AUSTIN BAY SAYS IT’S THE SAME OLD SONG where media coverage of Jay Garner’s reconstruction effort is concerned:

According to his critics, Jay Garner is already Tommy Franks. No, I don”t mean the Gen. Franks of April 2003, but the Gen. Franks of March 2003 and — for that matter — of October 2001.

Garner’s reconstruction effort is already in trouble with media fingerwaggers. Never mind that gunfire continues to sputter. Why, Garner lacks sufficient personnel, there’s infighting at the Pentagon — shucks, his plan is flawed.

Heard it before? Sure, track back three weeks with the likes of The New York Times’ R.W. Apple excoriating Central Command. Reconstructing Iraq has barely begun, but the critical piling-on is already in progress. One horror among the usual cranks is Garner has oil industry contacts and he’s retired military. Of course, anyone with a knack for the obvious knows both knocks are welcome assets, given Iraq’s petroleum reserves and the iffy security situation. The cranks appear to prefer Garner be a Marxist sociology prof with a ‘stop the war” tattoo on his tongue. . . .

Bay also notes:

Garner’s and the Iraqi people’s task is truly a 21st century endeavor. Their sweat, vision and spine must surmount some of the 20th century’s worst fascist and socialist depredations, while finessing 12th century religious attitudes. They must accomplish this under the harsh gaze of an insistent, antsy media with biases to feed and ratings to spur.

For the sake of Iraq’s people, better put some patient, credible minds behind that media gaze. How many critics got Afghanistan and Operation Iraqi Freedom dead wrong? Where are the massive civilian casualties and the quagmire in the sand? Spin it to me again, about Vietnam in Baghdad?

Patient, credible minds? Does Howell Raines have any of those at hand? I think it’s the media that needs more, and better, troops.

I’M SOMEWHAT SKEPTICAL ABOUT THIS STORY but if it’s true it’s the kind of thing I’m criticizing in my TechCentralStation column today:

Civil rights advocates demanded today that the federal government explain how hundreds of people — some of them vocal critics of the Bush administration — have ended up on a list used to stop people suspected of having terrorist links from boarding commercial air flights.

In a lawsuit filed in San Francisco, the American Civil Liberties Union said government officials had improperly withheld information about how people wind up on the “no fly” list, what steps are taken to ensure its accuracy and how people who are erroneously detained at airports can get their names off the list.

“Without even basic information about the no-fly list or other watch lists,” the lawsuit said, “the public cannot evaluate the government’s decision to use such lists.”

Since the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, the F.B.I. and federal transportation officials have generated secret lists of people suspected of having terrorist ties who should be stopped and questioned if they try to board an airplane.

I’m skeptical because these stories remind me of the long-debunked (and obviously dubious) Nancy Oden story, (here’s the Snopes debunking page) in which a Green activist claimed to have been detained because of her opposition to the war. (The Afghan War, not the Three Weeks War.)

I hope, of course, that there is a list of suspected terrorists who are questioned when they try to fly. And I note that a lot of people were pretty damned critical of the fact that the Bush Administration didn’t have that sort of list operating before 9/11.

The separate question is whether people are being targeted based on their opposition to the Administration’s policies, rather than suspected links to terrorists. I rather doubt that, but I certainly think it’s a subject on which we should let the sun shine in.

UPDATE: Here, on the other hand, is a truly worrisome arrest.

ANOTHER WAR PROFITEER is unmasked.

WHY FREEDOM ISN’T A LUXURY, but a source of strength: This week’s TechCentralStation column looks at the home front, and suggests that the Bush Administration’s penchant for secrecy is a source of weakness, not muscularity.

IF YOU ONLY READ INSTAPUNDIT and a few other blogs, then, well, you should branch out. Try visiting the Carnival of the Vanities, a traveling blog-roundup that’s at The Kitchen Cabinet this week. You’ll find links to posts on a lot of other blogs that are worth reading.

THE TELEGRAPH is now reporting that anti-war British MP George Galloway asked Saddam for more money.

Saddam was rejecting two specific requests allegedly made by Mr Galloway, as recorded in the intelligence chief’s memorandum. The first was for a greater share of the profits from oil exports.

