memo?

BEST LINE:  I am stealing York's thunder, but - after another lecture in which Corn concedes that Rove and Libby did not know that Ms. Plame had classified status but insists that they should have double-checked, York picks up on one of Corn's phrases characterizing their behavior and suggests it as an alternative to the "Hubris" title: "A Wee Bit Reckless".

I think the publishers made the stronger choice.

CREDIT WHERE DUE:  David Corn's column launched the criminal brouhaha but Josh Marshall certainly promoted the Plame case tirelessly.  Well, tirelessly until it turned against him.  Dan McLaughlin presnts "Josh's Greatest Hits".

Osama Died Of Typhoid Fever In August?

The AP adds this to the rumor mill - the French intelligence report is authentic but the content has not been verified:

The French defense ministry on Saturday called for an internal investigation of the leak of an intelligence document that raises the possibility that Osama bin Laden may have died of typhoid in Pakistan a month ago but said the report of the death remained unverified.

...The daily newspaper for the Lorraine region in eastern France printed what it described as a confidential document from the French foreign intelligence service DGSE citing an uncorroborated report from Saudi secret services that the leader of the al-Qaida terror network had died.

The contents of the document, dated Sept. 21, or Thursday, were not confirmed by French or other intelligence sources. However, the DGSE transmitted the note to President Jacques Chirac and other officials, the newspaper said.

Defense Minister Michele Alliot-Marie “has demanded an investigation be carried out of this leak,” a ministry statement said, adding that transmission of the confidential document could risk punishment.

Document exists but cannot be confirmed
Defense Ministry spokesman Jean-Francois Bureau, clarifying the statement, said that the DGSE document exists but that its contents — that bin Laden is allegedly dead — cannot be confirmed.

The DGSE, or Direction Generale des Services Exterieurs, indicated that its information came from a single source.

“According to a reliable source, Saudi security services are now convinced that Osama bin Laden is dead,” said the intelligence report.

The Ace of Spades has good coverage, including an excellent "I Question The Timing" analysis.  Dems who have been fearing an "October Surprise" can be excused a bit of non-surprise now.

And yes, we went through a similar exercise in 2004 - TNR worried about a "July Surprise" where Bush would disrupt Kerry's convention by announcing the capture of Osama or another High Value Target.  It's hard to believe that the NY Times took the notion seriously enough to prepare a front page, just in case.

POINT TO PONDER:  The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist.  Osama being considered to be dead works well for Bush, Musharaff, and Osama.

MORE:  TIME magazine has a Saudi source with a similar story:

                                Fugitive al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, believed to be on the run in rugged terrain in the Afghan-Pakistani border region since the September 11 attacks five years ago, has become seriously ill and may have already died, a Saudi source tells TIME, echoing earlier reports in the French media.

The source, speaking on condition of anonymity, says that Saudi officials have received multiple credible reports over the last several weeks that Bin Laden has been suffering from a water-borne illness. The source believes that there is a "high probability" that Bin Laden has already died from the disease, but stressed that Saudi officials have thus far received no concrete evidence of Bin Laden's death.

"This is not a rumor," says the source. "He is very ill. He got a water-related sickness and it could be terminal. There are a lot of serious facts about things that have actually happened. There is a lot to it. But we don't have any concrete information to say that he is dead."

And here is some info about typhoid.  let's clip this:

Mexico and South America are the most common areas for U.S.       citizens to contract typhoid fever. India, Pakistan and Egypt are also       known high risk areas for developing this disease.

Apparently typhoid is common enough in Pakistam that drug-resistant starins have developed - here are papers from 1996 and 2002.

Bill Clinton, Political Genius

Bill Clinton does the finger-wag again, this time with Chris Wallace of Fox News (transcript).  And what has vexed Mr. "It's All About Bill"?  The same thing that vexed him just before the airing of ABC's controversial "Path to 9/11", namely, the suggestion that his Administration was lax in pursuing Osama Bin Laden.

And does debating this topic really benefit the Democratic Party just now?  In his current melt-down Bill Clinton demands that we read Richard Clarke's book, which lays out the pro-Clinton case.

Read Clarke's book?  Please - maybe we can ask President Kerry how the Richard Clarke attacks worked for the Dems in 2004.

I have a compilation of Richard Clarke links here; Dan Drezner had an excellent overview of the initial debate and his own take on Clarke in a follow-up.

And I will take this opportunity to repeat what I think was my only original contribution to this sprawling brawl about Clinton's priorities - Pulitzer Prize winner David Halberstam delivered "War in a Time of Peace - Bush, Clinton, and the Generals" in May of 2001.  Although he covered Iraq, Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo, there is not a hint of a mention of Al Qaeda or Osama Bin Laden.  That suggests that, in all his digging and interviewing on the topic of Clinton at war, Halberstam never uncovered Clinton's war on terror, or did not experience Clinton's people pounding the table and emphasizing its importance.

Well, if Bill Clinton wants to spend the next month discussing his slack pursuit of Bin Laden as we run up to the election, let's everybody blow the dust off their archives and get it on.

MORE:  A call for perspective from the Captain:

We have all the investigations and tell-all books we will ever need. We have all formed our opinions. None of us will have them changed at this point. What we need to discuss now is what we do from here, a much more pressing debate that has actual real-world consequences, and we can't have that debate successfully until we stop the useless sniping about pre-9/11 failures.

I infer from his UPDATE that the kinder, gentler Captain has triggered a reader revolt:

...as a nation we need to end this argument if we want to get some consensus on engaging the enemy, and the enemy is not Bill Clinton.

Yes, but - tell that to the people who think the enemy is George Bush.  If our friends on the left really want to lose this debate again, why not?  I'll have time for all the calm and perspective in the world starting on the first Wednesday following the first Tuesday in November.  (If I can sustain my enthusiam that long - looks like I picked a bad season to give up caffeine...)

MIGHT BILL HAVE A PLAN?  Bill's temper tantrum may not help any Dems in 2006 but the obvious beneficiary for 2008 is Hillary.  If he bullies interviewers away from that question, she wins.  Or if asked, any answer she gives will seem calm and sensible by comparison.

The only negative -do we want a First Spouse complaining about right wing media bias?  Been there, overcame that.

I QUESTION THE TIMING OF THIS "OSAMA IS DEAD" RUMOR:  The Ace of Spades tracks the French report that Osama died of typhoid fever on Aug 23, 2006 in Pakistan.  He also makes all the points I would have made about a Rovian plot and finds a lot of stuff I would have overlooked.

First, a bit of the report:

PARIS (AP) - The head of terrorist network al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden, has died, according to information from the Saudi police, transmitted by the Directorate-General of External Services (DGSE), and reported on the Lorraine daily newspaper L'Est republicain in its Saturday edition.

"According to a commonly reliable source, the Saudi police believes that Osama Bin Laden has died," said a September 21st confidential note from the DGSE classified as "defense." L'Est republicain will publish it in its Saturday edition. The note, specified the daily newspaper, would be re-printed "un-edited."

And a bit of the speculation:

Question the Timing BIG TIME: Now, if my theory is right, the Bush Administration has of course sort of known about this for a while (for at least three weeks) but hasn't been able to confirm it, and thus hasn't been able to announce it. But they've known there might be some good news on the way.

With that in mind, check out this post at NRO's Sixers, culled from the very leftwing and very inane Raw Story (though it cites, in turn, Newsmax):

 

According to two conservative websites, White House political strategist Karl Rove has been promising GOP insiders that there will be an "October surprise" before the midterm elections.

"In the past week, Karl Rove has been promising Republican insiders an 'October surprise' to help win the November congressional elections," reports Ronald Kessler for Newsmax.

I have thought that Osama has been in the news lately because of the ABC miniseries and the 9/11 anniversary.  But Dems have worried about this particular October Surprise (or July Surprise) for a couple of elections now, so why not make it three in a row?

And let's give the Rovian Plot People their due - in 2004, TNR worried that Bush would announce the capture of a High Value Target the night that John Kerry addressed the Democratic Convention.  In fact, this notion was so widely believed on the left that the NY Times actually prepared an alternative front page Just In Case.  (Yes, it is hard to believe...)  How did that work out?  Well, the US cannounced the capture of an Osama underling, number 22 on the hit list.

And the DNC managed to capture Kerry's balloons.  Quite a night.

Libby To Testify At Trial

In a new filing (9 page .pdf) the Libby defense team describes the classified documents they will need and how they plan to use them in presenting Libby's defense (AP coverage).

The section starting on page 7 discusses the documents relating to the Wilson/Niger trip.  Among other things the defense hopes to introduce notes and emails to and from CIA employees Robert Grenier, Craig Schmall, and Bob Harlow.

Robert Grenier was the senior CIA official who, per the indictment, told Libby that Ms. Wilson was involved in selecting Joe for his trip; Craig Schmall was a CIA briefer to whom Libby mentioned Joe and Valerie Wilson; and Bob Harlow was in the CIA press office and spoke about Ms. Plame to Robert Novak and others.

The defense also expects to introduce the INR memo seen by Marc Grossman of State and (the defense believes) Ari Fleischer, former White House press secretary.

Able Danger, RIP?

The Defense Department has released the Inspector General's report on "Able Danger", a secret data-mining program that may or may not have identified Mohammed Atta and some other 9/11 hijackers in 2000.  Here is the Times and WaPo coverage.  The Times headline says it all:

Claim 9/11 Terrorists Were Identified Is Rejected

Congressman Curt Weldon took the lead in promoting this and I had so many problems with his story that I lost interest.  As an example, in one version, Weldon explained that he demanded a meeting with top people in the White House to show them the key Able Danger chart with Mohammed Atta's picture on it but only learned in 2005, during the course of his book research, that Atta was on the chart.  Oh, please - if people knew in late Sept 2001 that they had identified Atta, that is their headline, not something they are reminded of years later.  By September 2005 then-National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley had chimed with his own buzz-kill recollection of the meeting, claiming (plausibly, I would say) that he would have remembered if anyone had mentioned Atta to him.

My guess as to what happened with Able Danger - a few officers who wanted to be associated with a data-mining project had overly glorious memories of their accomplishments.  Based on a quick scan of the IG report, once the pilot group had demonstrated the data-mining concept the effort was taken over by another area - gee, bureaucratic infighting in the Army!

JUST FOR FUN:  Here is a dusty old link to the first Times story breaking this; nice to see that Douglas Jehl was modestly skeptical, as was I.  Baffled was I when I saw Able Danger.

Bush, McCain Et Al Reach Deal

From the AP:

WASHINGTON — The U.S. administration and Senate Republicans announced agreement Thursday on the interrogation and trial of suspects in the war on terror, clearing a major obstacle blocking legislation at the top of the Republican election-year agenda.

“We have a legislative framework that would allow terrorists to be brought to justice,” said National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley, emerging from a meeting in the office of Majority Leader Bill Frist.

“The agreement that we’ve entered into gives the president the tools he needs to continue to fight the war on terror and bring these evil people to justice,” said Senator John McCain of Arizona, one of three rebellious Republican legislators who told U.S. President George W. Bush he couldn’t have the legislation the way he initially asked for it.

“There’s no doubt that the integrity and letter and spirit of the Geneva Conventions have been preserved,” McCain said, referring to international agreements that cover the treatment of prisoners in wartime.

Details of the agreement were sketchy.

I'll provide one detail - since Dems have been hiding behind St. John on this issue, they will have a hard time announcing at this late date that McCain lacks the integrity and judgment to be trusted.

And another detail - whether this is a victory for Bush or McCain, it is not a victory for Harry Reid and the Senate Dems.

Here is the Times coverage.

In related news - although we would not call it "torture", Brian Ross of ABC News reports that coercive interrogation works.  The NY Times had  a long piece on this in June 2005 (excerpts), from which I took away this:

- the experts think that the threat of physical coercion is a useful interrogation tactic but they offer few examples of torture itself providing actionable intelligence.

UPDATE:  Let's come back to the first point and let Digby explain why hiding behind McCain was not so shrewd:

The Republicans are now standing shoulder to shoulder having worked this whole thing out --- they are strong, they are tough, they are moral, and they are willing to work together to form a compromise that they can all live with. Aren't they great? This is why we should vote Republican.

Now watch this drive.

Ed Rogers on Hardball said Bush got to look both tough on terror and effective in bringing the senate along. Kweisi Mfume says McCain looks good to Democrats and independents and Bush looks good to Americans in general.

