CLAYTON CRAMER is setting up a Mohammed Atta memorial site and wants your help.

“THIS SOUNDS LIKE SOMETHING OUT OF THE TERMINATOR,” writes the reader who sent this link to a story about two unconnected women with the same name being murdered within three days of one another.

DAN DREZNER WRITES that Daschle’s speech is compounding the trouble that Gore’s speech created for the Democrats. The whole thing is worth reading (lots of links, too) but here’s the money graf:

Let me be clear — there are substantive reasons to challenge the Bush administration’s position on Iraq. I’d like to see a fuller debate. But Daschle’s comments are the political equivalent of a hanging curveball for Republican operators to smack. And none of this happens without Gore’s Tuesday speech. Disadvantage: Daschle!

Oops.

UPDATE: Porphyrogenitus has another view with a Zell Miller angle. And Orin Judd responds to Dana Milbank’s reportage, which he says “completely butchered this story.”

ANOTHER UPDATE: Stephen Green isn’t happy with Daschle, but he’s not happy with Bush’s Department of Homeland Security either.

ANOTHER DROPPED BALL: The INS apparently failed to act on information that Los Angeles International Airport shooter Mohammed Hadayet was connected to terrorists.

No surprise, really: it took them forever to admit he was a terrorist even after the shootings.

A MALAYSIAN COUPLE IS SUING THE RELIGIOUS POLICE for bursting into their bedroom and separating them when they couldn’t produce a marriage license.

The mere existence of “religious police” is an abomination. I think there should be a bounty on them — or, at the very least, the “Buzz Aldrin remedy” should be applied forcefully. Staking out on anthills should be reserved for only the most dedicated members of the profession.

JOHN ROSENBERG REPORTS that the Congressional Hispanic Caucus has forgotten to update its website, which still shows support for the confirmation of Miguel Estrada.

TED BARLOW OFFERS A SADLY AMUSING DIALOGUE on the botched Russian privatization efforts. The Harvard economists involved come off poorly. To be fair, they faced a very difficult problem. But, also to be fair, they didn’t let that slow them down.

ANOTHER PROBLEM FOR THE INTERNATIONAL CRIMINAL COURT: LEGAL AFFAIRS IS REPORTING that the Rwandan court, sometimes cited as a prototype, is working out badly:

The discovery of genocide suspects on the ICTR’s payroll has threatened the integrity of the experiment in international law taking place in Arusha. Along with the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in The Hague, the tribunal for Rwanda is the first international court to try war criminals since the famous ones in Nuremberg and Tokyo following World War II. The U.N. Security Council set up the courts in 1993 and 1994 respectively to prosecute leaders suspected of committing genocide and crimes against humanity, and to alleviate Western guilt about having let them rage unchecked. The tribunals are the forerunners of the newly established and permanent International Criminal Court, which will be based in The Hague.

The Bush Administration strongly opposes the ICC—which was formally created in July—citing the potential threat to the authority of the U.S. courts and to Americans whom, theoretically, the court could prosecute. (See “Go Dutch.”) But the revelations about Nshamihigo and Nzabirinda expose a more practical and perhaps more debilitating problem for international tribunals—porous security and inept bureaucracy. The arrests have undermined the ICTR’s relationship with the current Tutsi-led government of Rwanda, which was already fragile, and have shaken the faith of some in the international diplomatic community, which was already weak. As a European diplomat based in Rwanda put it recently, “Imagine Klaus Barbie working for the defense at Nuremberg.”

You only get an excerpt (though it’s much longer than this passage) on their website, but I was just reading the actual magazine and this story is worth your attention if you’re interested in this subject.

The article by my law school classmate Nicki Kuckes on law firms and billable hours is good too, but unfortunately not on the web.

IT’S A RECESSION, BUT BLACK CHILD POVERTY IS DOWN: Mickey Kaus credits welfare reform!

THE CONCORDIA UNIVERSITY MANUAL “UPRISING” has mysteriously vanished from the Web — in fact, it vanished very shortly after I linked it last night. But Combustible Boy has a copy in HTML up over at The Sound and the Fury.

FUNNY, not long ago it was the anti-Bush folks who kept talking about the “Harkin scandal.” But it’s hard for me to see how this is bad for Bush. . . .

GROUP CAPTAIN LIONEL MANDRAKE IS CONDEMNING French unilateralism and military adventuring. He’s also got a letter from a German reader criticizing American criticism of German politicians.

IS THE TOOGOOD CASE RACIST PERSECUTION? Here’s a blog that seems to say so.

THE BURKA/BIKINI DEBATE is getting hotter. I don’t usually link back to a downstream post when there’s not a major error to correct, but this one has so many updates it’s practically new.

GEORGETOWN PROFESSOR PETER RUBIN says that strict constructionism doesn’t constrain judges. This is, largely, true. In fact, I’ve written a couple of law review articles to that effect. (Links here and here).

That’s not really an argument against fidelity to text and intent, though. It just means it’s been oversold. Parchment barriers are of limited use in constraining federal judges. Character, as Jeff Cooper pointed out the other day, is more important. At any rate, where the federal Courts of Appeals are concerned, the real problem — to paraphrase Michael Dukakis — is not ideology, but competence, and a bureaucratic mindset that does more harm than ideology.

MICHAEL KELLY SAYS THAT AL GORE IS UNFIT FOR PUBLIC OFFICE:

This speech, an attack on the Bush policy on Iraq, was Gore’s big effort to distinguish himself from the Democratic pack in advance of another possible presidential run. It served: It distinguished Gore, now and forever, as someone who cannot be considered a responsible aspirant to power. Politics are allowed in politics, but there are limits, and there is a pale, and Gore has now shown himself to be ignorant of those limits, and he has now placed himself beyond that pale.

