BARBARA AMIEL WRITES:

I HAVE OFTEN SEEN disagreements between the BBC and British governments, whether Labour or Conservative. But the battle going on now is quite different. It is a struggle for power between the two. Incredibly, it has all the hallmarks of an attempted coup d’état by the BBC. . . .

The serious story here is the spectacle of the BBC brass, lined up like a row of colonels in a banana republic, trying desperately to unseat a government which pursued a policy of which they disapprove. It is, to say the least, an unedifying spectacle.

Things are getting ugly. Actually, they already have.

A LAWYER EMAILS that this story is a reason not to automatically disbelieve your client when he says he has no idea how that stuff wound up on his hard drive:

A man has been cleared of child porn charges, after investigators found that an Internet attacker was responsible for the presence of illicit images on his PC

A man accused of storing child pornography on his computer has been cleared after it emerged that his computer had been infected by a Trojan horse, which was responsible for transferring the images onto his PC.

Julian Green, 45, was taken into custody last October after police with a search warrant raided his house. He then spent a night in a police cell, nine days in Exeter prison and three months in a bail hostel. During this time, his ex-wife won custody of his seven year old daughter and possession of his house. . . .

Green told The Evening Standard that the experience wrecked his life because he was treated like a depraved sex fiend. “I had never been in trouble before. In cases like this it is not innocent until proved guilty, but the other way around,” he said.

I wonder what the authorities will do to make him whole. Nothing, I expect.

DALE AMON IS RUNNING A QUIZ:

1) Whose idea was the Department of Homeland Security?

2) Who suggested the US use pre-emptive action against States harbouring WMD?

Nope, no hints here. But you might read this.

CHARLES AUSTIN HAS MOVED. Check out his new digs.

Christopher Johnson has moved, too!

ALGERIAN TOURIST UPDATE: Thomas Nephew notes that the remaining hostages appear to have been moved to Mali. The rest of the news isn’t very encouraging.

SOME GOOD QUESTIONS:

Northwestern University law professor Anthony D’Amato has issued a strong caution to universities, calling on them to consider students’ privacy before shipping them off to the RIAA sponsored legal gulag. Lawyers could turn Loyola’s willingness to work with the RIAA into a black mark against students suspected of trading copyrighted files. More than that, however, D’Amato questions why Loyola – unlike MIT – was so ready to help the RIAA instead of its own tuition-paying kids.

Here’s another: why would you want to go to a school that cares so little for your privacy?

OUTSOURCING: Here’s the last word on the subject.

SWEDISH PAPERS ARE REPORTING a WMD discovery. Is it true? Beats me. There’s more here.

There’s also this report originally from The Times (but you need a subscription to read it there):

London – David Kelly, the British weapons expert at the centre of the Iraq dossier row, had amassed firm evidence to show that Saddam Hussein built and tested a “dirty bomb.”

Designed to cause cancer and birth defects, the radiological weapon could have been used by terrorists to create panic and widespread contamination in a crowded city.

Kelly, who committed suicide last month, presented evidence of the bomb to the government in 1995 and recommended to Foreign Office officials that it feature in the government’s intelligence dossier on Iraq. However, despite secret Iraqi documents being produced to prove its existence, it was not included. . . .

Iraq’s dirty bomb was made from a material called radioactive zirconium which was packed into a bomb casing with high explosives. Iraq had access to zirconium stored at its Al-Tarmiya reactor site – under United Nations safeguards – ostensibly for use in its peaceful nuclear power program.

Interesting. My goodness, it would certainly undercut the credibility of an awful lot of the Bush Administration’s critics if this sort of information turned out to be true, wouldn’t it? I’ve been skeptical of those who have theorized that the Administration was holding back on this stuff so as to draw its critics out and then embarrass them, but this makes me wonder. And how very convenient, to have it come out via the Swedes. . . .

Meanwhile, in a somewhat-related issue, here’s a report of Al Qaeda connections to the ongoing attacks in Iraq.