Can anyone in the know explain to me how letting McCain run with this torture debate benefitted the Democrats in any way?

Here's how the optics look to me:

McCain, the Republican rebel maverick, showed that Republicans are moral and look out for their troops.

Bush, the Republican statesman and leader, showed that he is committed to protecting Americans but that he is willing to listen and compromise when people of good faith express reservations about tactics.

The Democrats showed they are ciphers who don't have the stones to even say a word when the most important moral issue confronting the government is being debated.

It's a bipartisan consensus.

MORE CONSENSUS:  The Agonist:

...the Democrats we so weak-kneed there wasn't even any dissension. They just rolled over.

The Sideshow:

I'm so disgusted with the "Let's let the Republicans do it" Democrats that I might really puke. Write to them, write to them all, and ask them how in the world they can be so silent when the subject is fergodsakes torture.  I cannot believe they let this happen.  I can't believe, after all this time, they really thought they could trust any Republican to stand up for what's right and put a stop to this.  Didn't any of them even read the stupid McCain/Graham/ghost proposal?  Gah.  Read Digby, who appears to have moved beyond the teeth-gnashing phase to actual coherent sentences.

Echidne of the Snakes:

The Maverick:

That would be McCain. He's supposed to be the odd man out in the Republican party, the one who dares to disagree, nay, even challenge the rigid power structure of the party. But somehow nothing ever comes from these challenges. The wingnut power structure always gets its way and McCain ends up looking like a rebel, like an independent thinker, like a moderate. Like someone a Democrat could love.

It's a bad-cop-good-cop routine, and McCain is the good cop.  Too bad that the Democrats never learn this.

Great to see the Dem base getting energized in time for the election.  Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid - Ready to Lead!

IN SEARCH OF BETTER SLOGANS:  Here is a cheerier view of the Dem "strategy":

There is a possibility that in the past two weeks [while Bush and McCain were doing what will be described as the heavy lifting] the Democrats were able to devise their sixth iteration of a campaign slogan and strategy to roll out with less than 50 days to the election. Perhaps they could call it "Fifty States, Fifty Days...But Never Fifty Percent"? It's catchy, it's succinct, and it may well be accurate come November 8th.

Libby Wins A Round In Court

Libby's defense team got some help from the judge today.  Here is Matt Apuzzo of the AP:

A federal judge handed a victory to the defense Thursday in the Valerie Plame case, siding with Vice President Dick Cheney's indicted former chief of staff in a fight over release of classified information.

U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton decided that he won't impose strict standards sought by prosecutors who want to limit the amount of classified information used in the trial of defendant I. Lewis Libby.

Prosecutors had proposed a stringent three-part legal test that would have allowed information to be considered for the trial only when its benefit to the defense outweighed the government's need to keep it secret.

Walton sided with Libby's lawyers, who said any evidence that's relevant to the case should be considered for use. Once Walton rules on which evidence is relevant, government attorneys can propose portions to be blacked out or summarized, the judge said.

Thrillseekers can find the 14 page ruling here.

My quick perusal suggested the ruling was technical rather than topical, but perhaps someone else can find some case-related hints in there.

WISHFUL THINKING:  Joel Seidman of MSNBC finds "news" in the ruling:

WASHINGTON - The judge in the CIA leak case ruled Thursday that if Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald feels that admitting certain classified documents at the upcoming trial of I Lewis "Scooter" Libby can jeopardize national security, Fitzgerald can then move to dismiss the perjury charges against Libby.

Well.  First of all, frequent commenter Cecil Turner noticed the same thing.  Secondly, contra Mr. Seidman this is hardly a "ruling" by the judge; think of it more as a statement of fact.

Finally, we can only imagine the sighs of relief with which NBC News would greet a dismissal of the charges by Special Counsel Fitzgerald - this trial may be quite embarrassing for two of their reporters, Andrea Mitchell and Tim Russert.

Mr. Seidman does not dwell upon (or even note) NBC's rooting interest here.  Oh, well - he did not note their rooting interest in his previous story either.  My guess is that coverage of these journalistic conflicts of interest may be a bit light as the trial approaches - neither TIME, the NY Times, nor NBC will want to call attention to the roles played by their own reporters.

The NY Times, Keeping Hope Alive

The NY Times headlines great news for the Democrats!

Poll Finds Most Americans Displeased With Congress

Dead Tree readers of a liberal persuasion get even more encouragement in this version, (sub heds not on-line):

Only 25% in Poll Approve of the Congress

An Echo of 1994 Findings

Links to Special Interests Are cited - Standing of Bush Also Lags

The Democrats are going to party like its 1994!  Adam Nagourney and Janet Elder return to this in the second paragraph:

The disdain for Congress is as intense as it has been since 1994, when Republicans captured 52 seats to end 40 years of Democratic control of the House and retook the Senate as well.

It is not until paragraph five that Times readers get a whiff of reality:

What is more, it seems highly unlikely Democrats will experience a sweep similar to the one Republicans experienced in 1994. Most analysts judge only about 40 House seats to be in play at the moment, compared with over 100 seats in play at this point 12 years ago, in large part because redistricting has created more safe seats for both parties.

One of the many things we love about the Times is that it has a comprehensive guide to the election, including current projections for Senate, House, and Gubernatorial elections.  However, the Nagourney/Elder on-line story does not include a link to that feature.  Why not?  I can't even guess (but I will!) - maybe the Times only feels comfortable doling out exposure to reality in small doses.  [In that case, Times readers really don't want to see this LA Times story based on a Times/Bloomberg poll: "Bush and GOP Making Gains Among Voters"]

Anyway, per the NY Times election guide, the House races look like this:

Safe Dem, 189; Leaning Dem, 18; Toss-up, 15; Leaning Rep, 22; Safe Rep, 191

When we posted on this on Sept 4, the Times called the races as follows:

Safe Dem, 189; Leaning Dem, 17; Toss-Up, 16; Leaning Rep, 21; Safe Rep, 192

So in roughly two weeks a "Leaning Dem" has become a toss-up and a Safe Rep has migrated to "Leaning Rep".  Tear out the front page.

With today's numbers, to get to a majority of 218 the Dems need to win every safe and leaning seat and pick up 12 of the 16 toss-ups.  Not exactly a shoo-in.

Now, the obvious reason that this will not be 1994 is that the Democrats have not been able to unite behind any strong message other than "We Are Not Bush" (Maybe Hugo Chavez of Venezuela can help them liven that up a bit).  Nagourney and Elder tackle this head on in paragraph, hmm, thirteen:

In the poll, 50 percent said they would support a Democrat in the fall Congressional elections, compared with 35 percent who said they would support a Republican. But the poll found that Democrats continued to struggle to offer a strong case for turning government control over to them; only 38 percent said the Democrats had a clear plan for how they would run the country, compared with 45 percent who said the Republicans had offered a clear plan.

Following their 2002 debacle the Democrats were criticized for trying to beat something with nothing.  I'll reiterate - here we go again.  To win this election the Democrats need to run against George Bush and run away from their base; it's hard to do both.

MORE:  Amongst punters, the prospects for Republican control of the House have moved up to 56% at TradeSports and 55% in the Iowa Electronic Markets.

DID BUSH MOVE THE NEEDLE?  Nagourney and Elder say no:

The Times/CBS News poll also found that President Bush did not improve his own or his party’s standing through the intense campaign of speeches he made and events he attended surrounding the fifth anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

McQ at Q&O says yes, but all he has as evidence are the poll results themselves - where are the years of journalistic experience that Nagourney, Elder, and the Times editors bring to the table?  Evidence?  C'mon, we are talking about the reality-based community here.

MEANWHILE, ON THE OTHER COAST:  From the LA Times:

Bush and GOP Making Gains Among Voters

The LA TImes explains that, while the absolue levels are not good for the Reps, the direction of the poll results suggest the tide is now running in the Republican's favor:

WASHINGTON — President Bush's approval rating has reached its highest level since January, helping to boost the Republican Party's image across a range of domestic and national security issues just seven weeks before this year's midterm election, a new Times/Bloomberg poll has found.

The survey spotlights a continuing array of Republican vulnerabilities, but it also offers the first evidence in months that the GOP may be gaining momentum before November's battle for control of Congress.

Democrats hold a lead in the poll, 49% to 39%, when registered voters are asked which party they intend to support for Congress this year. But that advantage may rest on softening ground: On virtually every comparison between the parties measured in the survey, Republicans have improved their position since early summer.

In particular, Republicans have nearly doubled their advantage when voters are asked which party they trust most to protect the nation against terrorism — the thrust of Bush's public relations blitz in recent weeks.

Dear Office Of Professional Responsibility

Clarice Feldman follows up her Weekly Standard article about the Plame case by sending a letter to the Department of Justice's Office of Professional Responsibility questioning the conduct of Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald.

Ms. Feldman raises an interesting question with a fun backstory - was Ms. Plame actually covered by the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, and did Mr. Fitzgerald misrepresent her status under the IIPA to the court in his affidavit of Aug 27 2004?

First, Ms. Feldman:

At no time in the unredacted portions of the affidavit did Fitzgerald directly say that Plame met the test of the IIPA - which she clearly does not -but in various ways he deliberately left the Court with that impression in order to effect the rare contempt order and jailing of a reporter.

And for the backstory, let's cut to Jack Shafer, who pounded on the NY Times and their lead attorney. Floyd Abrams, for basing their argument on the First Amendment while attempting to have the subpoena against Time reporter Judy Miller quashed:

Maybe a First Amendment legend isn't what this case called for in the first place. Maybe Cooper and Miller would have been better served by having a criminal lawyer who knows how to bargain.

With New York Times Publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. promising to appeal this decision, perhaps both Cooper and Miller might want to rethink the utility of hanging their whole case on this First Amendment defense. If I were running their defense committee, I'd give the case to Bruce W. Sanford.

...

What could Sanford do for Cooper and Miller that Abrams can't? For one thing, he could tack away from the First Amendment argument. Even though I'm a First Amendment extremist, I found Abrams' oral argument before the D.C. Circuit to be wishful and flabby. I don't know of any court, let alone the Supreme Court, that is likely to hold that reporters possess a near automatic right to ignore grand jury subpoenas.

If I'm right, a fresh law jockey might be the ticket. In their op-ed, Sanford and Toensing called upon the special prosecutor Fitzgerald and the two reporters to ask Judge Thomas Hogan, who oversees the grand jury, "to conduct a hearing to require the CIA to identify all affirmative measures it was taking to shield Plame's identity." They conclude their piece, "Before we even think about sending reporters to prison for doing their jobs, the court should determine that all the elements of a crime are present."

Eventually a consortium of newspapers did hire Bruce Sanford to file an amicus brief making the "no crime" argument, without any apparent success.  But since I had been arguing that the courts would let this proceed for other reasons, I would hardly say that Mr. Sanford's apparent failure demonstrates that the IIPA does in fact cover Ms. Plame.

 

Are We Better Off Now Than We Were Thirty Years Ago?

Writing in the Business section, David Leonhardt tackles the question that Times columnist Paul Krugman recently uncorked - have middle class living standards actually risen over the last twenty five years, or have they stagnated?

His answer - yes.

...progress is easy to take for granted. Clearing a driveway without a shovel, buying an affordable cross-country plane ticket and — on a totally different scale — watching a very premature baby survive are all accepted parts of life today. They’re also fairly recent developments.

Polls show that Americans, in fact, understand this. By wide margins, they say they live better than their parents. “Looking backward,” the Pew Research Center reported last week, “Americans were more inclined to say they had made progress than were the publics of any country surveyed in Europe or the Middle East and most of the countries surveyed in Asia, Latin America and Africa.”

Part of the explanation is technological progress; another part involves problems with measuring inflation.  IF, as many economists believe, the CPI overstates actual inflation, then over long time periods the difference can add up:

By overstating inflation, the official numbers understate the country’s wealth, since every meaningful calculation of income subtracts inflation. The Census Bureau, for instance, says that the median-earning man who works full time — the one in the dead middle of the earnings ladder — made slightly less last year than in 1977. It is one of the main numbers cited by those who say life isn’t much better now than 30 years ago.

But Mr. Gordon’s adjustments show that men actually got a 27 percent raise in this period and women 65 percent. The gains are not as big as those of the 1950’s and 60’s, but they do sound far more realistic than the official numbers. Think about it: we live longer than people did in the 1970’s, we’re healthier while alive, we graduate from college in much greater numbers, we’re surrounded by new gadgets and we live in bigger houses. Is it really plausible, as some Democrats claim, that the middle class has made only marginal progress?