Gore’s speech was one no decent politician could have delivered. It was dishonest, cheap, low. It was hollow. It was bereft of policy, of solutions, of constructive ideas, very nearly of facts — bereft of anything other than taunts and jibes and embarrassingly obvious lies. It was breathtakingly hypocritical, a naked political assault delivered in tones of moral condescension from a man pretending to be superior to mere politics. It was wretched. It was vile. It was contemptible. But I understate.

Joe Lieberman is more polite, but he’s down on Gore, too, as is Ed Rendell, who’s running in the crucial swing state of Pennsylvania. Gore may remember another Tennessean, Frank Clement, who gave a speech that didn’t help his national prospects. How long, oh Lord, how long, has Gore been hitting the wrong note by trying too hard to hit the right one? As someone who was once a big Gore fan (I worked quite hard in his 1988 campaign), I’m just disappointed.

UPDATE: Henry Hanks has done some research.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Stephen Rittenbeg says Gore is just a post-modernist. But Max Sawicky liked the speech! Well, mostly. This, on the other hand, is just plain mean.

READER DONALD BURTON WRITES:

Now that we’re sending troops into the Ivory Coast on a rescue mission, is Molly Ivins going to write a column claiming it’s really about the cocoa?

MY TECHCENTRALSTATION COLUMN IS UP!

LILEKS HAS A BEE IN HIS BONNET. Several, actually. It’s a good one, today. Well, they’re all good ones — it’s an especially good one.

UPDATE: Max Sawicky responds to some comments by Lileks. What’s interesting is that I hadn’t recognized how much Sawicky agrees with Steven Den Beste on the nature of the problem, as opposed to the appropriate remedy. I’d be interested in hearing more on the latter.

GARY FARBER REPORTS that “the wave” is Mexican. Who knew?

Well, a lot of people, probably. But not me.

UPDATE: A bunch of people have emailed to say that the Wave isn’t Mexican. Here, courtesy of Jeff Cooper, is a link to a story that says it first appeared in Washington state in 1981.

PETER BEINART wonders why Bush is being, ahem, diplomatic regarding war aims and motivations. John Hawkins thinks he has the answer.

MICKEY KAUS HAS A SOLUTION TO THE IMPASSE over civil-service protection and the Department of Homeland Security. No, really — an actual proposed solution, not just a snarky comment.

WELL THIS EXPLAINS A LOT:

Who is Saddam Hussein’s biggest business partner?

The United Nations. The same U.N. whose secretary-general, Kofi Annan, stands as one of the chief ditherers over removing Saddam. Here are the ingredients of a conflict of interest.

Under the U.N.’s Office of the Iraq Program, which supervises the six-year-old Oil-for-Food Program, the U.N. has had a hand in the sale of more than $55 billion worth of Iraqi oil. Iraq ships oil out to U.N.-approved buyers under the terms of the sanctions agreement. The U.N. vets the inflow of “humanitarian” imports into Iraq.

The process is simple. Iraq contracts to import goods, and the U.N. gives the outside vendors cash collected from the oil sales. The U.N. has approved about $34 billion in such deals so far. The money it hasn’t yet doled out–at least $21 billion–sits in U.N.-administered bank accounts. U.N. officials refuse to divulge much information about these accounts–not even the countries in which they’re held.

Measured in dollars, this is by far the U.N.’s largest program. The sums involved are large enough–and their handling has been perverse enough–for this program to deserve more attention than it has so far received.

What, corruption at the UN? Next people will be accusing them of running sex slave networks in Bosnia, or something.

MORE ON THE FBI:

The intransigence of counterterrorism officials in Washington regarding a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant in the Moussaoui case was described to the committee in June, when Minneapolis FBI agent Coleen Rowley aired the complaint. Yesterday’s testimony focused anew on the role of lawyers in the FBI’s National Security Law Center.

The lawyers advised FBI counterterrorism officials that agents did not have enough evidence to seek an FISA warrant. One of the lawyers said that Moussaoui would have to be linked to a “recognized” foreign power, which the committee staff’s report called “a misunderstanding of FISA.”

The FBI had no immediate comment on the report, but acknowledged the misinterpretation of the law in discussions with the committee staff. “The FBI’s deputy general counsel told the Joint Inquiry Staff that the term ‘recognized foreign power’ has no meaning under FISA and that the FBI can obtain a search warrant under FISA for an agent of any international terrorist group, including the Chechen rebels. But because of the misunderstanding, Minneapolis spent the better part of three weeks trying to connect the Chechen group to al Qaeda.”

A supervisory agent who testified yesterday said that the FISA court’s past criticism of some FBI warrant applications as inaccurate has had a “chilling effect,” discouraging others from seeking warrants.

Last week, committee members learned that a National Security Law Center lawyer turned down a separate plea in August 2001 from a New York FBI agent who warned that “someday someone will die” if FBI agents were not allowed to launch a criminal investigation and an aggressive manhunt for one of the Sept. 11 hijackers.

The FBI’s Radical Fundamentalist Unit also failed to take any action on the Phoenix memo, which described the activities of 10 suspected Islamic militants involved in aviation.

It’s more important that the problems be fixed than that heads roll. But I’m not convinced that the problems will be fixed unless some heads do roll.

And Louis Freeh ought to be subpoenaed.

PHIL BOWERMASTER has a proposal for the Blogosphere. If they’re going to make a mockery of things, it might as well be our mockery!