TOUR THE INDIAN BLOGOSPHERE: This week’s Blog Mela is up!
Archive for 2005
July 15, 2005
WARTRASH is a new warblog by Fred Lapides.
CNN NOTICES SOME FEMALE BLOGGERS: Trey Jackson has the video.
A BBC REPORTER IS READING THE NEW HARRY POTTER BOOK, and is liveblogging the reading. Liveblogging a book — why didn’t I think of that?
A SAUDI WOMAN GETS A COMMERCIAL PILOT’S LICENSE: I hope she’s the face of the future. Heck, one day maybe they’ll let her drive a car.
DAVID CORN RESPONDS ANGRILY to claims that he was the Plame-outer. (“And, by the way, Mark Felt was not Deep Throat; it was me.”) Given that she never seems to have been outed at all, really, this seems like a non-issue to me. And this roundup of the lefty blogs’ response from Slate suggests that the scandal is pretty much over:
Plucky liberal Joshua Micah Marshall offers what he hopes will be the Democratic line on the scandal. “The entire Wilson/Plame story and the Rove/White House criminal probe sub-story are just so many threads thrown off a much larger and more consquential ball of yarn: the administration’s use of fraudulent evidence of an Iraqi nuclear weapons program to seal the deal for war on Iraq with the American people,” he writes at TPMCafe. Atrios, E Pluribus Unum, Ed Cone, and others on the left are opening up another front in the war on Rove, passing around a New York Times column that attacks the advisor for turning 9/11 into a domestic political opportunity.
When the loudest critics start changing the subject back to their old discredited talking points, well . . . .
UPDATE: Cliff May responds to Corn here — and scroll up from that post for more.
WHILE YOU’RE HITTING TIPJARS, you might want to hit Michael Yon’s. He’s doing more worthwhile stuff with the money than I am.
MORE DOCUMENT-SHREDDING AT THE U.N.: It’s a wonder that they have any left.
THE BUSH GIRLS GO TO AFRICA: Sounds like the title to a movie.
F.E.C. UPDATE: Allison Hayward looks at the D.C. Circuit decision today.
AT INSTAPUNDIT, WE TAKE A FLOGGIN’ AND KEEP ON BLOGGIN’ — Apparently, they’ve dug up our phone line by mistake, leaving us without phone or DSL. Luckily, the Verizon card is still working. It’s slow, but it’s faster than dialup.
THIS WEEK’S CARNIVAL OF THE RECIPES IS UP!
A PHONY EPIDEMIC:
A Texas federal judge has issued a blistering 249-page order and sanctioned a high-profile plaintiffs law firm, accusing the plaintiffs bar of manufacturing a “phantom epidemic” of the lung disease silicosis.
And at least one legal expert suggests a similar finding might come if courts look closely at recent absestosis litigation.
Judge Janis Graham Jack, in a June 30 ruling, noted that more than 9,000 plaintiffs in the multidistrict litigation case had been seen by about 8,000 physicians who diagnosed and treated them for every other health problem, but never noted the presence of silicosis. The silica illness diagnoses came from just 12 doctors, most of whom were in the employ of various mobile-screening operations, doing what she called “assembly-line diagnosing.” In Re: Silica Products Liability Litigation, No. 1553 (S.D. Tex.). . . .
Brickman finds it remarkable that “despite the overwhelming evidence of fraud uncovered” in the silicosis cases, no state prosecutor has ever launched an investigation. A representative of the Mississippi attorney general’s office, Special Assistant Attorney General Jacob Ray, says he cannot confirm or deny that his office is investigating the silicosis cases.
Sounds like it ought to be.
REUTERS GETTING COZY WITH TERRORISTS. No big surprise.
EVERY TIME ANDREW SULLIVAN RATTLES HIS TIPJAR, I get more donations, too. Thanks!
SANDY BERGER UPDATE: Unbillable Hours has looked at the documents and has some thoughts on why the sentencing was postponed.
INTERESTING LEGAL DEVELOPMENT:
The Department of Defense won an important legal victory this morning in the Hamdan case. The United States Court of Appeals in Washington D.C. reversed a district court decision that Hamdan, who admits he was Osama bin Laden’s driver in Afghanistan, could not be tried by a military commission unless a “competent tribunal” first determined that he was not a prisoner of war under the Geneva Convention. The Court concluded that the Geneva Convention is not enforceable in federal court. It also found that a military commission is a “competent tribunal,” and thus that such a commission can try Hamdan and, in doing so, decide his claim that he’s entitled to prisoner of war status.
No link to the opinion yet.