Personally, I am all in favor of seeing a wealthy economist like Paul Krugman appearing in public and ranting to the middle class that their lot has not improved.  These performances make him appear to be an out-of-touch Ivory Tower academic without actually changing any minds; we can only hope that John Kerry, to pick a name at random, will amplify the effect by joining in.

MORE:  Some recent analysis from Paul Krugman on this very topic:

Since 1973, however, the picture has been mixed. Real median household income — the income of the household in the middle of the income distribution, adjusted for inflation — rose a modest 16 percent between 1973 and 2005. But even this small rise didn’t reflect clear gains across the board. The typical full-time male worker saw his wages, adjusted for inflation, actually fall; the typical household’s real income was up only because women’s wages rose (although by far less than everyone’s wages rose during the postwar boom) and because more women were working.

The debate over the state of the middle class, for the most part, is about whether these numbers understate or overstate the true progress achieved by typical families. The optimists point to technological advances that, they argue, don’t get reflected in official estimates of the standard of living. In 1973, you couldn’t chat on a cellphone, watch a video or surf the Internet; many medical conditions that are now easily managed with drugs were untreatable; and so on.

The pessimists point to ways in which life has deteriorated, things that also aren’t counted by the official statistics. Traffic has gotten far worse, and commutes have gotten longer. The economic riskiness of life has increased: year-to-year fluctuations in family income have grown much larger. The rat race has intensified, as families, no longer confident in the quality of public education, stretch to buy houses in good school districts — and often go bankrupt when misfortune strikes in the form of a layoff for either spouse or high medical bills.

Does the good outweigh the bad? Never mind. As I said, the ambiguity is the message.

...

Yet in spite of all this technological progress, which has allowed the average American worker to produce much more, we’re not sure whether there was any rise in the typical worker’s pay. Only those at the upper end of the income distribution saw clear gains — gains that were enormous for the lucky few at the very top.

That’s why the debate over whether the middle class is a bit better off or a bit worse off now than a generation ago misses the point. What we should be debating is why technological and economic progress has done so little for most Americans, and what changes in government policies would spread the benefits of progress more widely. An effort to shore up middle-class health insurance, paid for by a rollback of recent tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans — something like the plan proposed by John Kerry two years ago, but more ambitious — would be a good place to start.

Just to note - in his discussion of optimists and pessimists and technological progress, Krugman never noted th edebate about specific technical issues with the use of the CPI to calculate real incomes (and the attendant underestimate of increases in real income).  Since his acolytes insist that Krugman would never let his political views impact his economic analysis, I am at a loss to explain it.

However (and it seems unfair to rely on the unforgiving memory of the internet), Krugman was on the other side of these very same debates when Clinton was President:

...in December a blue-ribbon panel of economists headed by Michael Boskin of Stanford declared that the Consumer Price Index had been systematically overstating inflation, probably by more than 1 percent per year for the last two decades, mainly by failing to take account of changes in the patterns of consumption and improvements in product quality.

Even the bureau's technical adjustment was controversial, because it seemed to deflate business boasts about a "productivity revolution" in recent years. The Boskin report, however, ignited a firestorm of criticism. Partly this was because of the link between the C.P.I. and Social Security payments, which meant that any downward revision in the index would strike directly at retirees. Many of the Boskin report's harshest critics, however, were outraged because it repudiated a view of the economy on which they had staked their reputations and built their careers. For if inflation has been exaggerated, then the growth in real wages has been understated - and so the whole story about how companies are not sharing productivity gains with their workers evaporates.

To be fair, there are not many professional economists among those who are wailing and rending their garments. On the contrary, most economists who study the relationship between productivity and wages are relieved at the more or less official admission that some of the published numbers may have been way off, because they already knew there had to be something wrong. When you tried to put the data together into a consistent story about what has been happening to America, you discovered that the supposed facts just didn't fit together.

...

There are still many details to settle. The Boskin report, in particular, is not an official document - it will be quite a while before the Government actually issues a revised C.P.I., and the eventual revision may be smaller than Boskin and his colleagues propose. Still, the general outline of the resolution is pretty clear. When all the revisions are taken into account, productivity growth will probably look somewhat higher than it did before, because some of the revisions being proposed to the way we measure consumer prices will also affect the way we calculate growth. But the rate of growth of real wages will look much higher - and so it will now be roughly in line with productivity and wages with data that show a roughly unchanged distribution of income between capital and labor. In other words, the whole story about workers not sharing in productivity gains will turn out to have been based on a statistical illusion.

It is important not to go overboard on this point. There are real problems in America, and our previous concerns were by no means pure hypochondria. For one thing, it remains true that the rate of economic progress over the past 25 years has been much slower than it was in the previous 25. Even if Boskin's numbers are right, the income of the median family - which officially has experience virtually no gain since 1973 - has risen by only about 35 percent over the past 25 years, compared with 100 percent over the previous 25. Furthermore, it is quite likely that if we "Boskinized" the old data - that is, if we tried to adjust the C.P.I. for the 50's and 60's to take account of changing consumption patterns and rising product quality - we would find that official numbers understated the rate of progress just as much if not more than they did in recent decades. (Many observers would argue that the qualitative changes in the way ordinary people lived were far greater between 1945 and 1970 than between 1970 and the present.) The popular impression that the first postwar generation experienced an immense improvement in living standards, while the second did not, is still correct; the American dream may not be dead, but it is certainly not what it was.

Someone could sell tickets to these Krugman v. Krugman debates.

YES, BUT:  Brad DeLong presents a cogent summary of alternative viewpoints.  Here he quotes Jared Bernstein:

But... this middle-class debate... I fear it’s a distraction.... [R]ight now, those of us who seek a different set of policy responses to the big challenges we face... would be better off talking much more about that agenda, and not arguing over whether the middle class is better off relative to 30 years ago.

And here is the Prof himself:

Think about it. If there is 20% of CPI bias in the past 30 years, then median male real earnings have risen by 30% instead of the 10% in official statistics. But real national income per capita has risen by 125% rather than by 90%. A country that is so phenomenally more productive than the country of the mid-1970s should be able to do a much better job at providing an economic environment in which all Americans can have greatly improved income security, education for their children, and leisure time, as well as a much greater share in the rises in real material standards of living of which the rich have grabbed the lion's--no, much more than the lion's, the tyrannosaurus's--share.

Their are two related debates here - how do we optimize the growth of the economic pie, and how do we slice it in accordance with some concept of efficiency, equity and justice?  An alternative to the view expressed by Brad DeLong is that low taxes and flexible labor markets (to pick two factors) contribute to both the growth and the slicing of the pie, so that folks who want a re-slicing need to address the implications of that trade-off.  Europe springs to mind as providing examples of countries with less income inequality, higher taxes, more protected labor markets, and no ability whatsoever to create jobs and absorb immigrants.  It may well be that the policies they have chosen to guide the slicing of the pie also impede its growth.

METAPHOR MANGLER NEEDED:  I am not a baker, but yes, my impression is that pies can boil over but rarely "grow".  Whatever.

Moving Off The Fence

The Senate has closed debate on the "enforcement only" fence bill; Bill Frist says a vote on the bill will be scheduled for next week:

The Senate today gave up on comprehensive immigration reform and instead advanced a bill that would authorize a fence along one-third of the U.S. border with Mexico.

By a tally of 94 to 0, the Senate voted to limit debate on the bill to build a barrier to those trying to sneak across the border along two regions, one running from Calexico, Calif., to Douglas, Ariz., and the other in Laredo, Texas.

...Frist said the Senate would cast a final vote on the fence bill next week. "Securing our borders is a major step forward in addressing comprehensive immigration reform," he said.

Senate Democrats were disappointed by the fence bill, although they voted to limit debate on it.

"We can build the tallest fence in the world and it won't fix our broken immigration system," said Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.). "To do that we need the kind of comprehensive reform that the Senate passed earlier this year."

John McCain, Presidential wanna-be, has been an advocate of comprehensive reform, but... can the man who has already irked conservatives with his McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform further annoy conservatives over the next two weeks by both holding up the President's bill on military tribunals and opposing the fence?

I suppose he could, if he is intending to run as a third party candidate (McCain-Lieberman '08!).  But if he wants the Republican nomination, I expect McCain will see benefits to coming back to the fold on one or both of these issues.

The Pain Of Kaus

With the news that Bill Frist will bring an "enforcement only" bill to the Senate floor, Mickey Kaus is struggling to keep a straight face and avoid a terminal case of "I-told-you-so-itis" - he has been telling us since at least last spring that the enforcement only route had high political appeal for Republicans, and he even did some premature gloating in May.

Well, let me chime in with some premature gloating of my own.  Bush's national security offensive seems to boosted his approval ratings and raised Republican prospects in the fall elections.

USA Today gives the NSA warrantless eavesdropping a mention but does not provide context:

Bush's terror-fighting techniques drew mixed reviews. A 55%-42% majority supported his policy of wiretapping phone conversations between U.S. citizens here and suspected terrorists in other countries without getting a court order.

Per the actual poll, last February the same question had a 47% approve / 50% disapprove response.  Now, maybe the "true" national mood has always been about 50/50 on this question and both of these polls are simply showing noise.  But in my gloating modality, I will assert that Bush (or the passage of time) has moved the needle in Bush's direction.  Let's repeat the question below, since I am sure you are curious:

17.  As you may know, the Bush administration has been   wiretapping telephone conversations between U.S. citizens living in the United   States and suspected terrorists living in other countries without getting a   court order allowing it to do so.  Do you think the Bush administration was   right or wrong in wiretapping these conversations without obtaining a court   order?

Let me just anticipate one more bit of bad news for Democrats - they have been hiding for weeks behind Republican Senators John McCain, Lindsay Graham, and John Warner
on the President's bill to establish military tribunals for terrorists.

But McCain has Presidential aspirations which conflict with his current posture, and talk of a compromise is in the air.

So where will the Democrats be if, come the weekend, media hero St. John blesses an administration bill on tribunals?  The time for Democrats to emerge as leaders will have long passed and Bush will rack up yet another "victory" (I am grouping that with his impending "victory" on immigration reform and whatever we finally get on warrantless eavesdropping).

These will all be tough votes for Democrats, as folks have been saying for months.

MORE:  At TradeSports, the probablity of Republicans retaining control of the House has moved up to 52%; at the Iowa Electronic Market the Reps are also at 52%.  The Reps bottomed out at 40% in early September at TradeSports.

RELATED:  Ezra Klein is very interesting on partisanship verus principles as it relates to McCain's prospects..

Tackling Toensing

David Corn, 'Hubris' author and Joe Wilson promoter, is grappling with Victoria Toensing, a chief counsel for the Senate Intelligence Committee and deputy assistant attorney general in the Reagan administration."

Ms. Toensing is pushing back with an NRO article that summarizes their debate so far.  Now, frankly, I am not much interested in their main theme, which is a dispute over whether David Corn "outed" Valerie Plame himself with his July 16, 2003 article.  The notion is that Mr. Corn hyped her possible status as a covert agent and wondered whether the Intelligence Identities Protection Act had been violated by the people who leaked to Robert Novak for his July 14, 2003 column, thereby pegging Ms. Plame as having classified status. 

(My offical view - the Corn/Wilson screaming did not exactly draw attention away from Ms. Plame, but dedicated foreign spy-catchers should have picked up on the Novak column from July 14.  Of course, they also should have taken an interest in the wife when hubby Joe announced in his July 6 2003 op-ed that he did consulting and travel for the CIA.  I have serious problems with her tradecraft if Ms. Palme expects us to believe that she wss making a serious effort to preserve her cover.)

However, Ms. Toensing reiterates a point she has made many times - being "covert" is a matter of statutory definition under the Intelligence Identities Protection Act; it is different from having classified status or from being a CIA employee with "Non-official cover", i.e., a "NOC".  Let's just review that part of the definition of "covert" that might apply to Ms. Plame:

(4) The term "covert agent" means—

(A) a present or retired officer or employee of an intelligence agency or a present or retired member of the Armed Forces assigned to duty with an intelligence agency—

(i) whose identity as such an officer, employee, or member is classified information, and

(ii) who is serving outside the United States or has within the last five years served outside the United States;

Ms. Plame was a current employee of an "intelligence agency"; we have been assured by Special Counsel Fitzgerald that her status was classified, and we do not doubt him.

