GEORGE GALLOWAY STAYS TRUE TO TYPE.
Archive for 2005
July 7, 2005
WHAT ARE THE CHANCES OF A TERRORIST NUCLEAR ATTACK? Good question. My take: Nontrivial, but not huge. Your results may differ, and may be right.
RUSSIA: Turning into a Baltic bully.
London closed its subway system and evacuated all stations after emergency services were called to explosions in and around the financial district.
Police said blasts occurred in “multiple locations.” A bus exploded near Russell Square, causing “numerous casualties,” a police statement said. A policeman on the scene at Liverpool Street said fatalities had occurred.
Liverpool Street station, Aldgate, Edgware Road and King’s Cross are among stations evacuated after blasts were reported on underground train links. Scotland Yard said the first blast was reported at 8:50 a.m. local time.
Josh Trevino, who is enroute to London, has more. And Tim Worstall has a roundup, including links to firsthand accounts by London bloggers. Check out the UK blogs aggregator for more, too. The British government seems to be suggesting that anti-G8 activists are behind this, but it sounds more like Al Qaeda.
UPDATE: They’re searching the DC Metro for bombs, fearing a coordinated attack. Thanks to Kathryn Jean Lopez’ early-rising, there’s lots more at The Corner.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Much more here, including more blogger accounts. And TigerHawk live-blogged Tony Blair’s speech.
Norm Geras has more, too.
MORE: Comments at Terrorism Unveiled: “Typical Al Qaeda.” Some thoughts on the political ramifications, too.
Meanwhile, Michele Catalano has lots more at The Command Post. And Columbia law student Tony Rickey is blogging from London.
STILL MORE: Jeff Jarvis has a roundup with lots of links. So does Matt Sheffield, who also has some eyewitness emails.
Pepperdine Law student Alexander Smart sends this email from London:
I’m a Pepperdine law student studying in London right now. I’m presently sitting in effective lock-down in South Kensington, due to a “suspicious package” found on the street in front of our building. As of now, official count (the bbc) is seven explosions, six on the tube and one on a double decker. There are two confirmed deaths, and “a high number of casualties.” The tube is completely closed, and right now, there are no buses moving around in central London, and it looks like the center is closed to all traffic.
Stay tuned.
MORE STILL: Reader Neil Richards emails from London:
A few blocks away from the initial bomb blast, the offices of my company have remained open. In many ways it’s the safest thing to do, best to stay where people can keep track of you. Everybody at the office is trying to get their work done as best as possible (difficult with a number of staff unable to get in this morning). Life goes on, and everybody is making plans of how to deal with the crisis in a calm manner. Nobody is trying to leave the office. Unless we’re specifically targeted we’ll stay put and do our best to ignore the threats.
Here’s another huge roundup, with lots of reader comments, from Europhobia.
InstaPunk has pictures from London. And there’s much more here, including a map of the explosions’ location.
Gateway Pundit has more photos, too.
And a reader notes that the Abu Hamza trial opened Tuesday in London and suggests that’s a more likely connection than the G8 conference. One hopes that the British authorities will respond to these attacks by cracking down on the rather large number of Muslim extremists who have set up shop in London.
Indian blogger Amit Varma notes that we’re all in this together: “This isn’t just an attack on the UK, but, like the attacks of 9/11, they’re an attack on a way of life and a value-system, one that is dear not just to Western countries, but to millions in the developing world, like me. Concepts like personal freedom, equality of women and, in fact, human rights are alien to those behind the attack, and they must be defeated.”
If you want to send your condolences, here’s the contact page for the British Embassy and consulates in the United States.
EVEN MORE: Amateurs? An “unsophisticated homegrown attack?” Hmm. I’m not so sure. Patrick Belton observes:
I’m quite struck by the strategic cynicism of attacking public transportation, and then after an interval, the crowded bus lines once commuters had been diverted to them. But several friends I spoke with this morning who have lived in Israel say that this pattern – an initial attack, followed by a staggered attack on emergency services once they’d arrived – isn’t at all uncommon. (My friends living abroad are kindly texting to see if i have all of my relevant body parts, attached in the appropriate fashion.) I find that such an attack on commuting civilians completely unengaged with the machinery of government, war, or administration is striking me as stomach-turning and revolting in a way I could not have previously imagined.