UPDATE: Link here, via (of course) Howard Bashman. I notice that the case was argued by my law school classmate Peter Keisler.
WITH THE NEW HARRY POTTER BOOK COMING OUT, retailers are resorting to the Dark Arts to get sales.
Well, okay, not that dark.
LONDON UPDATE: “The British-born mastermind of the London attacks had direct links with al-Qaeda, police sources confirmed yesterday.”
UPDATE: Another arrest:
CAIRO, Egypt (AP) – An Egyptian biochemist arrested Friday in Cairo in connection with the London bombings taught at a British university after taking graduate courses in North Carolina.
Magdy el-Nashar, 33, was arrested early Friday, an Egyptian government official said on condition of anonymity because an official announcement of the arrest had not been made. El-Nashar was being interrogated by Egyptian authorities, the official said.
Stay tuned.
ANOTHER UPDATE: El-Nahsar bio here.
JOHN TABIN LOOKS FURTHER AT THE PEW POLL on Muslim attitudes on terror and democracy. “Fighting terrorism in Afghanistan and Iraq does not seem to have massively radicalized the Muslim world; if anything the opposite is happening.” Meanwhile, Austin Bay looks at Al Qaeda’s information war.
UPDATE: Andrew Bolt:
IN a selfish way, I’m glad just one newspaper reported just one line of Major-General Jim Molan’s speech two weeks ago.
What better proof of what I’ve argued so often – that you are not being told the good news from Iraq.
Indeed.
TODD ZYWICKI is recruiting law professors to sign an amicus brief in FAIR v. Rumsfeld, the Solomon Amendment military-recruiters-on-campus case. If you’re a law professor, and interested, follow the link for more background.
SADDAM / OSAMA CONNECTIONS: Check out this audio clip.
PLAME UPDATE: The leak came from the press?
Chief presidential adviser Karl Rove testified to a grand jury that he talked with two journalists before they divulged the identity of an undercover CIA officer but that he originally learned about the operative from the news media and not government sources, according to a person briefed on the testimony.
Mickey Kaus has more, and Tom Maguire has much, much more. And Orin Kerr has the big question: “I wonder if the Plame story will now play out in an infinite loop of leak investigations.”
UPDATE: Joe Wilson seems to be letting more air out of what looks more and more like a grossly inflated story: “My wife was not a clandestine officer the day that Bob Novak blew her identity.”
ANOTHER UPDATE: It’s an “I told you so” moment. I have to say that I’ve been skeptical of theories that this was yet another Karl Rove “rope-a-dope” operation designed to sucker Administration opponents into discrediting themselves. But now I’m not so sure. And Ed Morrissey notes an irony.
And I don’t know what to make of this: David Corn not Novak, was the outer?
MORE: Jon Henke has a big roundup post. The rope-a-dope bit is looking more plausible.
STILL MORE: Daniel Larsen emails that Wilson’s statement isn’t what it seems:
He was responding to Blitzer’s charge that “you’ve sought to capitalize on this extravaganza, having that photo shoot with your wife, who was a clandestine officer of the CIA.” What I think he meant was: “It doesn’t matter that I had the photo shoot, because she stopped being a clandestine agent the moment that column came out.”
I guess I could see that — except that for that to be the case she would have had to be a clandestine agent up to that point, which doesn’t seem to be the case:
A former CIA covert agent who supervised Mrs. Plame early in her career yesterday took issue with her identification as an “undercover agent,” saying that she worked for more than five years at the agency’s headquarters in Langley and that most of her neighbors and friends knew that she was a CIA employee.
“She made no bones about the fact that she was an agency employee and her husband was a diplomat,” Fred Rustmann, a covert agent from 1966 to 1990, told The Washington Times. . . . In addition, Mrs. Plame hadn’t been out as an NOC since 1997, when she returned from her last assignment, married Mr. Wilson and had twins, USA Today reported yesterday.
Doesn’t sound very clandestine to me.
NON-ERROR CORRECTION UPDATE: Tony Pierce sends this post, which says the CNN transcript of Wilson is wrong. But actually, the story seems to be Wilson claiming that he meant what reader Larsen suggests above — at least, that’s the gist of this Media Matters release. Since it seems as clear as anything in this affair that Valerie Plame was not a covert agent the day before Novak’s column either, I think we can chalk this up to Joe Wilson’s habitual disingenuousness. But as John Tierney notes, that’s not surprising:
The endangered spies Ms. Wilson was compared to James Bond in the early days of the scandal, but it turns out she had been working for years at C.I.A. headquarters, not exactly a deep-cover position. Since being outed, she’s hardly been acting like a spy who’s worried that her former contacts are in danger.