But did she qualify under clause (ii) - was she serving outside the US, or had she served outside the US in the previous five years?

If Ms. Plame does not qualify under that clause, she is not "covert", whatever else she may be.  That can lead to the odd result noted by Ms. Toensing:

On September 5, 2006, Corn wrote, “Plame was an operations officer working on a top priority” and that in the “early 1990s, she became what is known as a nonofficial cover officer. NOCs are the most clandestine of the CIA’s frontline officers.” A NOC is not necessarily “covert,” and Corn’s using them as synonyms does not make them the same. 

Now, the frustrating bit - none of this is debate is new, yet it seems to remain unresolved.  Folks on both sides of the debate have been wondering whether Ms. Plame had "served outside the United States" more or less since this scandal broke.  And the wondering takes two forms:

(a) Did Ms. Plame ever actually travel abroad on official business?  Per her biography, as reconstructed from Joe Wilson's book and other sources, it appeared that she had been posted to CIA headquarters in Langley since 1997, which was more than five years prior to her outing in 2003. 

The question of overseas travel seems to have been answered by 'Hubris', which reports that she went to Jordan to confer about aluminum tubes.

However, there is another question:

(b) Does "serving outside the United States" include traveling outside the United States on official business, or does it mean "formally posted abroad"? 

If the latter, Ms. Plame's business trips do not qualify her under the five year limit, since her current posting was domestic.  In that case, her "outing" would not violate the IIPA regardless of her classified status.

Ms. Toensing has addressed this point previously, in a Dec 2004 piece that appeared in the WSJ and a Jan 2005 WaPo contribution:

Her status as undercover must be classified, and she must have been assigned to duty outside the United States currently or in the past five years. This requirement does not mean jetting to Berlin or Taipei for a week's work. It means permanent assignment in a foreign country. Since Plame had been living in Washington for some time when the July 2003 column was published, and was working at a desk job in Langley (a no-no for a person with a need for cover), there is a serious legal question as to whether she qualifies as "covert."

And what is the source of Ms. Toensing's expertise on this?  Her co-author was Bruce Sanford, and they wrote this:

As two people who drafted and negotiated the scope of the 1982 Intelligence Identities Protection Act, we can tell you: The Novak column and the surrounding facts do not support evidence of criminal conduct.

Fine, she helped draft the law and years later is opining as to Congressional intent.  Let's hear from the other side, relying on the oft-quoted Larry Johnson, a retired intelligence
officer:

Ms. Toensing is wrong. Let us pray that Ms. Toensing is not practicing law these days because, if her comments in this article reflect her abilities as an attorney, clients could be in serious trouble. Valerie Plame was a "covert agent" as defined by the law. In her cover position as a consultant to Brewster-Jennings, Ms. Plame served overseas on clandestine missions. Just because she did not live overseas full time does not mean she did not work overseas using her status as a non-official cover officer.

"If her comments in this article reflect her abilities as an attorney, clients could be in serious trouble"?  Pretty bold talk from a fellow most famous for writing "The Declining Terrorist Threat" in July of 2001.  And other than foot-stomping, Mr. Johnson offers no support at all for his assertion.

And the well-regarded "EmptyWheel", an attorney consultant/savant posting at "The Next Hurrah" has offered this cogent legal precis:

Victoria Toensing was out beating her "this doesn't qualify for IIPA" horse again.

If there is more at that site on offer from Emptywheel I am not finding it.

[But NOT a foot-stomper - Jeralyn Merritt of TalkLeft opined that the use of the IIPA would be "a stretch", although she was not commenting specifically on the five year rule.]

So at this point we are not getting much of an argument from anyone: appeals to self-authority on the right, foot-stomping on the left, and no facts offered by either side three years on.

And keep in mind - no one has ever been tried under the IIPA so, for that specific statute at least, the issue has never been before a judge.

However!  My possibly quixotic thought is this - the concept of "serving abroad" cannot be a new one.  In the glorious bureaucracy known as the US Government, there are handbooks and definitions for everything.  Furthermore, someone somewhere must have litigated their entitlement to some benefit (health coverage, death, disability, whatever) based on the length of their service abroad, the circumstances of their service abroad, or some such  I would like to challenge interested bloggers and readers to chime in with their suggestions as to relevant definitions or case law that might settle this.

And let me kick it off with a few ideas, all of which support Ms. Toensing's view (you will have to trust me that I have not found support for the other side and buried it).

First, if Ms. Plame had been a covert geologist, this issue would be settled - from the US Geological Survey manual:

D. Service abroad means service on or after September 6, 1960, by an employee at a post of duty outside the United States and outside the employee's place of residence if that place of residence is a territory or possession of the United States.

Since she is not a geologist this excerpt is merely suggestive - it is a small leap of faith to presume that the US Geological side has not chosen to break new ground here, and instead is adopting a standard government-wide definition.

Here is something suggestive from the State Dept manual (with emphasis added):

SEC. 504. 78 SERVICE IN THE UNITED STATES AND ABROAD.— (a) Career members of the Service shall be obligated to serve abroad and shall be expected to serve abroad for substantial portions of their careers. The Secretary shall establish by regulation limitations upon assignments of members of the Serv-ice within the United States. A member of the Service may not be assigned to duty within the United States for any period of continuous service exceeding eight years unless the Secretary approves an extension of such period for that member be-cause of special circumstances. (b) Consistent with the needs of the Service, the Secretary shall seek to assign each career member of the Service who is a citizen of the United States (other than those employed in accordance with section 311) 79 to duty within the United States at least once during each period of fifteen years that the member is in the Service.

If the continuous eight-year-limit clock could be stopped simply by traveling abroad on business, this passage requiring special approval by the Secretary seems like nonsense.

More suggestive material - here is a definition of eligibility for the Thomas Jefferson Star for Foreign Service, which is sort of a Bronze Star for the Foreign Service:

The Thomas Jefferson Star for Foreign Service recognizes individuals who, while traveling or serving abroad on official business, are killed or incur a serious illness or injury that results in death, permanent incapacity, or disability.

You know my question!  If "traveling abroad" is synonomous with "service abroad", why does this definition make a distinction between them?  The actual statute makes a similar distinction:

The President, upon the recommendation of the Secretary, may award a Thomas Jefferson Star for Foreign Service to any member of the Foreign Service or any other civilian employee of the Government of the United States who, while employed at, or assigned permanently or temporarily to, an official mission overseas or while traveling abroad on official business, incurred a wound or other injury or an illness...

I invite other contributions - comments and trackbacks are open.  But I think we will find that Ms. Toensing is right and the foot-stompers are, well, promoting a bit of non-reality-based thinking.  First time for everything.

MORE:  Lest you doubt the significance - if Ms. Toensing's perspective can be firmly established there are major implications for the Libby trial, starting with, how could Fitzgerald have spent over two years investigating a situation that could not have been criminal and segueing to, what is the meaning of "perjury" or "obstruction" when there is no possibility of an underlying criminal charge?

Put bluntly - if Libby had said to investigators, "You got me - Dick Cheney told me that Valerie Plame had classified status but I blabbed to reporters anyway", neither Cheney nor Libby could have been charged under the IIPA because of the five year rule.  And Fitzgerald should have known that when he took Libby's testimony.  So what was Fitzgerald investigating - a conspiracy to commit a non-criminal act?

Well - our research notwithstanding, I Boldly Predict we will hear a lot about this from the defense at Libby's trial.

DETAILS, DETAILS:  From Rick Ballard:

According to the Foreign Service Act of 1980 under CHAPTER 5—CLASSIFICATION OF POSITIONS
AND ASSIGNMENTS:

SEC. 505. 80 TEMPORARY DETAILS.—
A period of duty of not more than six months in duration by a member of the Service shall be considered a temporary detail and shall not be considered an assignment within the meaning of this chapter.

That definition certainly pertains to the DoS - whether the CIA follows the same rules is a different question.

A ROAD SIGN TO THE TRUTH:  This topic has surely been answered, at least for State:

SEC. 413. 73 DEATH GRATUITY.—
(a) The Secretary may provide for payment of a gratuity to the surviving dependents of any Foreign Service employee who dies as a result of injuries sustained in the performance of duty abroad, in an amount equal to one year's salary at the time of death. Any death gratuity payment made under this section shall be held to have been a gift and shall be in addition to any other benefit payable from any source.

So - if a member of the State Dept. dies while traveling overseas but posted in the US, are they eligible for the death gratuity?  This can't be a hard question.

ANOTHER ROADMAP:  A CRS Report for Congress was prepared in Oct. 2003 reviewing the IIPA, but it does not touch upon the question at hand.  However, the footnotes give cites to the legislative history, so an interpid researcher could follow that trail.

Latest Libby Filings!!

OK, the arrival of new Libby filings no longer quickens the old pulse the way a lunch with Bill Clinton might - it is great to see Bill promoting Pelosi's latest new theme.

Anyway, Special Counsel Fitzgerald, in a filing from Sept 7 (22 page .pdf), opposed Libby's use of a memory expert (I meant to post this last week, but I forgot...)

Team Libby responded on Sept 15 (18 page .pdf).

I will read these later, but there they are.

Also check out Clarice Feldman's piece in the Weekly Standard reviewing the current case against Libby.  Ms. Feldman has delivered a comprehensive yet concise defense brief highlighting the many problems with the prosecutor's case; in fact, I will be so bold as to say that this is the best defense of Libby I have seen (and way better than my suggested insanity defense).

That said, I am firmly on both sides of this - clearly, fans of the prosecution will prefer to emphasize a different set of facts.  Put briefly, it may well be that Fitzgerald is worried that Libby lied about the involvement of Dick Cheney but indicted on these counts because it was all he thought he could prove and he was hoping for cooperation and a plea deal.

MORE:  Frequent commenter Jeff has already picked out two highlights from the filings- contra 'Hubris', Libby did testify that Cheney told him about Ms. Plame in his first FBI interview (that fact was also in Libby's notes).  And the filing mentions that TIME reporter Matt Cooper's notes "tend to impeach, rather than corroborate, the claim that Mr. Libby confirmed anything about Mr. Wilson's wife".

Democrats' Latest "NewD irection"

Dana Milbank of the WaPo lampoons Nancy Pelosi's latest campaign initiative and so do we, but we settle for cheap sophomoric hijinks.  Milbank first:

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, the woman who will become speaker of the House if Democrats get lucky in November, began her weekly news conference yesterday holding up a red-white-and-blue brochure.

"I hope you all received 'A New Direction for America,' " she said, standing at a lectern that bore the same slogan. She called the manifesto "a compilation of many of the initiatives taken by our House Democratic Caucus that encompasses our new direction for all Americans."

It was a handsome booklet, full of homey photographs and popular proposals, but there was a problem. Democrats have had more "New Directions" recently than MapQuest.

Among the party's campaign slogans this year: "Culture of Corruption," "Culture of Cronyism," "Do-Nothing Congress," "Rubber-Stamp Congress," "Together, We Can Do Better," "Together, America Can Do Better" and, most recently, "Six for '06."

For those keeping score at home, Democrats arrived at "New Direction" yesterday by downgrading one of the "Six for '06" issues (health care) and upgrading three others (honesty, civility and fiscal discipline), for a total of eight items on the contents page.

By contrast, Republicans have settled on a single, unofficial slogan, which essentially says: Vote Democrat and Die. And in politics, scary and scurrilous usually trumps elaborate and earnest -- something Pelosi has experienced firsthand in recent days.

Others have had similar difficulty taking the latest Dem brainwave seriously - a sly commenter has this suggestion:

A New Direction for America as the dems chosen slogan?

Say that again and see if you can hear it.

Or, move the "d" from direction over to new and then read it out loud again.

A NewD irection for America

And you think it's coincidence that Bill has been popping up in the news recently?

Is that one of Nancy Pelosi's pamphlets in his pocket, or is he just excited to see her?

Novak "Would Hope" Bush Would Pardon Libby

Bob Novak took questions on C-Span today.  Some highlights (and I am straining my TiVo here):

- Novak "would hope" that President Bush would pardon Libby.  Whether a pardon should be given before or after the trial seems to be a point of contention amongst the people with whom Novak has discussed this.

- "Nobody gave me the name": Neither Armitage, Rove, nor CIA Public Information Director Bill Harlow gave Ms, Plame's name to Bob Novak - Mr. Novak repeated his story that he looked it up in Who's Who.  I would urge folks to study the videotape (it should be right about the 2:46 mark of the 3 hour broadcast) - I thought Novak's demeanor changed markedly during this statement.  He cast his eyes down and gave a grin that, to these skeptical eyes, could be read as "Is anybody believing this story?"

