ROGER SIMON HAS MORE ON THE U.N. OIL-FOR-FOOD SCANDAL and the United Nations’ reluctance to come clean. Actually the word used is “stonewalling.”

Why don’t we have Congressional hearings on this?

UPDATE: In an update, Simon notes that we will have hearings next month. Good! And Baldilocks asks: “I wonder what the first clue was. Was it the palaces or the ever-rounder cheeks of Saddam and his cronies?”

THE LINUX USERS’ GROUP OF IRAQ wants computer books — and not just books about Linux. If you can help, give ’em a hand.

TRENT TELENKO HAS thoughts on military communications.

Meanwhile, Cathy Seipp has thoughts on the civilian variety.

JAN HAUGLAND writes that the success of the Bush anti-terror strategy is demonstrated by the latest from Hamas: An urgent effort to make America feel unthreatened.

Well, they did seem rather anxious to make that point.

STEVEN ANTLER offers an interesting chart of poverty rates over the past several decades.

“WE WANT DEMOCRACY LIKE THE OTHERS:” Here’s some more evidence that the freeing of Iraq is sending ripples across the Arab world, to the discomfort of despots:

Kurdish residents claim the government responded to what they call peaceful protests with violence as an excuse to say Syria remains too unstable to introduce the kind of democratic reforms that are helping their brethren in Iraq.

“We want democracy like the others,” said Hoshiar Abdelrahman, another young shopkeeper in Malikiya, 60 miles east of Qamishliye.

More here:

Many of those present had relatives and friends in northern Syria and were in cell-phone contact with them hour by hour. In and around the city of Kamishli, in the past few days, several dozen Kurdish protesters have been shot down by Baathist police and militia for raising the Kurdish flag and for destroying pictures and statues of the weak-chinned hereditary ruler, Bashar al-Assad. In tussling with local party goons who shout slogans in favor of the ousted Saddam, it is clear, they are hoping for a rerun of regime change.

It is early to pronounce, but this event seems certain to be remembered as the beginning of the end of the long-petrified Syrian status quo. The Kurdish population of Syria is not as large, in proportion, as its cousinly equivalent in Iraq. But there are many features of the Syrian Baath regime that make it more vulnerable than Saddam Hussein’s. Saddam based his terrifying rule on a minority of a minority—the Tikriti clan of the Sunni. Assad, like his father, is a member of the Alawite confessional minority, which in the wider Arab world is a very small group indeed. Syria has large populations of Sunni, Druze, and Armenians, and the Alawite elite has stayed in power by playing off minorities against minorities. It is in a weak position to rally the rest of society against any identifiable “enemy within,” lest by doing so it call attention to its own tenuous position.

And that’s not all:

In Syria, and tomorrow in Iran, there are forces at work who intend to take these pronouncements with absolute seriousness. It would be nice if American liberals came out more forcefully and demanded that the administration live up to its own rhetoric on the question.

Yes, the Administration shouldn’t chicken out now. The dominoes are teetering, and we should be giving them a shove.

BELGRAVIA DISPATCH is live-blogging Clarke’s testimony.

UPDATE: John Lehman: Clarke has a “real credibility problem.” And Clarke’s answer tells you what the political strategy here is.

ANOTHER UPDATE: More here: “Clarke implodes.”

IT’S CLARKE V. CONASON NOW: This is almost starting to look like a Karl Rove setup.

UPDATE: Or maybe Clarke set himself up. Here’s what he said in 2002:

January 2001, the incoming Bush administration was briefed on the existing strategy. They were also briefed on these series of issues that had not been decided on in a couple of years.

And the third point is the Bush administration decided then, you know, mid-January, to do two things. One, vigorously pursue the existing policy, including all of the lethal covert action findings, which we’ve now made public to some extent. . . .

The second thing the administration decided to do is to initiate a process to look at those issues which had been on the table for a couple of years and get them decided.

So, point five, that process which was initiated in the first week in February, uh, decided in principle, uh in the spring to add to the existing Clinton strategy and to increase CIA resources, for example, for covert action, five-fold, to go after Al Qaeda. . .

JIM ANGLE: You’re saying that the Bush administration did not stop anything that the Clinton administration was doing while it was making these decisions, and by the end of the summer had increased money for covert action five-fold. Is that correct?

CLARKE: All of that’s correct.

(Emphasis added.) So Clarke in 2002 says that the Bush Administration picked up the Clinton ball and ran with it, redoubling (er, quintupling!) effort. Clarke in 2004 — an election year, with a book to sell — says the opposite, that the Bush Administration ignored the problem.

Which Clarke do you believe?

ANOTHER UPDATE: A reader points out this excerpt from the same transcript:

ANGLE: So, just to finish up if we could then, so what you’re saying is that there was no — one, there was no [Clinton] plan; two, there was no delay; and that actually the first changes since October of ’98 were made in the spring months just after the [Bush] administration came into office?

CLARKE: You got it. That’s right.

It’s hard for me to see how this leaves Clarke with any credibility at all.