UPDATE: A couple of readers say that zirconium is an unlikely candidate for a dirty bomb. I don’t know. But I did find this CNN transcript:

MCEDWARDS: And what about what we hear called a dirty bomb?

DUELFER: Iraq acknowledged to us in 1995 that [in] fact they had designed and tested what is called, popularly, a dirty bomb, which is essentially a conventional explosion, but designed to spread radioactive material. We reported this in some detail in December 1995. The material which they were using them was zirconium.

Interesting. That’s Charles Duelfer, deputy UNSCOM chairman. He’s supposed to know about that stuff, right? On the other hand, this transcript is from 2002, which makes the story old news, to the extent that it was news back then.

HYPOCRISY FROM THE WORLD BANK:

In a statement worthy of the French diplomat he apparently aspires to become, World Bank President James Wolfensohn concluded his meeting with the Iraqi Governing Council with the disdainful remark that “a constitution and an elected government would constitute a recognized government, but what do we do in the meantime?”

Whoaaa there, Daddy Warbucks! Hold the sauterne and the foie gras!

I don’t recall that Saddam’s regime was elected. Or that it governed by a constitution. Yet that terror-state was recognized as legitimate by the world’s diplomats and international bankers. Every slithering, interest-bearing one of them.

And now Iraq’s interim Governing Council doesn’t deserve the level of recognition accorded Saddam Hussein?

Saddam seized power in a coup, slaughtered his opponents, started successive wars of aggression, pursued weapons of mass destruction and never held a single honest election. But he was just fine with foreign ministries, the United Nations and world financial institutions.

Yet Iraq’s representative Governing Council lacks legitimacy as it seeks to build democracy? And Iraq doesn’t qualify for reconstruction loans?

This is a double standard of such a disgraceful magnitude that the only appropriate adjective is “European.”

Wolfensohn is American (though I think he’s a naturalized citizen of Australian extraction). And I’m not sure a Eurocrat would say that particular stupid thing.

Come to think of it, those Eurocrats aren’t exactly elected, are they?

Meanwhile, Reporters Sans Frontieres is learning that the U.N.’s hostility to freedom isn’t just an annoyance to the United States.

I’VE BEEN SAYING FOR QUITE A WHILE that Algeria deserves more attention. Now Amir Taheri gives it some.

SORRY FOR THE LIMITED BLOGGING: The Nigerian relatives are in town.

Meanwhile, note that Chief Wiggles has moved.

TONY ADRAGNA WRITES on a U.S. “war crime” that wasn’t.

There have been a lot of those, haven’t there? But somehow I had missed this one.

BAGHDAD UNIVERSITY isn’t doing quite as well as this opening paragraph suggests, but the news is still encouraging:

BAGHDAD — Two young women strolled arm in arm toward the university bus stop, giddy with relief that final exams were over. Around them surged a stream of students as diverse as it was high-spirited: girls in modest black veils or skin-tight fashion ensembles, trim-bearded Shiite and clean-shaven Sunni Muslim youths, minority Kurds and Christians.

Fascinating stuff.

MATT WELCH takes a close look at Gray Davis. You should listen to Matt. He’s a man who’s ahead of his time. Perhaps too far for his own good!

A FEW READERS (well, okay, one) emailed to say that my link below to a story reporting that Vaclav Havel wore a t-shirt reading “F–k the Communists!” was in poor taste. I don’t get it — people Fisk the Communists all the time. . . .

It’s not like it said “Communists s–k” or anything.

I’ll be here all week.

OBVIOUSLY, THE ANTHRAX-BY-MAIL ATTACKS NEVER HAPPENED — otherwise surely the FBI would have found something by now:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – No traces of anthrax have been found from a Maryland pond that the FBI drained in June as part of its investigation into the 2001 deadly anthrax attacks, law enforcement officials said on Friday.

They said the laboratory tests on the soil samples had been completed fairly soon after the draining of the pond located in a municipal forest owned by the city of Frederick, which is about 50 miles from Washington, D.C.

The FBI began the draining on June 9 and it took about three weeks, the officials said. The FBI spent just under $250,000 on it.