That said, he spoke with an air of self-mockery - he said, roughly, "In all those conversations nobody gave me a name.  So being an intrepid reporter I got a copy of Who's Who and there it was, Valerie Plame."  Maybe the idea of the high-priced investigative wiz relying on Who's Who just seems silly to him.

Well - if I were a human truth-detector I would be doing something else, probably involving the detection of truth...

- In response to a David Corn column wondering about the accuracy of Novak's recollections, Novak explained that he rarely takes notes in meeting with high-level people - he worries that they would find it off-putting, and that it would shatter the conversational mood Novak is hoping to create.  However, as Novak explained in his recent column, he recreated the conversation shortly after it ocurred; his guess is that Armitage only pieced it together months later for the investigators.

- Novak and Armitage had a long, detailed discussion of the Wilson trip to Niger.  Due to his respect for source confidentiality, Novak won't say whether Armitage thought the trip was good or bad.  However, the fact that Novak framed the question that way narrows the choices and suggest the answer - Armitage was almost surely trashing the trip as an inconclusive waste of time, which was the State Dept. view before Wilson was sent and as captured afterwards in the famous INR memo.

As a bonus - a detailed discussion of the Niger trip might well have included the information presented by Pincus/Leiby on July 6 or Andrea Mitchell on July 8.  Let's rehash that:

On July 8 Andrea Mitchell claimed that CIA sources told her that the Wilson trip was arranged by "some of the covert operatives in the CIA at a very low level".

And on July 6, Walter Pincus and Richard Leiby of the WaPo reported that

A senior administration official said yesterday that Wilson's mission originated within the CIA's clandestine service...

Novak stood by his claim that Armitage specifically said that Ms. Plame "worked in the CIA’s Counter-Proliferation Division".

How Armitage would have known that is not clear - the CPD connection was not specifically noted in the INR memo.  On the other hand, Armitage has a telephone and lots of Washington connections.

I'd Rather Be Lucky Than Good

Inspired, no doubt, by the timeless wisdom of well-known socialist "Lefty" Gomez, and prompted by John Kerry's promise to engage in coast-to-coast ass-kicking, the BumperStickerist explains why he backed Bush in 2004:

I finally admitted to a liberal friend the obvious truth - I voted for Bush because he's both pure evil *and* the luckiest bastard on the face of the earth. I mean, seriously, look at just a couple key events:

Bush joins the Texas ANG - Kerry joins the Navy Reserves.

Bush completes TANG training for jets, flies jets, volunteers for Vietnam only to be told that the pilot skills he has aren't needed.

Kerry joins the Swift Boats at time they were patrolling off coas - the duty changes to river patrolling, Kerry gets shot at by people intent on killing him and his crew. Kerry leaves by choice after three months.

Advantage: Bush

Bush skates through the last two years of his TANG duty, but does so with such foresight as to bury almost all traces of his duty record leaving only notes from a dental record exam.

Kerry works as an admirals aide for the balance of his active duty stint - but manages to get caught on tape during a meeting where assassination is discussed, travels to Vietnam while on Reserve status to meet with the enemy, has his Silver Star citation ammended twice times, publishes an anti-war book that's later debunked.

Advantage:  Bush

Bush:  Sat for 6.5 minutes after hearing about the 9/11 attacks in a room with a bunch of kids, a teacher, and a camera crew.

Kerry:  Sat for an hour, stunned to the point of inaction, in a room full of adult elected officials with no camera present.

Advantage:  Bush

Bush: Able to surround himself with a cadre of people able to engineer election fraud on a massive scale in Democratic-controlled precincts undetected, destroy two huge buildings in the middle of a major US city without any actual, you know, evidence left behind, destroy our basic Constitutional rights in pursuit of his neocon vision of a Unitary Executive and still have the energy to clear brush from his ranch while on vacation.

Kerry:  Can't get the balloons to release on cue.

Advantage:  Bush

There comes a point where you just marvel at the timing of events in favor of Bush and the way the Democrats clusterfuck their way through life and decide 'fuck it - Bush'

Seriously, if the Left can't defeat the Evil that is Bush, how the hell can they be trusted to defeat actual Evil?

Go, Balloons!  And Go, Tall John!

After The 'Spinal Cord-ectomy'

What sort of press coverage might a person expect if they show no sign at all of possessing a backbone?  If you are a Senate Democrat, the NY Times will be kind - here we go with the Times coverage of Bush's push to pass legislation to allow warrantless eavesdropping and to create new military tribunals for terrorists.

Panel in Senate Backs Bush Plan for Eavesdropping

By ERIC LICHTBLAU  and KATE ZERNIKE

WASHINGTON, Sept. 13 — The White House took a critical step on Wednesday in its effort to get Congressional blessing for President Bush’s domestic eavesdropping program, but it ran into increasingly fierce resistance from leading Republicans over its plan to try terror suspects being held in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

The mixed results signaled the tough road the White House faces in trying to sell the two key planks in its national security agenda to sometimes skeptical Congressional Republicans less than two months before the midterm elections.

Democrats have allowed Republicans to fight among themselves over the issues, and appear willing to allow the issues to come to a vote rather than risk charges of political obstructionism in an election season.

    So, Democrats finally appear in the third paragraph, with a bold strategy for demonstrating their readiness to lead the nation in war-time - let the Republicans sort it out.  We get more after a big skip:

But negotiations between Capitol Hill and the White House [on the military tribunals] broke down as three Republican senators crucial to passage of the legislation hardened their stance against a White House plan that would reinterpret a main provision of the Geneva Conventions.

...

The White House political strategy in the past week has been twofold: first, putting Mr. Bush in the public spotlight with a string of national security speeches, and now, trying to put Democrats in a box by forcing them to take a stand and vote on Mr. Bush’s authority to run two of his most controversial antiterror programs.

But Senators Warner, McCain and Graham appeared to be providing cover for the Democrats, allowing them to stay on the sidelines while the three senators, respected Republicans with distinguished military records, take on the White House.

“We think that this is a sincere effort, based on principle, by Senators Warner, McCain and Graham, to come up with the best legislation they can,” said Senator Jack Reed, Democrat of Rhode Island and a member of the Armed Services Committee.

Asked whether Democrats were worried that the Republicans might yield to the White House, Mr. Reed said: “I haven’t seen any evidence of that yet. What I’ve seen is that they’re approaching this looking at the substance, not just over weeks and months, but what’s in the best interests of the United States, what’s in the best interests of American military personnel who might years from now be held.”

That is a strong message from Mr. Reed - Democrats are willing to be led by these Republicans but not those Republicans.

The administration had also faced resistance over the N.S.A. wiretapping program. The Democrats had bottled up the administration’s proposals, saying Congress was being forced to legislate “in the dark” about a secret program that few members had been briefed on. They have repeatedly used procedural maneuvers to block the proposals from coming to a vote in the Judiciary Committee, drawing accusations of obstructionism from Republicans.

But Democrats, who appeared to realize the risk of being accused of thwarting debate on national security matters, did not stand in the way of the committee vote on Wednesday.

There may have been a deal here, although the Times does not state that:

Democrats claimed a partial victory on the wiretapping issue when they won Judiciary Committee approval of another measure that could effectively ban the security agency’s eavesdropping program.

That plan, drafted by Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, would affirm that the foreign intelligence law passed by Congress in 1978, requiring court approval for eavesdropping, as the “exclusive” means of authorizing wiretaps in the United States against suspected terrorists and spies.

Democrats succeeded in getting two Republican moderates, Mr. Specter and Mr. Graham, both of whom had voiced concerns over the legal aspects of the wiretapping program, to vote in favor of the proposal and send it to the full Senate.

That set the stage for the unusual spectacle of the Judiciary Committee — and its chairman — supporting two proposals that many lawmakers said would effectively nullify each other if passed.

The fundamental problem faced by the Dems is obvious - their base supports positions that are not electable, or at least, the Dems are afraid to find out.

Evidently, Reps are not concerned that support for warrantless eavesdropping will carry an electoral penalty.

Armitage: I Don't Remember What I Said, But Novak Is Wrong

Richard Armitage and Robert Novak continue the feud that erupted with Novak's column yesterday in which Novak said that Armitage's recent public statement had "obscured" the truth.  Armitage fired back in the WaPo, but delivered a comedy classic.  Bear with me - it is highlighted near the end of the excerpt:

In his initial July 14, 2003, column, Novak wrote that Wilson "never worked for the CIA, but his wife, Valerie Plame, is an agency operative on weapons of mass destruction." Novak also wrote that "two senior administration officials told me his wife suggested sending Wilson to Niger to investigate."

Novak did not identify his sources, but Armitage admitted publicly for the first time last week that he was one. White House political adviser Karl Rove earlier confirmed he was the other.

In confirming his role, Armitage said his disclosure to Novak was done in an offhand way. At the end of their conversation, "Novak asked me, 'Hey, why did the CIA send Mr. Wilson to Niger?' I said, 'I don't know, but I think his wife worked out there,' " Armitage said.

...

But Novak says in today's column that Armitage's statements "obscured what he really did" and that "Armitage did not, as he now indicates, merely pass on something he had heard and that he 'thought' might be so. Rather, he identified to me the CIA division where Mrs. Wilson worked and said flatly that she recommended the mission to Niger by her husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson."

Novak said further that "Armitage did not slip me this information as idle chitchat. . . . He made clear that he considered it especially suited for my column." In an interview, Novak said that Armitage effectively described it as stock, Washington-insider information of the sort that often appeared in the column.

Armitage, in reply, said his disclosure to Novak was inadvertent and noted that Novak himself described it as "offhand" in an Oct. 1, 2003, column. Armitage said he could not recall whether he identified the CIA division where Wilson's wife worked. He added that he rejects any suggestion he was deliberately trying to plant the information, explaining that "I had no reason to wish him [Wilson] any ill" and that Wilson "was simply verifying what had already been reported [about Iraq] through State channels."

Well, Novak says that Armitage told him where Ms. Plame works, and Armitage can't remember.  Pretty compelling.  of course, Armitage had mentioned Ms. Plame's job function to Woodward, describing her as working "for the CIA on weapons of mass destruction as a WMD analyst."

That differs from the description given by Novak as "in the CIA’s Counter-Proliferation Division", but it certainly suggests that Armitage was not shy about providing a description.

GROAN:  Spell Check is working fine; Brain Check, not so much - The post title has been supplemented to read "Armitage: I Don't Remember...", as per the author's original intent.

Losers For Lamont

Jimmy Carter hopes Lieberman loses.  Lieberman knows Carter lost.

When you are getting advice from Jimmy Carter on how to promote the image of a Strong America...

He Knows Where To Find Us

Speaking to the New Hampshire Examiner as part of their "Meet The Candidates" series John Kerry promises to deal manfully and vigorously with the Swift Boat Veterans:

Asked if he dreads the prospect of being “Swift-Boated” all over again, Kerry counters that he would relish such a fight.

“I’m prepared to kick their ass from one end of America to the other,” he declares. “I am so confident of my abilities to address that and to demolish it and to even turn it into a positive.”

John O'Neill responded sensibly [and in this column]:

Kerry’s tough talk triggers laughter from John O’Neill, a fellow Vietnam veteran who helped found Swift Boat Veterans for the Truth and wrote a blistering 2004 book on Kerry, “Unfit for Command.”

“Well, he’s got eight times as much time to prepare for us as he spent in Vietnam,” says O’Neill, referring to Kerry’s short tour of duty.

Will John Kerry hold the Tough Guy pose until 2008?  Please - John has as many personas to try on before the Iowa caucuses as Teresa has scarves.

Meanwhile, the last we heard on this topic was an absurd Times puffer by Kate Zernike.  We cited a specific error here, and noted many other open questions about Kerry's Swift Boat service; perhaps he will take a break from his ass-kicking to clear up a few simple points:

(1)  Will he ever, ever, pretty please sign a non-restricted 180 disclosure form so that John Q. Public can get access to his military record?  Where we stand now is that Kerry has signed a 180 authorizing release only to some friendly media.  What kind of ass-kicking is that?  C'mon John, bring it on!

(2) Where oh where are Kerry's "War Notes", Kerry's diary and collection of letters which formed the basis for the Brinkley "Tour of Duty" book?  I hope Kerry is not planning to kick our asses while keeping that secret - surely the press won't allow that sort of selective non-disclosure, will they?