BUSH CAN’T GET A BREAK: Now he’s being blamed for not invading Afghanistan in 1998! Here’s the relevant passage from MSNBC:

The report revealed that in a previously undisclosed secret diplomatic mission, Saudi Arabia won a commitment from the Taliban to expel bin Laden in 1998. But a clash between the Taliban’s leader, Mullah Mohammad Omar, and Saudi officials scuttled the arrangement, and Bush did not follow up.

Damn him — governing Texas while Rome burned! Why didn’t he send the Texas Rangers to finish off Bin Laden? (“One mullah, one Ranger!”) Sheesh. Can you say “Freudian slip?”

It’s not as if anybody has the storyline on this figured out from the get-go or anything. . . .

UPDATE: Then there’s this from another story:

One event that panel members found galling was why there was no retaliation by either administration for the bombing of the destroyer Cole in early 2001.

Maybe because the Cole was bombed on October 12, 2000? It seems like people are trying awfully hard to make it sound as if all this stuff happened on Bush’s watch.

Coming soon: Complaints about why the Bush Administration didn’t do anything to prevent the assassination attempt on Harry Truman at Blair House. And what about the Maine, huh? Why didn’t Bush do something about that?

MEGAN MCARDLE: Soon to be a hot TV star! I just want to note that I spotted her potential long ago.

TOM MAGUIRE has an interesting collection of Richard Clarke links. Read this, too, in which we see that Clarke’s report that Condi Rice had never heard of Al Qaeda before he briefed her is in error.

Meanwhile Jeff Jarvis cuts to the chase:

The terrorists came within a matter of yards of killing me.
But I don’t blame the Bush or Clinton administrations for that. I blame the terrorists.

Could we have stopped them? Only with some damned lucky breaks. We can’t make believe that any system would have guaranteed catching them before the act. For we have to remember that these are pathologically insane and evil beasts and it’s impossible to guess how low they will stoop.

If we were lucky enough to have intelligence inside their devil’s cult, then, yes, we might have foiled their plot. But that’s obviously hard to do.

If we were lucky enough to have stopped one of them for speeding and locked them up, then might have foiled their plot. But that’s like counting on a lottery ticket.

What matters now is learning the lessons we can learn — and to that extent, the hearings are valuable — to protect us as best we can.

But I find the blame game going on now unseemly and divisive and unproductive and distracting and just a little bit tasteless.

Indeed.

UPDATE: Clarke claims that Condi Rice had never heard of Al Qaeda when he briefed her as she took office. But here’s what she said in the interview referenced above, which took place before the election:

During an interview on Detroit radio station WJR the year before the Clarke briefing, Rice mentioned bin Laden by name, then recommended: “You really have to get the intelligence agencies better organized to deal with the terrorist threat to the United States itself. One of the problems that we have is a kind of split responsibility, of course, between the CIA and foreign intelligence and the FBI and domestic intelligence.”

Then, in a chillingly prescient comment, Rice named bin Laden a second time, warning, “There needs to be better cooperation because we don’t want to wake up one day and find out that Osama bin Laden has been successful on our own territory.”

Sounds like a pretty good diagnosis of the problems with Clarke’s anti-terrorism operation to me. Compare that statement from 2000 with this postmortem from George Tenet at the 9/11 hearings:

He said the problem in part was operational and in part systemic. “We didn’t integrate all the data we had properly, and probably we had a lot of data that we didn’t know about that, if everybody had known about, maybe we would have had a chance,” Tenet said.

He also pointed to the “wall that was in place between the criminal side and the intelligence side” of law enforcement domestically and internationally as an impediment. “Even people in the Criminal Division and the Intelligence Divisions of the FBI couldn’t talk to each other, let alone talk to us or us talk to them,” Tenet explained.

Sounds like Condi was on top of things back then, not clueless as Clarke is claiming now. To add to Jeff Jarvis’s take: distracting, tasteless — and dishonest.

MORE THOUGHTS ON DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPHY: My TechCentralStation column is up.

HERE’S AN INTERESTING INTERVIEW with Eugene Volokh, by Will Baude.

LOOKING FOR A NANOTECHNOLOGY JOB? Here’s a new nanotechnology jobs website. More information here.

CLAY RISEN says that the next Enron will be in Europe, and notes that the Euro-sneering that greeted the Enron scandal in 2002 has, er, shifted its tone. You can, by the way, get a free 4-week subscription to The New Republic Digital by clicking on the ad to the left.

CHANGING TUNES? Belgravia Dispatch notes a Clarke quote that isn’t getting much attention:

Richard Clarke, the country’s first counter-terrorism czar, told me in an interview at his home in Arlington, Virginia, that he wasn’t particularly surprised that the Bush Administration’s efforts to find bin Laden had been stymied by political problems. He had seen such efforts fail before. Clarke, who retired from public service in February and is now a private consultant on security matters, has served every President since Ronald Reagan. He has won a reputation as a tireless advocate for action against Al Qaeda. Clarke emphasized that the C.I.A. director, George Tenet, President Bush, and, before him, President Clinton were all deeply committed to stopping bin Laden; nonetheless, Clarke said, their best efforts had been doomed by bureaucratic clashes, caution, and incessant problems with Pakistan.”

