VANESSA LEGGETT UPDATE: Lloyd Grove reports on the multiplicity of awards she’s won for her ordeal. As I wrote in the Wall Street Journal a few weeks back, this case makes the FBI and the Justice Department look really bad. But then, that’s been happening a lot, hasn’t it?

WIRELESS BLOGGING: I’m on the laptop in the Student Center, across the street from the Law School. It’s deserted (summer school starts next week), but there’s Starbucks and a comfy chair. The University finally got the wireless network set up so that it would work with Windows XP (don’t ask). I’m delighted to have the mobility.

TURNAROUND in the Nuremburg files case. The 9th Circuit, sitting en banc held that the websites were “true threats” and not protected by the First Amendment. I’d be inclined to rule the other way, but on the facts this is a close case. Eugene Volokh has more on this. He says that it should have gone the other way, too, and says that the threats here weren’t any worse than those permitted by the Supreme Court in NAACP v. Claiborne Hardware. That’s probably true, but this isn’t an easy case. I think it’s likely bound for the Supremes.

UPDATE: Eugene now has a much longer post that makes a pretty persuasive case that Claiborne Hardware should control here.

SFSU UPDATE: Best of the Web has some additional information about goings-on at SFSU. About the quality of the administration’s response it writes:

Political correctness is such an old story as to be a cliché, but perhaps some sort of awakening is under way at SFSU. Will Corrigan be true to his word and deal harshly with his campus’s anti-Semitic thugs? The world is watching.

Indeed it is.

AN ORGY OF GRANDSTANDING AND BLOVIATION: That’s Ron Bailey’s evaluation of yesterday’s Congressional hearings on cloning. Meanwhile this analysis of literary and (of course) Star Wars metaphors in the cloning debate suggests that public discourse has been taken over by the Dark Side. And here Chris Mooney looks at the Star Wars / Lord of the Rings worldview and its roots in Luddism.

ATTY GEN. ASHCROFT isn’t flying commercial, for what are described as “security reasons.” And given the (putative) role of Justice in fighting terrorism, and Ashcroft’s own Pim-Fortuyn-like demonization in the press, maybe that makes sense.

On the other hand, I’d prefer if the guys who subject us to all that lousy and pointless security rigamarole at airports had to go through it themselves. Yeah, I know, you may say I’m a dreamer. But I’m not the only one. . . .

TAPPED leads the charge against political correctness at Berkeley and at the University of South Carolina.

CREATIVE COMMONS seems to be off the ground.

MELANA VICKERS delivers a near-Fisking to supporters of the Army’s “Crusader” vehicle.

EVE KAYDEN writes on unpopular opinions. I’m not surprised at her experience. While political correctness is real, it’s not as prevalent as people might think: it’s just that the extent to which people disagree is masked by preference falsification, which is of course encouraged by self-appointed thought police. That’s breaking down now, partly because the campus left has so thoroughly discredited itself over the past decade, partly because it’s just gotten, well, dull.

THE FEELING OF POWER: Sasha Volokh has a great post. If I weren’t figuring out grades, I’d like it even more.

SFSU UPDATE: Bay Area denizen Richard Bennett has some observations and links.

ANOTHER DAY, ANOTHER GRAY DAVIS SCANDAL. This one involves the California prison guards’ union, about as us unsavory a political influence as you’re likely to find. I believe they’re big supporters of “three strikes” laws, as you might imagine. Read this L.A. Times piece, too: “Shameless Governor Is a Compulsive Money-Grubber.”

TONY ADRAGNA writes on Cuba, Carter and the Farm Bill. And he has footnotes.

Footnotes. Meanwhile Walter Russell Mead says that Carter’s visit to Cuba was a major blow for freedom.

SFSU UPDATE: Here’s an editorial in the Washington Times.

BAD NEWS for the Chinese economy, reports Brink Lindsey.

BRENDAN O’NEILL REPORTS that it’s a Fukuyama-fest in Britain. Somehow, I’m not surprised.

READER GEORGE SPENCER says that you can’t fix Rolling Stone because it was never that cool anyway:

By coincidence, a few days I dug out some elderly crumbling copies of RS from the late 1960s and early 1970s. In their own dope-y way (pun intended), they’re just as rubbishy as Maxim. If you’re in the narrow demographic/psychographic audience that RS wants to attract, you think it’s cool. If you’re not in that group, RS is uncool. Advertisers would like our 40-something age group to instead read My Generation magazine, a magazine that publishes 1975 era content for mature adults. It’s published by something called the AARP. A recent issue ran a feature on the late Ken Kesey in which he bragged about dropping acid every Easter and going to church with his mother. Hmmm…maybe I’ll stick with the Wall Street Journal.

What? Next you’ll be saying we should make our own coolness instead of getting it from a magazine!

OUBAI SHAHBANDAR says that Bush should get tough on illegal immigrants.

PUNDITREVIEW is calling it “PhotoGate.” Enough “gates” already.

ROD DREHER says that Holland is being Giulianized. Will the rest of Europe follow?