If I could pick one issue on which to see some documentation it would be Kerry's first Purple Heart.  Two of the Band of Brothers, Zaladonis and Runyon, back up Kerry's account of the incident, described by Runyon as tthe scariest night of his life.  However, press accounts do not make this link until early 2004 (I recall a February story, but can link to an April one).

Yet oddly, Zaladonis said nothing about this to Douglas Brinkley when he was interviewed (repeatedly) for Brinkley's book back in (I presume) 2003.  Zaladonis sailed on PCF-44, Kerry's first boat, just a few days later, yet he never mentioned his first encounter with Kerry, where Kerry had his first combat and earned his first medal.  That is some odd memory by Zaladonis and quite a ghastly interview technique by Brinkley.  (What did Brinkley ask, anyway - "Tell me about the second time you first met John Kerry?  Do you remember any dramatic events other than ones that led to medals?).

Also oddly, Brinkley makes no reference whatsoever to Kerry's War Notes to recreate the night of Kerry's first combat and first Purple Heart.  One might have thought Kerry would have jotted down a few thoughts, or maybe even mentioned who was with him that night.

Well.  Presumably this will all come out in the ass-kicking.

I have no doubt that Kerry's remaining admirers thrill to his manly talk, but his only hope is that media such as the Times remain firmly in the tank for him.  And that is not a bad strategy, since at this point, it may very well serve their interest to do so.  For example, almost any Times follow-up on the Swift story would reveal Ms. Zernike to have prepared a flawed, uncorrected story, and would further reveal that the Times gave short shrift to a legitimate series of stories during the election campaign; better for the Times to continue to pretend this is a non-story.

My guess - the most logical explanation for Kerry's ongoing non-disclosure is that the facts are against him.  Consequently he will try to deliver just enough that his cheerleaders in the media can pretend that the Swift Boat Veterans have been rebutted.  However, the  Times and others will not apply any investigatory muscle, in order to paper over their past non-coverage.  "Nothing to see here, move on".  Dot Org.

MORE:  Look, the Times will never correct that old Zernike piece, and I wasted pixels writing to the public editor a while back, but...  public@nytimes.com

NSA Legislation Advances

The Senate Judiciary Committee voted out the Specter compromise with the White House on legislation covering the NSA warrantless wiretap program.

The coverage of the Times and WaPo are strikingly different.  The Times leads with a description of an innocuous compromise under which the courts will review the program:

Democratic Effort to Limit Surveillance Bill Is Blocked

WASHINGTON, Sept. 13 — The Senate Judiciary Committee today endorsed a bill backed by the White House to have a secret court review the constitutionality of the Bush administration’s eavesdropping program.

By a party-line vote of 10 to 8, the committee sent the bill to the Senate floor, where a vote could come next week. The bill embodies an agreement reached by President Bush and the committee chairman, Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, under which the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court would review the eavesdropping program.

The WaPo leads with a dimmer view of the court's role:

Senate Committee Approves Wiretap Legislation

By Bill Brubaker

Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, September 13, 2006; 5:24 PM

A Senate committee today approved a bill supported by President Bush that would enable the administration to continue a warrantless wiretapping program that the White House launched after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

The approval came after Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee blocked an amendment by Democrats that would have limited Bush's eavesdropping program and required the National Security Agency to report more often to Congress on its surveillance activities.

Democrats say the bill approved by the committee would expand -- as well as legalize -- Bush's authority to monitor terrorism suspects.

The NY Times (but not the WaPo) note that Republicans Specter and Graham switched sides to vote out a competing bill from Dianne Feinstein:

Senator Feinstein offered a competing measure that would reaffirm the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act as the “exclusive” means by which wiretapping could be ordered in intelligence cases. Her measure, backed by all eight panel Democrats plus Mr. Specter and Senator Lindsey O. Graham, Republican of South Carolina, would seem incompatible with the Specter-White House agreement, even though Mr. Specter voted for Ms. Feinstein’s measure so it can be debated on the floor.

It's hard to guess at Specter's strategy here, but here is a quick, utterly uninformed hunch - Specter has worked out a compromise with Ms. Feinstein under which he has agreed to send her bill to the floor in exchange for a "no-filibuster" agreement.  I should note that I have no idea whether this is the type of bill which *can* be filibustered.

MORE:  The ACLU is outraged.

It's Just A Flesh Wound

Here is a great headline from the "Alternative Reality-Based Community" on the impending demise of Air America:

Air America To Declare Bankruptcy, But Progressive Radio Remains Strong

Progressive radio - the strong, silent type.

From the linked post:

The right wing is sure to seize on Air America’s financial woes as a sign that progressive talk radio is unpopular.

Call us unimaginative...

One might have thought that the same tsuanmi of voter anger that is going to sweep away the Republican Perty and all its works this fall might have prompted a few people to tune in.  But perhaps the problems were more technical - reception is difficult in some areas, apparently, and not everyone looked good in the required reception-enhancement device.

What's the frequency, Kenneth?

MORE:  The Ace of Spades enters the headline derby with:

Air America Files For Chapter 19, Combined Financial & Intellectual Bankruptcy

The Wilsons' Civil Suit Against Evil Dick Cheney et al

The Media Blog has links to the Wilsons' amended complaint (now including Richard Armitage!), a flashback to Lawrence O'Donnell expressing doubt about the viability of the lawsuit, and more.

Novak: Armitage Interviews "Obscured" The Truth

Matt Drudge sneak previews the next Bob Novak column, due out tomorrow (Thursday) [due tomorrow but arriving today!]:

"When Richard Armitage finally acknowledged last week he was my source three years ago in revealing Valerie Plame Wilson as a CIA employee, the former deputy secretary of state's interviews obscured what he really did," Bob Novak claims in a column set for Thursday release.

Novak, attempting to set the record straight, writes: "First, Armitage did not, as he now indicates, merely pass on something he had heard and that he 'thought' might be so. Rather, he identified to me the CIA division where Mrs. Wilson worked, and said flatly that she recommended the mission to Niger by her husband, former Amb. Joseph Wilson. Second, Armitage did not slip me this information as idle chitchat, as he now suggests. He made clear he considered it especially suited for my column."

Novak slams Armitage for holding back all this time.

Armitage's silence for "two and one-half years caused intense pain for his colleagues in government and enabled partisan Democrats in Congress to falsely accuse Rove of being my primary source," Novak explains.

"When Armitage now says he was mute because of special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald's request, that does not explain his silent three months between his claimed first realization that he was the source and Fitzgerald's appointment on Dec. 30. Armitage's tardy self-disclosure is tainted because it is deceptive."

For what it's worth, we believe Drudge has access to this because we believe that wire-service columns go out early so the subscribing newspapers can set them up.  For example, Novak's July 14, 2003 column "outing" Ms. Plame went on the wire on July 11.

So, where are we?  Well, various commentators, including myself, noted that Armitage had not exactly been forthcoming about his chat with Woodward or much else in this case, so there was reason to take his story with a grain of salt.  This was Armitage's account as described by CBS:

"At the end of a wide-ranging interview he asked me, 'Why did the CIA send Ambassador (Wilson) to Africa?' I said I didn't know, but that she worked out at the agency," Armitage says.

Armitage says he told Novak because it was "just an offhand question." "I didn't put any big import on it and I just answered and it was the last question we had," he says.

Armitage adds that while the document was classified, "it doesn't mean that every sentence in the document is classified.

"I had never seen a covered agent's name in any memo in, I think, 28 years of government," he says.

He adds that he thinks he referred to Wilson's wife as such, or possibly as "Mrs. Wilson." He never referred to her as Valerie Plame, he adds.

"I didn't know the woman's name was Plame. I didn't know she was an operative," he says.

Skeptics noted that what Armitage claims he told Novak is much less than what Novak reported - for example, Armitage does not even admit telling Novak that Ms. Plame was involved in arranging Ambassador Wilson's trip to Niger.  Where, people wondered, did Novak learn that - some undisclosed third source, from a chattier Karl Rove than either Novak or Rove described, or what?

On the other hand, Novak had an odd encounter on the sidewalk on July 8 with a stranger who tuned out to be a friend of Joe Wilson's.  The two struck up a conversation, the stranger  asked about Niger and Wilson, and Novak said (per Joe Wilson's book), "Wilson's an asshole. The CIA sent him. His wife, Valerie, works for the CIA. She's a weapons of mass destruction specialist. She sent him."

OK, that was on July 8; per other reporting, Rove and Novak exchanged phone calls on the 8th but only talked on the 9th.  So how did Novak know on the 8th that Ms. Plame was a WMD specialist who sent her hubby to Niger?  *IF* Armitage really only mentioned that "she worked out at the agency", Novak would have to be psychic (in which case his vast powers have been underutilized over the many years) or he would have to have another mystery source.

On the other hand, if Armitage told Novak that Ms. Plame worked in the Directorate of Operations and was involved in sending her hubby, as Novak asserts, then the question of what did Novak know and how did he know it is nearly answered.

However... how did Armitage know that Ms. Plame was in the Directorate of Operations, which is the branch that has the covert operatives (although not everyone there is covert)? 

Armitage claimed that he learned about Ms. Plame from the INR memo (.pdf file thanks to Josh Gerstein and the NY Sun), which mentioned her in just one sentence as a "CIA WMD manager".  Why did Armitage place her in the Directorate of Operations and not in WINPAC, which also has WMD specialist and, we presume, managers?  A lucky guess?

My guess is that someone does have a mystery source here.  I would be surprised if Bob Novak had not called one of his CIA contacts to probe the Wilson story - if everyone was telling him that Wilson was sent by the CIA, why wouldn't he call over there?

On the other hand, I don't mind the idea that Armitage, who has been in Washington a long time, has some long-time friends at the CIA and had a background chat with one of them.  Senior people were asking about the Wilson trip and Armitage's underlings were telling him the INR was not involved - is it utterly implausible that Armitage called a CIA buddy of his to double-check? 

Well - Novak says Armitage told him Ms. Plame was in the DO, even though Armitage could not have learned that from the INR memo.  I suppose that calling someone in the DO an "operative" would be consistent with Novak's usage in his famous column:

Wilson never worked for the CIA, but his wife, Valerie Plame, is an Agency operative on weapons of mass destruction. Two senior administration officials told me Wilson's wife suggested sending him to Niger to investigate the Italian report. The CIA says its counter-proliferation officials selected Wilson and asked his wife to contact him.

Compounding the mystery - On July 8 Andrea Mitchell claimed that CIA sources told her that the Wilson trip was arranged by "some of the covert operatives in the CIA at a very low level".

And on July 6, Walter Pincus and Richard Leiby of the WaPo reported that

A senior administration official said yesterday that Wilson's mission originated within the CIA's clandestine service...

I would think that "the clandestine service" meant Directorate of Operations rather than WINPAC.  The point is, the notion that the Wilson trip was arranged by the DO was not, apparently, a big secret on July 8, and the use of the word "operative" was not unique to Novak.

My Big Finish - I have never thought the Armitage story was complete and accurate, so the Novak column does not shock me.  And I DO NOT think Novak is coming forward simply to protect Rove or someone else - Fitzgerald has the testimony he has and this column won't change that; in the court of public opinion this case has been dismissed due to lack of interest.

I think Novak is coming forwards because he is peeved with Armitage and thinks he is being a weasel on this story.  (And when the Prince of Darkness questions your integrity, that is getting down there...)

"NAME" GAME ASIDE:  *IF* Armitage called a CIA crony that could explain where the name "Plame" came from - she is referred to as "Valerie Wilson" in the INR memo but someone who knew her before she was married might well remember her as "Plame".  That said, in his interview Armitage denied using the "Plame" name and Novak does not contradict him (in this Drudge excerpt, anyway).

Novak claimed he relied on "Who's Who when he explained this last summer but that explanation has not really satisfied people.

Finally, Judy Miller had "Valerie Flame" in her notebook, probably from another source:

Mr. Fitzgerald asked me about another entry in my notebook, where I had written the words ''Valerie Flame,'' clearly a reference to Ms. Plame. Mr. Fitzgerald wanted to know whether the entry was based on my conversations with Mr. Libby. I said I didn't think so. I said I believed the information came from another source, whom I could not recall.

Mr. Fitzgerald asked if I could recall discussing the Wilson-Plame connection with other sources. I said I had, though I could not recall any by name or when those conversations occurred.