The memorandum said that Mr Galloway was already receiving between 10 and 15 cents per barrel of three million barrels exported every six months: an annual sum of at least £375,000.

Mr Galloway’s second reported request was for “exceptional commercial and contractual” opportunities with three ministries and the state electricity commission. These requests for more sources of income fell on deaf ears, but Saddam’s decision not to allow them did not apply to Mr Galloway’s existing deals.

This is incredible stuff, suggesting a degree of corruption that is, in fact, hard to believe. Galloway is denying the charges with increasing vigor. I imagine that the truth will come out, one way or another, on this.

Tim Blair has a nice roundup of coverage and reactions to this story.

AMERICOONING: Hmm. Trend-flack Faith Popcorn may have something right here. A friend with business interests in China writes:

Looks like no China trips in the near future. SARS is really going to be a downer for the economy if not controlled soon. No one that I know feels its worth the risk to travel there now. We had planned a family trip to France for the summer, but none of us wants to go now. It is incredible that things have changed so much in such a short time.

Indeed.

FAREED ZAKARIA A “CONSERVATIVE?” Well, not exactly, writes Virginia Postrel.

TONY ADRAGNA’S IRAQ SANCTIONS WATCH has identified yet another hidden agenda from the French.

I MEANT TO POST THIS DAYS AGO, but CalPundit has moved to a spiffy new Movable Type site, with permalinks that work and everything.

KEN LAYNE HAS AN ASSIGNMENT for people covering the Columbia disaster. Heck, he’s practically written the story for someone. And it’s a good angle.

MORE CRUSHING OF DISSENT, this time at the University of Wisconsin.

WHAT’S THE WORD for the enjoyment that I and others feel in seeing the various predictions of doom go wrong? Why, it’s “Fehlervorhersagefreude” of course.

THE 82D AIRBORNE, protecting mosques from terrorists:

The event was peaceful for the most part, although the U.S. military said Tuesday that police in Karbala arrested six men who had been planning to blow up two of the city’s mosques.

Five of the detainees claimed to be members of Saddam’s Baath Party, and one said he belonged to al-Qaida, said Capt. Jimmie Cummings, spokesman for the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division. The men were arrested Monday and have been handed over to the 101st Airborne Division in Karbala, Cummings said.

Al Qaeda and Ba’ath trying to blow up mosques; the “All-American” 82d Airborne standing in their way. I wonder if this story will make Al Jazeera?

UPDATE: Al Qaeda and Ba’ath working together? Pejman Yousefzadeh notes that before the war, we were told by some that such things were impossible.

HERE’S A PROPOSAL FOR A REVERSE BOYCOTT, encouraging Americans to buy English beer to show our gratitude. I’ve been drinking Newcastle and Foster’s lately, so I guess I’m ahead of the curve.

UPDATE: I posted this last night, and the email I got suggested that people understood what I meant. This morning I’m getting emails hotly informing me that Foster’s is Australian. Uh, yeah. But they’re our allies, too, see?

As for those who tell me that Victoria Bitters is better — yeah, I know. But I’ve only had VB in Australia. Is it even available in the States? I’ve never seen it.

MATT WELCH IS ALL OVER THE BUSH / SAUDI CONNECTION:

LOS ANGELES – Under a draft law being circulated in Washington, D.C., right now, Americans could be stripped of their citizenship if they provide “material support” to groups that carry out “terrorist” activities. Non-citizen residents could be deported on mere suspicion of threatening national security.

Should these odious measures pass, I hereby nominate the first candidates for expulsion from the country: Prince Bandar bin Sultan, Saudi ambassador to the United States, and his wife, Princess Haifa al Faisal.

Washington’s most senior diplomatic couple — Bandar has been ambassador for 20 years — have been ladling out “material support,” indirectly or directly or both, to suspected terrorists or their families for years. . . .

Barbara and George H. W. Bush have all but adopted Bandar and Haifa. “The Bushes are like my mother and father,” Haifa told The New Yorker. “I know if ever I needed anything, I could go to them.” In the May issue of The Atlantic, Robert Baer, a retired CIA agent, wrote that, around the Bush family Kennebunkport, Me., compound, the prince is known as “Bandar Bush.”

Read the whole thing. It’s pretty damning. I remain astonished that the Democrats haven’t made an issue of this. Could it be that they’ve been bought off?