Well, that’s who we’re fighting here.
I think the attacks were a strategic mistake. They’ve got even Ken Livingstone sounding Churchillian. I’m assuming that they’re Al Qaeda-related, though I suppose we don’t know that for sure yet.
Meanwhile, here’s an article on London’s growing role as a center of radical Islam. Except:
In the past decade, the United Kingdom’s undisputed political, economic, and cultural center has also become a major world center of political Islam and anti-Semitic, anti-Israel, and anti-American activism. Through its Arabic-language newspapers, magazines, and publishing houses, not to mention its flourishing network of bookshops, mosques, and community centers, radical Islam has taken full advantage of what British democracy has to offer for its anti-Western goals, reaping the benefits of London’s significance as a hub of global finance, electronic media, and mass communications technology.46 The effect of this with regard to anti-Semitism and virulent anti-Zionism has therefore been quite different from that found elsewhere in Europe: Although Britain’s Muslim population of about 1.5 million is only a quarter of that of France, the growing influence of London’s Muslims has given the most inflammatory of ideas a greater legitimacy in the capital’s political and cultural discourse than they enjoy virtually anywhere else.
I suspect that will change.
YET MORE: Bill Roggio has an analysis of what the attacks may mean. And here are more photos from London, via Flickr.
MICKEY KAUS to Reynolds and Welch: Nice try!
July 6, 2005
DON’T MISS THE WAR NEWS ROUNDUP at Winds of Change. These are regular things there, so I don’t link them every time, but that doesn’t mean they’re not worth reading.
PROTESTING KELO IN CONNECTICUT: About 1,000 people showed up. The Autonomist has a report, with photos and video of a short speech by Susette Kelo.
CHUCK SIMMINS LOOKS AT what’s happening with tsunami aid after 6 months.
LOTS OF INTERESTING STUFF AT VODKAPUNDIT: Just keep scrolling.
SOMEBODY FEED ‘EM SOME CAT FOOD: “If you’re going to serve up a conspiracy theory–without any evidence, of course–shouldn’t the theory at least make some kind of sense?”
IAIN MURRAY WRITES ON CHIRAC VS. THE ANGLOSPHERE. “Having attacked Tony Blair and Britain itself at the recent EU summit, Chirac has inadvertently driven Blair towards a Euro-skeptic position, something that has proved very popular in the U.K. As the Jacques attack was completely unprovoked, it is unlikely that the prime minister will be in conciliatory mood.”
THE CARNIVAL OF THE NBA is back!
TOM MAGUIRE has lots of thoughts on the Judith Miller affair.
SHIELD JOURNALISM, NOT JOURNALISTS: Matt Welch has some thoughts on how we should respond to the Miller/Cooper affair:
Offer the protection to any citizen who is in the process of conducting journalism. Judith Miller and Matthew Cooper clearly identified themselves as working on articles they hoped would be published. That’s journalism. Similarly, freelance writer Vanessa Leggett—who was shamefully jailed for 168 days a few years back for refusing to cough up notes on a Houston murder she was compiling for a book, after the Justice Department successfully argued she was not a “working journalist”—would have also qualified.
Non-“professional” bloggers, too, could qualify, in the extremely unlikely event that A) they were actually compiling original data worth subpoenaing, and B) they had identified themselves to interview subjects as working on something to be published. Making this determination would be far less complicated than the current federal shield bill’s messy attempt to define a “covered person” by publication or outlet.
That’s right, though the current journalism establishment hasn’t seemed especially interested in that approach. That’s funny, because as I noted in my piece on the Vanessa Leggett affair (which Matt links), there’s already a statute that does that in other contexts:
At any rate, a more relevant standard than “professional journalist” (though also not a First Amendment doctrine) would seem to be found in 42 U.S. Code section 2000aa, which forbids law enforcement agents from seizing “work product materials” or “other documents” possessed by a person “reasonably believed to have a purpose to disseminate to the public a newspaper, book, broadcast or other similar form of public communication.”