I am confident there are sources out there that Fitzgerald never identified.  Since he was focusing his search on the White House, that is not surprising - Fitzgerald did seem to be investigating "Did the White House conspire to out Ms. Plame?", rather than "Who outed Ms. Plame?"

UPDATE:  Armitage pisses back, via the WaPo:

Armitage, in an interview yesterday, said he stood by his account and disputed Novak's.

...In confirming his role, Armitage said his disclosure to Novak was done in an offhand way. At the end of their conversation, "Novak asked me, 'Hey, why did the CIA send Mr. Wilson to Niger?' I said, 'I don't know, but I think his wife worked out there,' " Armitage said.

...But Novak says in today's column that Armitage's statements "obscured what he really did" and that "Armitage did not, as he now indicates, merely pass on something he had heard and that he 'thought' might be so. Rather, he identified to me the CIA division where Mrs. Wilson worked and said flatly that she recommended the mission to Niger by her husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson."

And now the comedy bit:

Armitage said he could not recall whether he identified the CIA division where Wilson's wife worked.

He can't remember, but Novak is wrong!

 

More fun:

Lobbyist Ken Duberstein, a friend of Armitage who helped arrange Novak's meeting with him, said yesterday that Armitage's account precisely matches what Armitage told him in October 2003.

Matches precisely!  And Mr. Duberstein is certain about this three-year old conversation because he has notes and a tape-recording!  Please, I'm begging now - give me a break.

Truth Puts Its Boots On (Hitchens Helps)

The last time we checked in Christopher Hitchens was tackling the notion that Bush lied and Joe Wilson told the heroic truth about his mission to Niger in search of Iraqi interest in uranium.

Now Hitchens is going after another of the left's greatest hits: Ari Fleischer's infamous comment that "all Americans that they need to watch what they say, watch what they do":

And there it was again, in Frank Rich's  column (TimesSelect subscription required) in the New York Times of Sunday, Sept. 10, recalling the alleged pall of fear that fell over Americans five years ago this month:

The presidential press secretary, Ari Fleischer, condemned Bill Maher's irreverent comic response to 9/11 by reminding "all Americans that they need to watch what they say, watch what they do." Fear itself—the fear that "paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance," as FDR had it—was already being wielded as a weapon against Americans by their own government.

I have been meaning to put this pathetic canard out of its misery for some time now, and this week seems as good a time as any.

Putting the canard out of its misery is really just a matter of checking the transcript or reading Fleischer's letter to the NY Times, but Hitch manages to do so with his accustomed flair.

If folks would care to suggest a few more classic bit of mis-remembering or opportunistic misunderstanding by the Dems, that might make for some interesting comments.  Maybe we can predict Hitch's next target (or Maureen Dowd's next column... or not.)

I UNDERSTAND EVERYTHING BUT WHY A DUCK?  What is it about "canards" that makes folks want to end their misery?  Something they quacked?  Something they didn't quack?

Troubling.  Where is PETA on this?

Ramesh Ponnuru Hefts The White Towel - And Likes It!

Ramesh Ponnuru of NRO, writing as a guest of the NYTimes op-ed page, is not quite ready to throw in the towel on the prospects of the Republican's holding onto the House of Representatives this November.

However, in assessing the implications and likely consequences of a Republican defeat, he opines that it would not be such a bad thing for conservatives.  Briefly, (a) the Senate, which he expects the Republicans to hold, will continue to control judicial confirmations; (b) the House Republicans have focused on pork in order to maintain their majority and may view a defeat as the wake-up that sends them back to their conservative roots;  (c) empowering the angry, embittered left and putting them on public display could be great advertising for the Reps; and (d) Republicans running for President in 2008 can run against Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and blame all of the ills of the country on her - blaming the Dems will be trickier if the Reps control everything (but where there's a will there's a way!).  A snippet:

So the policy tradeoffs for Republicans are not especially troubling. They would still be able to set foreign policy and appoint judges. They would be blocked only from making domestic-policy reforms they show no sign of attempting anyway.

Ramesh is a bit gloomy - maybe both Iraq and the economy will be going swimmingly by 2008.  Maybe.  But somehow I don't think it is the economy that is worrying Ramesh, although I may be simply projecting.

Arkansas Governor and Presidential wanna-be Mike Huckabee has his own thoughts on the pros and cons of a Republican drubbing in 2006:

Gov. Mike Huckabee says his prospects for winning the Republican presidential nomination in 2008 might actually improve if his own party takes a beating in the 2006 midterm elections.

“Will it be a wake-up call to our party, that we’re going to have to retool the message — not the principles — but the message?” Huckabee muses in an interview with The Examiner. “And will the party start looking for new voices, the ones that aren’t so already established?

“If so, then a guy like me may have a moment,” he adds. “If they say, ‘Well, it’s just McCain’s turn,’ well OK. But I don’t think we’re going to go there.”

Although some polls suggest Sen. John McCain is the early front-runner in the GOP presidential sweepstakes, Huckabee says the Arizona maverick should not start measuring the Oval Office for drapes just yet.

“I have a hard time seeing him being elected president, just because I think, at times, some of his views have alienated very important segments of the Republican Party,” Huckabee says. “I’m not sure he can mend the fences with the evangelical wing of the party, the pro-life part of the party.”

Shall we segue to some McCain-bashing?  McCain is a great American with an admirable personal biography, but can he be nominated while evangelicals distrust him and other conservatives always remember that he put the "McCain" in "McCain-Feingold"?

UPDATE:  From "tristero" at Hullabaloo:

"Conservatives" Will Benefit If Democrats Win The House

Yes, and I hope they keep benefitting by losing the Senate. It builds character, trust me.

Character, or characters?  Groan - I don't want to be rebuilt.

Libertarians At War (With Each Other)

Glenn Reynolds links to Steven Green, who argues that the war against Islamofascism is more fraught with peril than the Cold War:

With the one tiny (and farfetched) possibility of instant and total nuclear annihilation, the stakes today are much, much higher than they ever were during the Cold War.

On the other hand, John Tierney, libertarian columnist for the NY Times, thinks that, although it made sense for Osama Bin Laden to market his jihad in apocalyptic terms, it was foolish for Bush to play along (other than for political advantage - yes, this column represents, for Tierney, a real Bush-basher, so I'll excerpt a lot for the non-Times Select crowd out there.)

Somewhere, Osama bin Laden must be smiling. Or at least he will be whenever his couriers deliver the next batch of press clippings.

Once again he has beaten America at an American game: public relations. He may be sitting powerlessly in a cave, but his image is as scary as ever. He doesn’t even have to cut a new video. He released an old one last week, the equivalent of a fading musician putting out a greatest-hits album, only this one’s getting played every hour.

Last night, President Bush paid him homage by quoting his warning that America will face “defeat and disgrace forever” it if loses in Iraq. Bush himself called the war on terror a “struggle for civilization,” and said it was essential to ”maintain the way of life enjoyed by free nations.”

It was just the kind of apocalyptic language favored by bin Laden, except that, for all his delusions, he might realize that American civilization is not really in jeopardy. Americans can try to copy him, but they don’t understand his rhetorical technique.

They continually misinterpret his equine theory of international relations: “When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature, they will like the strong horse.” This is supposedly a reason America was attacked on Sept. 11 — it was perceived as weak for failing to respond to Al Qaeda’s earlier attacks — and why it can’t leave Iraq.

...

But bin Laden knows something else the Bush administration hasn’t figured out: You don’t actually have to be the strong horse. You just have to look stronger. You can be weak, you can be pummeled in a fight, but as long as your opponent looks more scared than you, you can save face by simply declaring victory.

As an act of war, the attack on Sept. 11 was a blunder by Al Qaeda, and not merely because of the counterattack that destroyed Al Qaeda’s training camps and ousted the Taliban. It also alienated former jihadist allies in the Arab world, and caused a rift within Al Qaeda.

One of its senior members, Abu al-Walid al-Masri, broke with bin Laden and accused him of having an “extreme infatuation” with international publicity. The attack, as Fawaz Gerges notes in Foreign Policy magazine, demonstrated that “bin Laden was prepared to sacrifice Afghanistan and Mullah Omar at the altar of his public relations campaign.”

But at least bin Laden knew his P.R. Al Qaeda wasn’t a serious military threat to America, but it could play one on television. As Al Qaeda’s losses mounted and America recovered from the attack, bin Laden and his cohorts didn’t let the facts get in the way of their campaign to promote fear (and themselves). They hid in caves and proclaimed themselves champions.

America, meanwhile, accentuated the negative. Instead of declaring victory against terrorists after routing the Taliban and sending bin Laden into hiding, it invaded Iraq, reinvigorating Al Qaeda with a new tool for recruiting. Instead of putting the terrorist risk in perspective, Bush (with the full cooperation of Democrats and the press) set an impossible standard for making America safe.

“We’re on the offense against the terrorists on every battlefront,” Bush said last week, “and we’ll accept nothing less than complete victory.”

When you define victory that way, when you treat one attack from a disorganized band of fanatics as a menace to civilization, you’ve doomed yourself to defeat and caused more damage than they could. You can’t completely stop terrorism, but you can scare people into giving up liberties, wasting huge sums of money and sacrificing more lives than would be lost in a terrorist attack.

My interpretation of the Tierney Strategy - as a nation we should keep our eye on the threat but not scream about it.  As an example, could George Bush have gotten expanded wiretapping authority from Congress without hyping the terror threat?  Who knows or cares?  Bush operated under Executive authority there, with Guantanamo, and in many other ways.  But I'll wager he could have calmly gotten authorization from Congress even with a bit less of the apocalypse now in his rhetoric.

Since Glenn also links to James Joyner, let's put him in the mix as thinking the Cold War was more dangerous:

There’s a minor problem, though, with the argument: It is simply inconceivable that the Islamists will defeat us militarily, let alone impose their culture on us. As scary as Bin Laden and company are, they are not going to amass an arsenal of nuclear weapons capable of annihiliting the planet many times over.

In hindsight, the only way we’d have lost to the Soviets was through nuclear holocaust. They were simply no match for us in the things that matter in conventional war, a strong economy and a highly trained, technologically advanced force. But that actually made threat of a war between the two superpowers excalating to a nuclear conflagration a near certainty if war ignited.

For myself - the Cold War was more dangerous.  From a PR perspective, America could have been well-served by delivering a tub-thumping in Afghanistan, trumpeting our victory, and then quietly maintaining a high level of vigilance.

Invading Iraq and transforming it into a stable democracy also represented a way to advance America's strategic interests.  However, invading Iraq with a half-assed non-plan that results in confusion and limbo was probably not be the way to move America, or freedom, forward.

Too Few Troops In Anbar

The NY Times rehashes yesterday's WaPo coverage of a Marine Corps report from Anbar Province in Iraq.  The WaPo has more today.

From the Times:

The political and security situation in western Iraq is grim and will continue to deteriorate unless the region receives a major infusion of aid and a division is sent to reinforce the American troops operating there, according to the senior Marine intelligence officer in Iraq.

The assessment, prepared last month by Col. Peter Devlin at the Marine headquarters in Anbar Province, has been sent to senior military officials in Iraq and at the Pentagon.

...

Marine commanders have been mounting a campaign to secure the province in the face of a virulent insurgency. But they have had to cope with seriously short-handed Iraqi Army units and a Shiite-dominated government in Baghdad that has tended to view the area as a low priority for government spending and programs.

Elements of the assessment were reported Monday in The Washington Post. Military officials familiar with the document disclosed additional material and provided several quotations from the assessment.

One factor that has hampered the American counterinsurgency effort has been the limited number of American troops. As a general rule, a substantial number of troops are required in a counterinsurgency campaign to protect the population from attacks and intimidation by insurgent groups.

There are about 30,000 marines, soldiers, airmen and sailors in Anbar, a region that borders Syria, Jordan and Saudi Arabia and is roughly the size of Louisiana.

American forces can generally maneuver where they want and are fighting to regain control of Ramadi, the provincial capital, neighborhood by neighborhood. But there are areas of the province where the Americans have not established a persistent presence, the assessment says.     

Macranger has an email from the Pentagon providing backspin.

UPDATE:  The Wednesday Times digests the Pentagon push-back and burps up with this:

Grim Report Out of Anbar Is Disputed by General

  

By MICHAEL R. GORDON

 

WASHINGTON, Sept. 12 — The senior Marine commander in Iraq said Tuesday that he had sufficient forces to carry out his mission but that the mission did not include defeating the insurgency.