JACK BALKIN has a long post on Rick Santorum’s remarks about gay sex, and bestiality, etc.

UPDATE: Eugene Volokh, on the other hand, calls this a “faux scandal.”

ERIC S. RAYMOND IS BLOGGING AGAIN.

THE BEER OF THE MOMENT? It’s not German.

MERYL YOURISH LOOKS BACK on two years (!) of blogging.

THE BBC’S SCIENCE REPORTING gets a brutal Fisking from NasaWatch over basic and obvious factual errors in a story about Burt Rutan’s new private space venture.

Note that the BBC has fixed the errors without any indication that they were ever there, something that we also saw earlier in its coverage of Abu Abbas and Leon Klinghoffer. I’m not sure whether I’d condemn that or not — you want people to fix things, after all. I often fix posts shortly after they’re posted without indicating it. If they’ve been up long enough that it’s not an on-the-spot fix, and if the fix is of the sort that might turn someone else’s link to it nonsensical, then I indicate it in an update. If it’s just cosmetic, like fixing a typo, I don’t.

A PACK, NOT A HERD: Very cool story on the role that amateur video and photos have played in reconstructing the Columbia disaster. Here’s the slogan of one of those guys: “Life is unpredictable, so keep a camera nearby and catch it.” Good advice for bloggers, too.

NOT IN OUR NAME — Three UCLA Law School faculty members condemn the UCLA faculty senate antiwar resolution, which was achieved, it seems, via procedural flimflammery:

We were mugged by about 200 of our faculty colleagues at UCLA. These colleagues condemn the liberation of Iraq and wanted to say so publicly. But they were not content to speak out in their own names, as they had every right to do. Instead, they insisted on speaking in our names — and in the names of the more than 3,000 people on the UCLA faculty. . . .

According to the rules of the academic senate, 200 members can convene a special meeting by signing petitions. Two hundred members did so, and the meeting was held last week, at a time when many on the faculty were busy teaching or preparing for class.

By the time they voted, the 200-member quorum had apparently vanished, but they went ahead anyway: 180 for the resolution, seven against and nine abstaining.

The resolution they adopted puts the academic senate on record as saying “to our fellow citizens, to the president of the United States and to our senators and representatives” that we “deplore the administration’s doctrine of preventive war and the U.S. invasion of Iraq.”

The academic senate includes us. A rump group of our colleagues put these words — words that we find loathsome — into our mouths.

A “rump group,” indeed. (Via The Volokh Conspiracy).

FRANCE HAS DONE AN ABOUT-FACE ON IRAQ SANCTIONS:

But the French ambassador, Jean-Marc de la Sabliere, said the sanctions issue was now linked by past Security Council resolutions to a certification of Iraqi disarmament.

“So meanwhile, we could suspend the sanctions and adjust the oil-for-food [programme] with an idea of its phasing out,” he told reporters following a briefing by UN chief weapons inspector Hans Blix.

Under the oil-for-food programme the UN has managed the use of funds generated by limited Iraqi oil sales to pay for humanitarian goods.

The French ambassador did not link a suspension of the sanctions to a return of the UN inspectors to Iraq.

Interesting.

UPDATE: Porphyrogenitus suspects that the about-face may have been occasioned by threats to release information from Iraqi archives. Heh. I kind of hope so.

SARS AND SMS: Just got an email from Conrad at The Gweilo Diaries with the following additional information from ReOriented:

Miss Q. is pretty much immune to scaremongering on communicable diseases. Nevertheless, the admission by the government that they’d lied about the true number of SARS cases in China and the subsequent scapegoating of two saps up north did make for an interesting interlude. The rumour mill has as a consequence gone into overdrive, one indicator being a deluge of text messages to Miss Q’s mobile phone; 21 and counting when I left on Monday afternoon. All of these were forwarded messages that had in turn probably been forwarded hundreds of times. Origins have been lost in the mist of Chinese SMS space. Most were pretty innocuous, but a few stood out as truly stupid.

Here’s my favorite: “If you have received this message, you now have SARS! To cure yourself, send this message on to at least ten friends.” It’s also interesting, as he notes, to compare the text messages on SARS that are circulating with the official government statements.