At the time her name was printed, her face was still not that familiar even to most Washington veterans, but that soon changed. When her husband received a “truth-telling” award at a Nation magazine luncheon, he wept as he told of his sorrow at his wife’s loss of anonymity. Then he introduced her to the crowd.
And then, for any enemy agents who missed seeing her face at the luncheon but had an Internet connection, she posed with her husband for a photograph in Vanity Fair.
The smeared whistle-blower Mr. Wilson accused the White House of willfully ignoring his report showing that Iraq had not been seeking nuclear material from Niger. But a bipartisan report from the Senate Intelligence Committee concluded that his investigation had yielded little valuable information, hadn’t reached the White House and hadn’t disproved the Iraq-Niger link – in fact, in some ways it supported the link.
Mr. Wilson presented himself as a courageous truth-teller who was being attacked by lying partisans, but he himself became a Democratic partisan (working with the John Kerry presidential campaign) who had a problem with facts. He denied that his wife had anything to do with his assignment in Niger, but Senate investigators found a memo in which she recommended him.
Karl Rove’s version of events now looks less like a smear and more like the truth: Mr. Wilson’s investigation, far from being requested and then suppressed by a White House afraid of its contents, was a low-level report of not much interest to anyone outside the Wilson household.
Still, I do want to be fair to the seemingly dishonest and inept Ambassador Wilson, so you can read Tony’s rather different take by following the link. But note the uselessness of this correction:
During the early afternoon of July 15, 2005, the Associated Press issued a corrected version of the article noting Wilson’s clarification that “his wife lost her ability to be a covert agent because of the leak, not that she had stopped working for the CIA beforehand.”
Nobody ever said that she wasn’t working for the CIA — the question is whether she was a covert spy or a paperpusher, and the answer seems pretty clearly to be the latter. And “ability to be a covert agent” isn’t the same as actually being a covert agent, though he hopes you’ll miss that. This is, sadly, typical of Wilson here, though it seems that she lost her ability to be a covert agent when she married Wilson, really.
MORE STILL: Jerry Pournelle, who was against invading Iraq, offers his explanation of what’s going on with Wilson:
Once Wilson wrote his op ed piece, anyone would know that there would be investigative reporters looking into what he was doing. His wife works at Langley, and it’s not hard to watch who goes in and out of the gate every day. Analysts don’t have very deep cover. The law is specific and says that it is a Federal crime to knowingly and intentionally identify covert CIA employees. That was largely intended to stop the actions of some of the anti-American publications that were rampant back in past times. It was framed in part not to criminalize discussions of common knowledge subjects. When Wilson’s wife got him the job going to Niger as an expert, and he then went to the Washington Post with his article denouncing the Administration, it wasn’t hard to predict that someone would cotton on to to this, and it would come out.
It became common knowledge that his wife got him the job. Who told that story isn’t clear. Possibly CIA people who do not share the anti-administration views. There are some. Quite a few, actually. But it was inevitable that it would come out, and both she and Joe Wilson must have known that.
There are a lot of sticks to beat the administration with. The war was not a good idea. But most of the Democrats who want to beat up the administration over the war voted to authorize it, so an honest analysis of the war decision factors won’t work. So, we have this imbecile investigation taking up time. No one is going to show that anyone knowingly and intentionally identified a covert CIA employee. One can make up a lot of plausible scenarios about what happened, including the simplest, that it was common knowledge and no one even thought about her being a covert employee of the Agency. There may even have been someone who did knowingly and intentionally identify her, but you won’t find it out at this range, because whoever did that would have been careful to tell the story to others in a way that masks his identity. He was just passing along gossip. But in fact, it was probable that it was just passing along gossip.
Read the whole thing.
July 14, 2005
BRAVO FOR JOHN HOWARD:
MAXINE McKEW: Prime Minister, if as you say you can’t rule out that possibility that we could have potential bombers right here in Australia, what if today’s announcement, this redeployment to Afghanistan and our continued presence in Iraq is all the provocation they need?
JOHN HOWARD: Maxine, these people are opposed to what we believe in and what we stand for, far more than what we do. If you imagine that you can buy immunity from fanatics by curling yourself in a ball, apologising for the world – to the world – for who you are and what you stand for and what you believe in, not only is that morally bankrupt, but it’s also ineffective. Because fanatics despise a lot of things and the things they despise most is weakness and timidity. There has been plenty of evidence through history that fanatics attack weakness and retreating people even more savagely than they do defiant people.
(Via Art Vandelay). Ms. McKew needs to read this column by Max Boot.