“The results did not turn up anything,” one official said.

And they’ve had access to the entire country for months! Years, even.

FORGET TOM DASCHLE’S BLOG: The South Dakota Politics blog is where you want to go, if you’re interested in, well, South Dakota politics. And hey, who isn’t?

STILL MORE DEVELOPMENTS on the BBC matter:

Lord Hutton revealed fresh evidence on Friday that suggests a clear conflict between accounts given by Andrew Gilligan, the BBC Today reporter, and by David Kelly, his main source.

The judge’s examination of the two men’s contradictory accounts of their meeting on May 22 at a London hotel will form a central element of his inquiry. . . .

While Mr Gilligan’s account of the meeting “in small part” matched his own recollection, its “overall character” was “quite different”, Mr Kelly claimed. His letter said he could “only conclude one of three things” – Mr Gilligan had “considerably embellished” what he had been told, or had met other people who “truly were intimately associated” with the dossier, or had “assembled comments from both multiple direct and indirect sources”.

If correct, this conclusion could prove very damaging for the BBC.

Stay, er, tuned.

BLOG JUNKY ANALYZES critics of Steven Den Beste.

BILL LOCKYER IS LAYING DOWN THE LAW to Gray Davis about campaign tactics. No trash talk, or else!

Better watch out, Gray — or he’ll introduce you to his friend Spike.

INTERESTING TRANSCRIPT of a PBS Newshour segment on the New York Times’ decision to get an ombudsman. Excerpt:

TERENCE SMITH: Susan Tifft, in a memo to the staff yesterday, Bill Keller said the committee that Joann was on had concluded that the Blair fiasco was made possible in part by a climate of, “isolation, intimidation, favoritism, and unrelenting pressure on the staff by the top editors.”

That sounds like a pretty damning indictment of Howell Raines and his deputy.

SUSAN TIFFT: Well, I think it was. I mean, in some places the report, I think, was very harsh, but I think it also was not directed entirely just at Howell Raines, the former executive editor.

I think what was really remarkable about the report was that it was really trying to get at a sort of systemic culture of the newsroom of The New York Times.

Will adding an ombudsman be enough, or is that mere window-dressing? I think that if the culture doesn’t change, it won’t be enough.

TOM DASCHLE has discovered the blog.

Julian Sanchez observes: “I suspect the next new word the senator learns will be “fisking.” I hope he finds the concept appealing.”

Looks like things are already heating up.

I WANT A T-SHIRT like Vaclav Havel’s.

PROGRESS WITH NORTH KOREA: Daniel Drezner has a roundup.

I PREDICT THAT JAMES TARANTO will have a field day with this story:

The Reuters news group and one of its US subsidiaries is being sued for racial discrimination over allegations that a “white, public school attitude” tolerated and encouraged a racist environment in which black employees were abused and persecuted.

The class action announced yesterday alleges that black employees at Radianz ­ a US-based internet services subsidiary of Reuters ­ were forced to work in “an outrageous, patently offensive environment”. One black employee was repeatedly referred to as “my nigger” by a white supervisor and was sent racially offensive emails, the action alleges. . . .

Asked if he thought it would have happened if the management had been American, he said: “There are plenty of American companies where racism happens ­ but I think it would have been less likely that it would have been done on such a wide-scale basis.”

Just remember: one man’s racist is another man’s exponent of Aryan purity!

UPDATE: Kevin Drum finds my comment above “disgusting.”

Sorry, Kevin. But Reuters repeatedly says that terrorism is a question of opinion.

I dare them to defend this suit on the basis that racism is merely the same. They won’t, and that’s because they’re hypocritical. Among other things.

ANOTHER UPDATE: It seems that Kevin must not read Taranto, and was unfamiliar with the Reuters “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter” line. That’s discussed in his comments, which have devolved into a discussion of whether it’s racist to call me “instacracker” and a dispute as to whether I’m “windy” or whether I no longer write anything except links.

Why choose guys? I’m good enough to do both at once!