YET ANOTHER REASON TO THINK THE FBI ISN’T UP TO THE JOB OF CATCHING TERRORISTS:

When Web operator Jon Messner gained control of one of al-Qaida’s prime Internet communication sites, he offered it to the FBI ( news – web sites) to use it for disinformation and collecting data about sympathizers.

What followed, he says, was a week of frustration.

FBI agents struggled to find someone with enough technical know-how to set up the sting. By the time they did, the opportunity was lost as militant Islamic Web users figured out the site was a decoy, said Messner of Ocean City, Md.

“It was like dealing with the motor vehicle administration,” said Messner, who runs Web sites, many of which sell pornographic materials. “We could have done something that could have seriously impacted things. It took me so many days just to get somebody who understood the Internet.”

That’s just plain pathetic. There’s no point talking about massive bureaucratic reorganizations, or sweeping new law enforcement powers, so long as this kind of screwup is a regular occurrence.

UPDATE: Here’s more bad news. Louis Freeh — who as many have mentioned has gotten pretty much a free pass — looks quite bad here.

CATHY YOUNG is savaging Bill O’Reilly over his attacks on attorney John Pozza.

I haven’t seen O’Relly in quite a while (I don’t watch much TV, especially at that time of night — well, I do, but it’s usually PowerPuff Girls or SpongeBob) but I also heard Neal Boortz saying that O’Reilly was over the line here.

STATELY INSTAPUNDIT MANOR has been taken over by a film crew, which is shooting some sort of safety video for the state. (The guys making the film overlap with the guys who are shooting my wife’s documentary, so somehow we’re now a film location).

I escaped the noise and confusion by going to Border’s for a while, where I ran across the July/August issue of The Atlantic, which you should immediately go buy. Here’s one reason.

STUART TAYLOR says you do not have the right to remain silent.

DAVE KOPEL AND ROBERT RACANSKY propose gun control for police. Among other things.

UPDATE: The shooter in this heaven-or-hell case that’s getting a lot of attention around the blogosphere turns out to have been “a corrections officer.” Good timing, guys!

AQUAMAN says he’s a superhero who gets no respect.

Me, I think that post is probably taken by The Elongated Man — though at least he gets plenty of dates.

NO, NO, WE’RE YOUR REAL ENEMY, DON’T FORGET US! Some weirdness from the Chinese:

I left China impressed that China’s defense establishment would sooner instigate a cross-strait dust-up than seriously help the United States in the war against international terrorism. Indeed, the terrorist threat is but an annoying distraction from the game of balance-of-power politics. They urgently want to resume full military-to-military contacts and resent any hint that China is no longer central to American foreign policy. For reasons that may relate to defense spending, they would rather be perceived as a growing threat than be ignored. In short, the PLA is concerned about the relative de-emphasis on the China relationship in the United States and is apparently eager not to be deprived of an enemy.

Hmm. Sounds almost like an episode of rope-a-dope.

JAMES LILEKS reflects on Stalinism and vomit.

ANTITERRORISM STRATEGY: I don’t think he meant it this way, but Jeff Cooper has a post that offers some possibilities. It’s sort of “what would Bugs Bunny do?”

I think our antiterrorism strategies could use a dose of that kind of thinking. Such approaches work best on people who take themselves too seriously, which is certainly the case with angry Islamofascists.

ANOTHER SUSPICIOUS DEATH in the Saudi royal family.

BASEBALL TO FANS: UP YOURS! As reader Bill McCabe puts it: “On the eve of a strike, Major League Baseball shows its love for the fans by sending a Cease & Desist Order to a fan site dedicated to the New York Mets.”

They don’t think of ’em as fans, Bill. They think of ’em as sheep to be fleeced, just the way the folks at the RIAA and MPAA think of music and movie overs.

UPDATE: Slate has picked up on the story.

AZIZ POONAWALLA has posted a response to Adil Farooq’s post on Jihadism I mentioned earlier. (Poonawalla calls Farooq’s analysis “Sunni-centric.”)

EMORY / BELLESILES UPDATE: Well, this isn’t really an “update,” which would involve actual new facts. This is just a followup to my mention below that rumors are swirling about what Emory will do in the Bellesiles affair.

Unfortunately, the rumors are plentiful, mutually contradictory, and allegedly well-sourced (though always at third or fourth hand). One set has it that Emory is planning to hang Bellesiles high, and that the delay has been to get its ducks in a row to withstand a threatened lawsuit.

Another is that Emory will do nothing official but will quietly buy out Bellesiles’ contract, putting him on perpetual (paid) leave while he goes to teach at another institution, perhaps abroad. (I find this one hard to believe, as it would create a gigantic scandal since it would, basically, be a coverup).

I don’t know what to make of these. It seems pretty safe to say that the investigation isn’t going to produce an exoneration of Bellesiles — first, given the evidence already out, that seems very unlikely, and second, one expects that an exoneration would be trumpeted by Bellesiles’ supporters and by Emory, which can’t be enjoying all the negative attention.

The big tipoff will be whether there’s a public announcement and release of the investigation’s report (which Emory has promised) in late August. If so, look for Bellesiles to be fired as the most likely outcome. On the other hand, if nothing is said, and Bellesiles is “on leave” again next year, then the coverup theory will be looking stronger.

“PORNO PATRIOTS:” Bringing Islamic Terrorists to their knees.