This statute (which, oddly enough, neither the Justice Department nor Ms. Leggett’s lawyers mentioned in any press accounts I could find) speaks to purpose, not status. Whether or not you’re a “real” journalist might, I suppose, have some small relevance in deciding whether you really plan to disseminate the work to the public, but that’s not the test: So long as you have the necessary purpose, that’s enough. (Interestingly, Ms. Leggett had in fact written two previous nonfiction works, both published by the FBI). There are exceptions to this statute, involving child pornography, national security, and immediate threats to life, but none would seem to apply here.
The statute isn’t relevant to this case — which is very different from the Vanessa Leggett case — but it certainly demonstrates that Congress has managed to grok the difference between being a member of the Journalists Guild and being a journalist in the past.
UPDATE: Fritz Schranck looks at how privilege works in Delaware, which may provide a useful model. He’s very impressed that Delaware’s privilege applies to “polemicists.”
ANOTHER UPDATE: Jeff Jarvis: “This onion has more layers.”
The editor-in-chief of Time Inc. made news the other day by offering to do what most of us take for granted: Obey the law. It’s about time. . . .
The only protection that might help is an absolute shield, akin to the attorney-client or doctor-patient privilege. But as University of Chicago law professor Geoffrey Stone notes, even those have exceptions. If a client asks his lawyer how to get away with robbing a bank, the conversation is not protected because the privilege was never meant to facilitate violations of the law.
The sort of privilege sought by the news media, however, would do just that. Reporters who are witnesses to a crime could evade the normal duty of citizens to tell what they know.
Journalists like nothing better than exposing self-seeking behavior by special interests who care nothing for the public good. In this case, they can find it by looking in the mirror.
Indeed. On the other hand, there’s this perspective:
“There are times when the greater good of our democracy demands an act of conscience,” Arthur Sulzberger Jr., chairman of the New York Times Co., said in a statement.
Didn’t Fawn Hall say something like that?
UPDATE: These are two rather different cases:
In Washington, New York Times reporter Judith Miller has been sent to jail for disobeying a court order to testify before a federal grand jury to protect her source. In New York, Lil’ Kim has been sent to jail for testifying falsely before a federal grand jury to protect her friends.
But the juxtaposition was clever.
HACKERS 1, CHINA 0.
MILITARY VETERANS ARE DOGPILING ON DUNCAN BLACK over some insensitive comments.
UPDATE: Related post from a non-chickenhawk here.
SMALL PROTESTS AND BIG PROTESTS: Guess which ones get more attention.
SOME PEOPLE ARE ALREADY AWFULLY EXCITED about the new Harry Potter book,
PHIL CARTER’S OPED, missing in action this morning, is now up on the New York Times website, with a correction and an apology. (And the error corrected seems a bit, um, odd. Do editors usually do this? Not to my pieces.)
If you ask me, the whole episode is a tribute to the power of Tom Maguire.
UPDATE: Bill Quick has more thoughts on the Times’ editorial slip:
The only thing you need to decipher this bit of self-aggrandizing code masquerading as a “correction” is to ask yourself, “An editor added these statements in quotes? Why? And they were supposed to be “removed” before the piece was printed? Why add the false quotes in the first place, then?
Why, indeed?
GUN CONTROL MEANS HITTING YOUR TARGET: Are federal shooting ranges open to the public, by law?
FROM THE SCHADENFREUDE DEPARTMENT:
French President Jacques Chirac, who flew to Singapore to present Paris’ bid to host the 2012 Olympics, came away empty-handed, suffering his fourth defeat in 15 months. . . .
For Chirac, 72, the defeat is yet another setback after the French on May 29 rejected a referendum on the European constitution and his political party was routed in regional and European parliamentary elections last year.
It’s a petty pleasure, but a pleasure nonetheless. And no, it doesn’t bother me that Bloomberg didn’t get it for NYC, either.
PODCASTING WITH NAPSTER: “Bottom line: To fill an MP3 player with music today – and variety is what I want – I could spend $1000 for 1000 songs over at iTunes, or $15 per month at Napster. I’m going with Napster.”
THIS WEEK’S CARNIVAL OF EDUCATION is up!
BLOG JOURNALISM: Ed Morrissey has been interviewing Bernard Goldberg, whose new book, 100 People Who Are Screwing Up America