JOSH MARSHALL says that Cynthia McKinney is still an idiot.

MATTHEW ENGEL receives a gentle yet savage Fisking at the hands of Clay Waters.

UPDATE: The dreaded Blogger Archive Bug strikes. Just go here until he fixes it.

ROLLING STONE RE-COOLIFICATION UPDATE: I didn’t get that many nominees, which is kind of sad. There were a lot of votes for bringing P.J. O’Rourke back (he’s almost respectable writing for The Atlantic, one reader complained), many nominations of Matt Welch and Ken Layne, and quite a few in support of Tim Blair.

I like all these guys, but is that it?

WHAT THE FBI SHOULD HAVE KNOWN: Lots of readers have emailed in response to my earlier post (it’s neck-and-neck with the one on wrenches!), taking both sides. Here are some samples. Reader Phillipe Richard writes:

Another reason it should have occurred to somebody:

The FBI was concerned because Middle Eastern men were training in flight schools. So obviously they were concerned about planes being hijacked? Does it take flight training to hijack a plane? No. You get the pilot to fly where you want to go. That’s a traditional hijacking, as Ari Fleischer puts it. So why would you need pilot training? Because you’re planning to kill the pilot. Why?Because you want the plane to go somewhere no pilot, even with a gun to his head, even when you threaten to blow up the plane, would go. And you don’t need pilot training to crash a plane just anywhere, just a hand. You might need to crash it into a specific target.

The fact that this went all the way up to the President suggests that somebody was awfully worried. I really fail to understand how nobody along the way could have guessed. Especially when someone all the way at the bottom did.

Howard Owens adds:

Glenn, did you ever watch the first episode of “The Lone Gunmen,” the X-Files spinoff.

It will probably never air again.

It was about the Lone Gunmen foiling a plot to hijack a plane and fly it into the WTC. In this episode, it happened at night and the hijackers were using a computer, but it was the first thing I thought of on Sept. 11.

Though personally, I’m willing to cut the FBI a little slack. The mistake was in not having a centralized anti-terrorism squad that could have put the pieces together.

Yeah, there’s something to that. What I find upsetting — and, in a way, insulting, — is the notion that the 9/11 attacks were utterly beyond imagination. Obviously, they weren’t. David Hecht makes the following points:

1. The intelligence business is composed of two major parts: assessing the
adversary’s capabilities, and assessing his intentions. Certainly, it is possible that our intelligence services realized that a hijacker had the capability to fly an airliner into a soft target: as you point out, anyone who had read Tom Clancy’s “Debt of Honor” could not but have been aware of the possibility. The problem comes in assessing intentions: WHY would anyone do such a thing? You will note that, even in the Clancy scenario, the person who does this is a lone actor, and he succeeds _despite the fact that the US is already in a shooting war_! Given that Mr. Clancy’s intel people are undoubtedly smarter and more imaginative than the ones in Real Life, what does this say about the difficulty of determining that this could be a threat?

2. Even within the framework of adversary capabilities, I do not have any doubt but that, on any given day, there are multiple potential threat indications and warnings. This has been rendered far more problematic in a post-Cold War environment where the threat axis can be virtually anywhere, rather than being limited to a few principal sources. It seems likely that, on any given day, the threat estimates emanating from our intel community must rank the threat of a 9/11 type incident as low: especially without
collateral indications and warnings (e.g., that such an effort was part of a decapitating strike complementary to other military action).

3. Let us also not forget that the threats, in this case, came from people who lived and worked in the U.S. (although they were foreign nationals). Given the hypersensitive civil-rights environment that we lived in prior to 9/11, what are the odds of our finding out what was going on and assessing it correctly? The CIA is forbidden by statute from domestic surveillance: the FBI’s counter-terrorism units have been starved for funds that have been used to feed the Drug War instead. The other intel agencies are primarily
concerned with military threats of a more traditional type and might not have recognized indications and warnings pertinent to acts of the 9/11 type even if they had received them.

Kierkegaard famously said that “Life can only be understood backward, but it must be lived forward.” I think we do ourselves an injustice when we condemn intelligence “failures” until all the facts are in.

Hmm. Well, there’s something to this — but I’d feel better about adopting a “wait until all the facts are in” approach if I didn’t have the strong impression that the past few months have been an orgy of bureaucratic ass-covering that will make it hard for the facts to come in. I have no confidence, at this point, that the intelligence system is being given the shakeup it needs to do the job it faces. I’d very much like to be wrong in this, and it’s possible that behind the wall of secrecy everything is being done right. It’s also possible that we have the same “top men” working on this as were featured at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. And I’m sorry to say that I know which way to bet.

UPDATE: Reader Marty Busse writes: “There was also the attempt, in December of 1994, by members of the Algerian Armed Islamic group, to crash a jetliner into the Eiffel Tower.” Also, check out the comments section after this post of Charles Johnson’s, particularly the post signed “Enough” about Cynthia McKinney-style conspiracy theorists.