BAD NEWS for the FBI:

The FBI blew repeated chances to uncover the 9-11 plot because it failed to aggressively investigate evidence of Al Qaeda’s presence in the United States, especially in the San Diego area, where two of the hijackers were living with one of the bureau’s own informants, according to the congressional report set for release this week.

THE LONG-DELAYED 900-page report also contains potentially explosive new evidence suggesting that Omar al-Bayoumi, a key associate of two of the hijackers, may have been a Saudi-government agent, sources tell NEWSWEEK. The report documents extensive ties between al-Bayoumi and the hijackers. But the bureau never kept tabs on al-Bayoumi—despite receiving prior information he was a secret Saudi agent, the report says. In January 2000, al-Bayoumi had a meeting at the Saudi Consulate in Los Angeles—and then went directly to a restaurant where he met future hijackers Khalid Almihdhar and Nawaf Alhazmi, whom he took back with him to San Diego. (Al-Bayoumi later arranged for the men to get an apartment next to his and fronted them their first two months rent.) The report is sure to reignite questions about whether some Saudi officials were secretly monitoring the hijackers—or even facilitating their conduct.

Hmm. My “advice to the Democrats” post is looking better, isn’t it?

LOOTING UPDATE: The United States Senate is standing up against the theft of valuable national treasures.

SOME THINGS CHANGE. Some things don’t.

TACITUS OFFERS SOME INTERESTING GOOD NEWS FROM IRAQ. Read it. And chalk one up for The Small Wars Manual.

I CAN’T SAY THAT THIS SURPRISES ME:

A SOPHISTICATED internet sting has provided fresh evidence linking Abu Hamza, the British radical Islamic cleric, to terror camps, claim anti-terrorist police.

Hamza is said to have been so convinced by a British undercover investigator posing as an extremist website operator that he allegedly sent him several secret propaganda films designed to attract new recruits. The videos were used, say investigators, to convince British Muslims to undergo jihad training at camps in Afghanistan and Bosnia.

Not terribly shocking, but gratifying.

TALKLEFT RESPONDS to my earlier advice-for-Democrats post with a further suggestion: let felons vote.

I have an elaboration on that: don’t have so many felonies. The justification for depriving felons of civil rights, like voting or owning guns, was originally that felonies were such serious crimes that the felon’s life was ordinarily forfeit anyway. But now felonies are designated very promiscuously — downloading files from the Internet? Filling in a pothole in your driveway that turns out to be a “wetland?”

Those things shouldn’t be felonies. To my mind, imposing civil rights deprivations for such minor, mala prohibita matters is a due process violation. Adopt that approach, and you don’t have to worry about felons being deprived of voting rights unless they’re murderers, robbers, rapists, etc. You know: real criminals.

BEING OFFLINE AND PAYING NO ATTENTION TO THE NEWS all weekend (which was wonderful), I missed the latest developments in the ongoing unravelling of the BBC. But Jeff Jarvis has been on the story and he’s got a devastating link-filled post. Excerpt:

We must know from the BBC what happened. The BBC must launch a Blair-like (that is, Jayson-Blair-like) investigation of Gilligan and his reporting. The BBC’s credibility demands it. The credibilty of the profession demands it.

My fellow journalists should demand it as well. Intead of standing in a press gang and asking Tony Blair about blood on his hands, those reporters should turn to their BBC colleagues and ask about the blood on their hands. A source of theirs killed himself over this story. Why?

The truth is coming out and that truth is:

The Blair government did not sex up this story.
The BBC and Andrew Gilligan are the ones who sexed up this story.

Meanwhile Tom Maguire is administering a skeptical deconstruction to a recent David Corn scandal piece.

And, in an entirely unrelated matter, Andrew Sullivan is writing about crucifixion. Having myself actually been crucified — I was understudy for “Thief on the Left” in the Smoky Mountain Passion Play back in high school — I can attest that it’s an entirely unenjoyable experience, even without the nails, and even when it’s all in, er, fun. My advice: avoid crucifixion if at all possible.

ROGER SIMON WAS BLOGGING FROM THE PLAZA last week. Now I”m blogging from a palatial tropical Ritz-Carlton. I’ll be speaking on nanotechnology tomorrow. The family is along; we spent the weekend at Disney World. (The Insta-Daughter liked Thunder Mountain the best, and the Haunted Mansion second.)

Blogging will be limited this week. The hotel has high-speed Internet access (though not wireless) and I’ll be busy having fun much of the time. But I will be posting daily, so do check in. Meanwhile Randy Barnett is guestblogging over at GlennReynolds.com. He’s got a series on the right to bear arms underway.

Email responses will be even worse than usual — I never really caught up from my last vacation. Sorry.

HERE’S A LINK TO BLAIR’S SPEECH. Excerpt:

There is a myth that though we love freedom, others don’t; that our attachment to freedom is a product of our culture; that freedom, democracy, human rights, the rule of law are American values or Western values; that Afghan women were content under the lash of the Taliban; that Saddam was somehow beloved by his people; that Milosevic was Serbia’s savior. Members of Congress, ours are not Western values. They are the universal values of the human spirit, and anywhere — (applause) — anywhere, any time ordinary people are given the chance to choose, the choice is the same: freedom, not tyranny; democracy, not dictatorship; the rule of law, not the rule of the secret police.

The spread of freedom is the best security for the free. It is our last line of defense and our first line of attack.

And just as the terrorist seeks to divide humanity in hate, so we have to unify around an idea. And that idea is liberty.