–Richard Clarke, per the August 4th 2003 issue of the New Yorker.

“Frankly,” he said, “I find it outrageous that the president is running for re-election on the grounds that he’s done such great things about terrorism. He ignored it. He ignored terrorism for months, when maybe we could have done something to stop 9/11. Maybe. We’ll never know.”

–Richard Clarke, on 60 Minutes, March 21, 2004.

Follow the link and read the whole thing. (Emphasis in original). I’m ready to believe that the Bush Administration dropped balls on terrorism before 9/11. Clarke seems to be grinding axes though.

And the big question is, what would today’s critics have had Bush do back then? What if Bush had invaded Afghanistan in February of 2001, going after Bin Laden in a serious way? He would have gotten the same kind of criticism he’s getting now — from many of the same people who are accusing him of not being preemptive enough against Bin Laden — for going after Saddam. And such an attack probably wouldn’t have stopped the 9/11 attacks, which were outside-Afghanistan efforts. And if the 9/11 attacks had happened anyway, those people would be blaming Bush’s targeting of Bin Laden for “triggering” the 9/11 attacks.

You want a revolution in antiterrorism? Fine. We’d all love to see the plan.

Where is it?

UPDATE: This Clarke statement would seem worthy of more attention.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Wonkette, as always, is amusing.

READER TOM BROSZ EMAILS:

Anybody notice how many people are, almost simultaneously, berating George Bush for not taking out bin Laden, and berating Sharon for taking out Ahmed Yassin?

Yes, I have.

HERE’S A PICTURE of the UT Agriculture Experimental Campus across the river, taken earlier this morning as I drove into work. You can’t tell from the image, but the odds are that some of those cows (barely visible under the trees) are clones. You can see more here, though the picture isn’t as pretty.

JONATHAN RAUCH offers actual good news about the U.N. No, really!

THE BLOVIATOR is back and blogging about public health, vaccinations, and more.

MORAL BLIND SPOTS: One of my regular email critics sent this, which I think is the first non-critical email I’ve received from him. It’s pretty revealing:

I realize you generally assume that the vast majority of reporters are praying to their pagan gods for our failure in Iraq and the war against terrorism (I am not one of them), and are now crafting their stories to reflect and facilitate such a thing. While I think you are dead wrong on this, I have to admit I was taken aback by a conversation I had recently with a colleague.

I work as a freelancer for a major national publication, and was talking to my editor as we were closing a piece last week. It was Thursday, and the reports were coming out of Pakistan that we might have Ayman al-Zawahiri surrounded. I passed this news on to the editor, who was crestfallen: “Oh, no. I don’t want anything good to happen for Bush before the election,” was the reaction (P.S., this editor does not edit foreign or political stories).

It was a sickening moment. This is a man responsible for thousands of American deaths. So while I have no desire to see Bush re-elected, and I disagree with our attack on Iraq, to hope for our failure in capturing one of the deadliest people in the world is a moral blindspot.

Yes, it is. And — based both on reports like this one, and on the obvious slant of some stories — I don’t think that editor is alone, though I doubt an actual majority of his colleagues feel that way. But some clearly do, letting their Bush-hatred trump their patriotism. This is no surprise, I suppose: there were plenty of Romans who played politics with the barbarian attacks, and sometimes even secretly allied with the barbarians, in the hopes of gaining political advantage at home. This isn’t on that level. But it’s nothing admirable. And it’s naive to think that such attitudes don’t influence coverage where they’re present.

UPDATE: Roger Simon comments.

ANOTHER UPDATE: I kind of figured that my correspondent would rather remain anonymous, though he didn’t request that. (Don’t count on me getting this right with your email — if you want to be anonymous, say so!) But I found this later email from him disturbing:

A word of thanks for leaving my name out of that post.

Realized after I sent the email that if my name were posted it might easily make its way back to the editor. I’m barely making enough money at the journalism thing as it is… the last thing I need is to be blacklisted.

Blacklisted by Big Media? For wanting us to win the war? An appalling thought.

PAUL KRUGMAN’S 400TH COLUMN: A milestone that I missed, but it has not gone unremarked.

CARNIVAL OF THE CAPITALISTS IS UP: Don’t miss it!

WITH A NAME LIKE THIS, it’s got to be a good blog.

THERE ARE LOTS OF KERRY QUESTIONS THAT I DON’T UNDERSTAND: Tom Maguire is looking at some of them. And here’s a report of Kerry hedging. Go figure!

Was Kerry at a meeting in 1971 where people talked about assassinations? Does it matter now? I’m really not sure what I think about this story, which seems rather complicated to me. Hedging on Kerry’s part probably won’t help, though.

UPDATE: Trying to get witnesses to change their stories is probably a bad idea, too.