NICK DENTON’S Declaration of European Independence isn’t getting the response he expected. Reid Stott captures the mood well: It’s about time you guys moved out of the house, got your own place, and started taking responsibility for yourselves.

But talk’s cheap. Europe may declare independence, but it won’t take up the responsiblities that implies because it can’t afford to without dismantling large parts of its social welfare apparatus, and bureaucracy in general. Really, the whole “Europe” edifice that has been created over the past several decades is grounded on the assumption that the United States will guarantee stability in the region, while Eurocrats get on with the important work of kvetching and pointing fingers.

I’m not an “American supremacist,” except maybe culturally. I certainly see little appeal in notions of imperialism. My ideal would be something like what the United States enjoyed when the British Empire was at its height: a more-or-less isolationist foreign policy while somebody else who posed no threat did the dirty work of keeping the sea lanes open and the lid on international crises. Kind of like what Europe has now.

AN AMERICAN TERRORIST IN IRAN: Ira Silverman has an interview in The New Yorker that’s worth reading. It’s a bit odd, as in places it seems to imply that Salahuddin is, well, a mole who is most useful to American intelligence where he is.

MICKEY KAUS EXPLORES the Bill Clinton / Elizabeth Hurley / John Edwards connection. Steve Bing’s sperm is involved.

SOUTH OF THE BORDER: Michael Barone writes that Mexico is doing better than most people realize, and predicts a dwindling of immigration over the next ten years as Mexican birthrates shrink while the Mexican economy grows.

MICHAEL MOYNIHAN writes that U.N. claims about human rights violations in the Afghanistan airwar are dubious:

A few observations: First, since when has a bombing mistake during a hot war been considered a “human rights violation?” When one refers civilian casualty claims to the “human rights” brigade at the UN, it typically infers intent. There isn’t anyone–save the Z Magazine crowd–that believes the USAF deliberately attacked a civilian target. By this logic, the whole notion of human rights becomes essentially worthless, creating no moral distinction between an errant bomb and an execution pit at Babi Yar.

But, you see, most of those U.N. types aren’t that upset by Babi Yar.

TIM NOAH is hot on the trail of my old law professor Stephen Carter, regarding his abstention from the Kass Council report.

Carter’s not talking, and Noah — rather unfairly in my opinion — suggests that Carter dropped out to promote his novel. I suspect this is an effort to provoke Carter into returning Noah’s calls, rather than a serious accusation. My guess is that Carter agreed to serve on the panel, then gave up when it was obvious that the Bush Administration had already made up its mind anyway, without waiting to hear what the Council had to say. But that’s just a guess, as I haven’t spoken to Carter about it.

WHAT A BASEBALL STRIKE MIGHT MEAN for the midterm election. This isn’t something I’ve thought about. But Todd Wiener has been pondering.

BELLESILES UPDATE: One of Michael Bellesiles’ contentions was that guns at the time of the American Revolution were too expensive for individuals to own, and hence rare. But here’s what Joyce Malcolm says, in her book, Guns and Violence: The English Experience, about the situation in England, a hundred years earlier (p. 49):

Coule Englishmen afford firearms?. . . By 1658, during the Commonwealth, the price had decreased to 11 shillings a musket, and in 1664 the government considered offering 10 shillings per musket to citizens who turned in serviceable weapons. . . . Used guns were, of course, less expensive. In 1628, when a new pair of pistols cost two pounds, a stolen handgun was valued at only 3 shillings. But the clearest evidence of the widespread ownership of weapons comes from court records. Indictments for misuse of firearms reveal an amazing array of persons of humble occupation — labourers, wheelwrights, bricklayers, carpenters, weavers, blacksmiths, farmers, and servants of both sexes — who appeared before the courts charged with misusing firearms.

Just a reminder to those who continue to claim that Bellesiles just got a few numbers wrong in a handful of paragraphs. Actually, his book is shot through with errors.

Emory, meanwhile, still isn’t talking about what its investigation of Bellesiles has revealed. I imagine that if it had produced an exoneration, we probably would have heard about it by now. But rumors are swirling. Stay tuned.

UPDATE: A reader asks why figures for firearms availability in 17th century Britain mean anything regarding 18th century America. Well, firearms prices tended to decline over time, but more importantly 18th century Americans were considerably richer than 17th century Brits, and had more reason to own firearms. So an argument that firearms were rare and expensive in 18th century America seems even less plausible in the face of evidence that they were cheap and plentiful in 17th century Britain.

PATRICK NIELSEN HAYDEN IS BACK, with new posts on Electrolite. First Adil Farooq, then Matt Welch and Ken Layne. Now this.

The Blogosphere is reconstituting itself. Something big must be in the wind.

UPDATE: It must be: Lileks is back, too!

ISNTAPUNDIT is writing about the romance of stripmining. No, really.

HERE’S MORE ON THE FBI’S ATROCIOUS CONDUCT IN BOSTON, where an innocent man spent nearly 30 years in prison (actually 3 others were wrongly convicted, but one of them died in prison, so he spent less time there. . . .) after being fingered by an FBI informant — who the FBI knew was lying.

These guys aren’t up to Homeland Security. We’d better win this war abroad.

(Link via Bill Quick).

UPDATE: Matthew Yglesias agrees, more or less, and recommends this article by Josh Marshall on the not-ready-for-primetime character of the FBI and Homeland Security in general. (And I don’t find his new blog design as hard to read as some, but then I’m looking at it on a super-crisp flatscreen display.)