If I’m up this early it’s usually because I’m catching an early flight, and that’s what’s going on this morning. So I’ll refer you to Andrew Sullivan and James Lileks for more analysis. Here’s an excerpt from Lileks:

Blair is, at heart, a socialist; I’ve no time for half the stuff he wants and most of the stuff he’d agree to. But he’d get my vote. We can argue about the shape and direction of Western Civ after we’ve made sure that such a thing will endure. I haven’t heard every single speech Tony Blair has made since he popped on to the political scene; I don’t know if he argues for increased license fees for domestic gerbils with the same passion and force. But today he sounded like a man who knew things, who knows that the threat is still grave, and cannot understand why others seek transient political advantage in exploiting those sixteen words.

Read it all. Blogging will be intermittent or nonexistent until Sunday night. See you then.

THESE STORIES JUST KEEP COMING:

In the latest in a series of grisly discoveries, the U.S. military said Thursday it found another mass grave this one in northern Iraq and thought to contain the bodies of up to 400 Kurdish women and children slain by Saddam Hussein’s regime. . . .

Some 25 sets of remains all women and children have been pulled from the grave, each with a bullet hole in the skull. The military said the size of the area leads them to believe the site contains between 200 and 400 bodies.

Since the end of the Iraq war, at least 60 mass graves, some with hundreds of corpses, have been discovered. The United Nations is investigating the killing or disappearance of at least 300,000 Iraqis believed murdered during Saddam’s regime.

At least.

JOE BIDEN seems to be backing away from his own bill, the dumb RAVE Act that was passed via a bit of procedural chicanery last year.

Here’s a column I wrote on the bill last year. Maybe Biden should have read it.

AMEN, BROTHER:

Trent Stamp, an adept number cruncher and database sleuth, has spent the past two years poring over the finances of the nation’s leading nonprofit organizations, and he is convinced of one thing: There are just too damn many charities in this country. To hear Stamp tell it, financial inefficiency and mismanagement are more prevalent among nonprofits than anyone knows, and he wants to let the whole world in on the secret.

Interesting article.

JEFF JARVIS writes that rationalizing hate crimes is “the moral mistake of the age.”

In a totally unrelated development (er, except that it involves Jeff) he’s testing out AOL’s new blogging tool.

YET ANOTHER INSTALLMENT OF THE DAILY HOWLER says that the press is murdering the facts on the Niger uranium story. He’s got transcripts, too.

Meanwhile Steven Den Beste notes: “You know, it’s odd that no one is accusing Bush of lying about how brutal and vicious Saddam was.”

HERE’S AN INTERVIEW WITH ROGER SIMON in which he discusses blogs, writing, and much more.

A DATE WITH MERYL YOURISH? What are you single bloggers waiting for?

THE BBC IS GETTING POUNDED IN THE TIMES:

There are legitimate questions about WMD but that does not justify the charges Gilligan has laid against the Government. The BBC will not admit that the allegations are false but nor does it still insist that the story was correct — merely that it has the right to broadcast what it wants. Greg Dyke, the BBC Director-General, has persuaded his governing board that a high principle of independence is at stake and an apology would cede editorial control to No 10.

This is utter rubbish. On this issue the BBC does not stand for principle but Blundering Bombastic Cynicism. Is the corporation becoming the Blair Baiting Campaign or is it a case of Blinkered Bosses Cornered? Maybe both. Bye Bye Credibility.

Hmm. Perhaps New Labour will find broadcast privatization more appealing now.

I’VE BEEN READING JIM DUNNIGAN’S NEW BOOK, The Perfect Soldier: Special Operations, Commandos, and the Future of U.S. Warfare, and I think it’s pretty good. There’s a lot of information on how things were done in Afghanistan. One thing that it makes clear is the importance of the learning curve — and, in particular, the importance of learning from things that don’t go well. That’s a lesson worth taking to heart in our ongoing war.

The book also has lots of useful background and reference material, which I imagine journalists and lawmakers will find helpful. And, like all Dunnigan’s stuff, it’s clearly written and highly readable.

MARK STEYN:

I repeat: where’s the lie? Why isn’t it merely a good-faith mistake? The anti-war crowd have been wrong on everything, from hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths to environmental catastrophe, from the horrors of the ‘brutal Afghan winter’ — now 22 months behind schedule — to those of the brutal Iraqi summer, which George Galloway was still trying to flog in the Guardian this week: ‘The US and British armies have entered the gates of hell. Soon it will be 100 degrees at midnight in Baghdad, but there will be no respite from the need for full body armour.’ Really? The average overnight low in July (Baghdad’s hottest month) is 77. On Monday night, after an unusually hot day, by 10.30 p.m. it was already down to a pleasant 83. . . .

Nonetheless, the Democrats smell blood and don’t want to be told that it’s their own.

Some of us are trying to help them out, but I doubt they’ll listen.

PRO-LIFERS ON THE TAKE? Ramesh Ponnuru says some are. Others aren’t.

UPDATE: Here’s more.

CATS AND DOGS, LIVING TOGETHER: Bryan Preston points out a positive piece on postwar Iraq, from Reuters.

VOTING MACHINE FRAUD? Cringely is on the story. I don’t know if these concerns are true, but I think that people should investigate. Meanwhile I’ve offered a surefire technological fix elsewhere.

THIS VIRGINIA POSTREL COLUMN on online sales and state protectionism is worth reading. They should move her to the op-ed page and give her a weekly slot.

SEX, BOOZE AND DICK CHENEY — all this and more over at The Volokh Conspiracy.

POLITICAL ADVICE FOR THE DEMOCRATS — they seem to need it, and I’m offering it over at GlennReynolds.com.

I don’t think, though, that anyone would offer me the DNC chairmanship, though it was once held by a law school classmate of mine. And the Democrats were doing better then, too.

UPDATE: John Conyers apparently hasn’t gotten the memo about the youth vote.

And here’s an issue too.

And a reader has more suggestions, as follow:

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