   

Ouch.  Unfortunately, they have the quotes to back up their lead:

“For what we are trying to achieve out here I think our force levels are about right,” said Maj. Gen. Richard C. Zilmer, who defined his primary mission as training the Iraqi forces who ultimately would be responsible for security in the area.

“Now, if that mission statement changes — if there is seen a larger role for coalition forces out here to win that insurgency fight — then that is going to change the metrics of what we need out here,” General Zilmer added.

The Marine general commands a force of 30,000 troops who are charged with securing Anbar Province, a vast region in western Iraq that borders Syria, Jordan and Saudi Arabia. He spoke to reporters in a telephone interview from his headquarters at Camp Falluja.

...

The classified intelligence assessment, according to military officials familiar with it, also said that the region would continue to deteriorate unless there was an infusion of aid and a division was sent to reinforce General Zilmer’s command, known as MNF-W, for Multinational Force-West.

In his telephone discussion with reporters, General Zilmer declined to discuss the specifics of the report but indicated that he agreed with the intelligence assessment.

At the same time, he insisted that the United States was winning the war, while acknowledging that the effort was hampered by sectarian differences and the belief among Iraqis in Anbar that the Baghdad-based government was not meeting their needs.

“Until those things change, until those long-term effects are realized, then trying to solve the insurgency out here is going to be problematic,” he said.

General Zilmer said that sending additional American troops would help in the short run, but was not the key to “achieve long-term security and stability out here in Anbar” because that ultimately depended on the Iraqis.

The general’s comments contrasted with those of some of his subordinate officers in the field. Regimental Combat Team 7, which reports to General Zilmer, has recommended that additional forces be deployed in its sector, its officers have said.

The general’s account of his mission — training Iraqi forces — was also a narrow one.

President Bush has suggested an expansive strategy to achieve victory by using American forces to clear contested towns of insurgents, holding them with Iraqi security forces and then spending funds to rebuild the infrastructure and win the support of the Iraqi people.

Gasoline Watch

USA Today follows their story of late August by headlining a continued drop in gasoline prices:

Gasoline prices continue to tumble, almost free-falling toward levels not seen in five months.

The nationwide average for regular was $2.618 a gallon, the Energy Information Administration reported Monday. That was 10.9 cents lower than a week earlier.

"The reason prices are going down so far so fast is that they shouldn't have been that high in the first place. Two reasons they were: fear and speculation," says Mike O'Connor, president of the Virginia Petroleum, Convenience and Grocery Association. It represents gasoline distributors who operate about 4,000 stations.

O'Connor says $2 gasoline "is more likely than unlikely" if the Gulf of Mexico isn't hit by hurricanes and if there isn't a flare-up of tensions in oil-producing regions.

The monthly DOE energy outlook suggests that the big plunge is behind us:

August began with a surge in oil prices, as BP Oil Company announced a reduction in oil production from Alaska’s Prudhoe Bay.  However, August ended with falling oil prices, led by the earlier-than-expected seasonal decline in gasoline prices.

The average retail price of regular motor gasoline fell from $3.04 per gallon on August 7, 2006, to $2.62 per gallon on September 11, 2006, and is expected to fall to an average of $2.55 per gallon in January 2007 before rising again into next summer.

Here is a cool chart, too.         

Captain Ed reminds us that falling gasoline prices probably won't fit neatly into the Dem playbook for this November.  I had pointed out last week that the Times was sliding right past that.

And FWIW, October gasoline futures closed at $1.59/gal; November was at $1.63.  That also suggests the big drop is behind us.

The Path To Tedium

I watched ABC's controversial "Path to 9/11" last night.  Well, I watched parts of it - I tuned in late because I had the silly idea that "The Path to 9/11' would be aired from, well, 9 to 11; check your local listings.

The 'docudrama' did not exactly hold my interest, although others surely found the endless third World vistas fascinating - my personal path to 9/11 took detours through Las Vegas (for the World Series of Poker) and Bristol, Connecticut (for some sports scores.)

But one thing was clear - there is a place for me in Hollywood as a writer for these big-time dramas!  Just for example, I did catch the BITTERLY CONTROVERSIAL scene where some CIA and Northern Alliance chaps are awaiting permission from Washington to go and whack Osama, and Sandy Berger freezes up and just stares at the phone rather than yelling "Green light!  Get Osama stat!"

Anyway, the Afghani leader of the Northern Alliance stares at his CIA counterpart and asks something like, "Are there no men left in Washington, or is everyone in your country a coward?".

To which the CIA contact did not reply, "I am afraid to answer that".

But he should have.

I can't wait for tonight.

Catching Osama

Mark Coffey has fun mocking the firedogs but I see the question is also burning at skippy and DKos - how could Bush have ever let Osama escape from Tora Bora, as reported by Dana Priest in today's WaPo?

Oh, please - I promised no more o' Tora Bora after the John Kerry's campaign tried to confuse hindsight with insight.  But as to the notion that if we had only committed more US troops at Tora Bora we could have bagged Osama, let me repeat this: Osama was a shrewd military tactician who was certainly capable of monitoring US troop movements and keeping an eye on his own back door.  He could have left Tora Bora at any time, and may simply have chosen to stay as long as he did because he was well aware that his escape route was being "blocked" by Afghan warlords whose commitment to the US was negotiable.

However, if Osama had seen US troops moving to close off his escape, he might very reasonably have chosen to withdraw sooner.

So fine - if we had changed our tactics and Osama had not responded by modifying his, we might have caught him.  What is the evidence that he is that stupid?  He did pretty well against the Russians and is doing OK so far against us.

And a last point to ponder - Tommy Franks, not George Bush, was in command of that battle in Afghanistan.  If Franks had been asking for more US troops and Bush had turned him down, that would be one thing.  As I read it, Franks went with what had been a winning plan up to then - US Special Forces supplementing Afghan warlords.  Following Tora Bora, Franks changed his approach, but there was no reason at the time to think that Bush should have overridden his man in command and insisted on a new approach.

This 2002 WaPo story is helpful, as is this CSM article which says Osama left Tora Bora in November, a notion which seems to be contradicted by the new report.  This old post has some links as well.

A BEAUTIFUL MILITARY MIND:  Paul Krugman, military strategist:

The path to this strategic defeat began with the failure to capture or kill bin Laden. Never mind the anti-Clinton hit piece, produced for ABC by a friend of Rush Limbaugh; there never was a clear shot at Osama before 9/11, let alone one rejected by Clinton officials. But there was a clear shot in December 2001, when Al Qaeda’s leader was trapped in the caves of Tora Bora. He made his escape because the Pentagon refused to use American ground troops to cut him off.

Interesting - economists routinely study game theory, where players adjust their moves and strategy in response to decisions made by other players.  I wonder if the Earnest Prof has realized that game theory and the analysis of strategic choices could be applied to military situations?  Coming soon - chess commentary from Krugman along the lines of "White's approach would have led to checkmate if only Black had stopped looking at he board and reacting appropriately".

As to his statement that "there never was a clear shot at Osama before 9/11, let alone one rejected by Clinton officials", something happened with the Sudan in 1996 when they expelled Osama.  This is from the final 9/11 Commission report (Ch 2, p 62-3):

In February 1996, Sudanese officials began approaching officials from the United States and other governments, asking what actions of theirs might ease the foreign pressure. In secret meetings with Saudi officials, Sudan offered to expel Bin Ladin to Saudi Arabia and asked the Saudis to pardon him. U.S. officials became aware of these secret discussions, certainly by March. Saudi officials apparently wanted Bin Ladin expelled from Sudan.  They had already revoked his citizenship, however, and would not tolerate his presence in their country.

And Bin Ladin may have no longer felt safe in Sudan, where he had already
escaped at least one assassination attempt that he believed to have been the work of the Egyptian or Saudi regimes, or both. In any case, on May 19, 1996, Bin Ladin left Sudan—significantly weakened, despite his ambitions and organizational skills. He returned to Afghanistan.

And here is how Bill Clinton described that in comments taped on Feb 15, 2002:

And we'd been hearing that the Sudanese wanted America to start dealing with them again.

They released him. At the time, 1996, he had committed no crime against America so I did not bring him here because we had no basis on which to hold him, though we knew he wanted to commit crimes against America.

So I pleaded with the Saudis to take him, 'cause they could have. But they thought it was a hot potato and they didn't and that's how he wound up in Afghanistan.

Clintonistas, in trying to run away from that, had modest success with the 9/11 Commission and more success with Media Matters and Paul Krugman.  However, it is clear that Sudan wanted to expel Bin Ladin and curry favor with the US, and the US was aware of their desire to do so.  Whether Sudan formally offered Bin Ladin to the US may be a formality and a useful defense; it does not beggar the imagination to think they would have offered him if we had asked, and one might wonder why we did not.  Apparently there is no evidence of a formal Sudanese offer; if there was evidence of a formal US request and a Sudanese refusal, I suspect we would have been told.

Ya Gotta Sail With The Captain

Captain Ed is offering great amenities to anyone interested in probing the latest Senate Intelligence Committee report - converted .pdf files that can be searched and cut/pasted.

That just takes away another excuse for not reading them pronto.  Darn.

Ned Lamont Discovers Our Superficial Press Corps

Digby at Hullabaloo decries the latest Times story (with not one but two follow-ups).  We will let the headlines tell the "story":

First, "Lamont Criticizes Lieberman’s 1998 Rebuke of Clinton Over Affair"

Lieberman responds predictably: "Lieberman Defends 1998 Rebuke of Clinton"

And now the knife is twisted, the dagger plunged, with "Lieberman Points Out a Turnabout by Lamont"!

Groan.  Digby complaints are that (1) our press corps focuses on this, rather than Lamont's new education proposal or his views on Iraq, health care, or whatever; and (2) Lamont's letter is hardly the 'gotcha' the Times is claiming.

Right twice, but... c'mon, Lamont is running with the big dogs now.  The press is superficial and looking for quick headlines and the sun rises in the east - deal with it.

Lamont should have sat down to dinner with seven Times reporters armed with scripted talking points - education reform, health care, Iraq, repeat until they are bored to tears.  And if they are bored to tears, so what?  Let them cry, and don't spoil the soup.  These reporters are not his friends, this is not a dinner party, and Lamont has no obligation to entertain and amuse these people.

Folks can whine about the attitude of the Times for all eternity; Lamont ought to upgrade his own message management, starting yesterday.

I blame the victim - somebody read to him a few posts from the Somerby archives.

Now Trash

Christy Hardin Smith of the firedogs does a good job rounding up reviews of the upcoming ABC debacle, "The Path to 9/11", including some righties who are fans of historical accuracy.

Tim Rutten of the LA Times adds this:

SURVEYING the smoking ruin that is ABC’s reputation after the "The Path to 9/11" debacle, it’s hard to know whether you’re looking at the consequence of unadulterated folly or of a calculated strategy that turned out to be too clever by half.

Anagram fans think the answer to Mr. Rutten's question is "calculated strategy"  Our clue - the writer is Mr. Nowrasteh, which is the hint to ABC's rep.

That said, the Dem Senators invoking government powers and licensing reviews to hold up a show they can feel free to pipe down on issues of civil liberties until they have sorted out their position.  Here is more Tim Rutten:

One of the most unfortunate consequences of all this was that most of the news media completely overlook a stunning affront to 1st Amendment freedoms that occurred when the Democratic leadership of the U.S. Senate sent Iger a letter Thursday appearing to threaten the network's licenses unless "The Path to 9/11" was altered or killed:

"The Communications Act of 1934 provides your network with a free broadcast license predicated on the fundamental understanding of your principle obligation to act as a trustee of the public airwaves in serving the public interest … ," the lawmakers wrote. "We urge you, after full consideration of the facts, to uphold your responsibilities as a respected member of American society and as a beneficiary of the free use of the public airwaves to cancel this factually inaccurate and deeply misguided program."

We've all become accustomed to a Congress that behaves as if it's divided between Bloods and Crips rather than Republicans and Democrats — but this was a thuggish new low. If we were inclined to dramatic license, the guys with thick necks in "On the Waterfront" would come to mind, though it's doubtful even Harvey Keitel could plausibly play Harry Reid as threatening.

If memory serves I have not been a consistent Tim Rutten fan, but I am with him here.  And here is an example of a Reuters sotry noting the Dem's letter but ignoring the reference to the broadcast license and the implied threat.

MORE:  Regading Nowrasteh, it's all about the "e"!  Obviously, they figured the internet would bring them down.  Obviously.