OH What the Hell - I long since decided that The World's Smallest Political Quiz was essentially a libertarian push-poll. Not that there's anything wrong with that! But since it's being rediscovered by the blogosphere this weekend, I figured What the heck. And perhaps it has some utility after all. Specifically, my little corner of punditspace is typically described as "libertarian and conservative." I'm seeing bloggers with self-described libertarian leanings testing out as borderline conservatives according to the poll, which fits with the expansive hawkishness common among warbloggers. Without further ado, Unqualified Offerings' chart looks like this:

A more sophisticated political self-test was making the rounds a few months ago. It not only had more questions and more answers (five instead of three), you got to weight the question as to its importance. At least in my case, the results were uncannily accurate. I'd love to find it again.

Ya Never Know Dept. - Why does Unqualifid Offerings not dismiss claims of Jihadist or Iraqi involvement in the Oklahoma City bombing, given that this site has been pretty dismissive of what passes for evidence of Iraqi involvement in the massacres of September 2001?

Because it remembers that when McVeigh neared his date with doom, the thing he seemed to want to talk about more than anything was Iraqi civilian casualties. What's more, the way he chose to compare the dead from the Murragh Building with the dead from Iraq sounds exactly like the way the Iraqis or sympathetic jihadists would speak of the issue themselves.

The dilemma of "black ops" terrorism is stark: You want to avoid retribution by hiding your involvement. And yet, like all terrorists, you want to send a message. That's a tough straddle. Circumstantially, the McVeigh operation would look like a partially successful attempt at it.

Why only partial? Because if it did happen that way, McVeigh's recruiters failed to take into account that nobody around here much gives a shit what a mass murderer has to say about the ethics of violence.

It's About Time! - For once, Eve Tushnet is working (read: blogging) weekends. Good stuff on identity, individuality and authority. And the second installment of "The Politics of Dancing."

Speaking of which. Now playing: Warren Zevon, My Ride's Here. This is the successor to the "comeback" record, Life'll Kill Ya. It took me a little longer to really connect with, but now, by gum, I am blown away. If you were disappointed by Elvis Costello's When I Was Cruel, I nevertheless doubt you will be disappointed by this one.

News that Stays News Department - This afternoon, while walking through the assisted-living facility where the Matron of the Offerings lives, Unqualified Offerings found itself unaccountably singing - aloud - the Violent Femmes' "Blister in the Sun." Not too loud, mind you, but audibly. Then UO realized that one day, and before too long, this site and people like it, will still be singing the Violent Femmes in such buildings, as residents. And do you know why, Loyal Readers?

Because quality lasts.

Thought for the Day - In The Closing of the American Mind, Allan Bloom had no end of bad things to say about rock and roll. It occurs to Unqualified Offerings that the complete and only refutation of his arguments required is "Acadian Driftwood," by the Band.

UO realizes this thought for the day comes straight from the department of late hits, but ars longa, vita brevis etc.

Hands Across the Water - Turkey has made the World Cup semifinals in some sport or other. The US did not. Now, the World Cup semifinals were probably sour anyway, but Unqualified Offerings moves that, in honor of Istanblog, the blogosphere adopt Turkey as its team for the duration. I believe the call is something like

TURKIYE!!

Try it out. And post a supportive pro-Turkey message to your weblog, if you have one.

This Is Sports Center with Unqualified Offerings - Diana Moon says Bill Bruford is all wrong about why Americans don't like soccer. Paul Farhi in the Post gives credence to the "Americans don't like it because there's too little scoring" theory.

Adds Taylor Twellman, a former University of Maryland star now with the MLS's New England Revolution. "Criticizing soccer for not enough scoring is just a cheap way of saying, 'I don't understand the game. I don't want to watch it.' It's not a boring game, if you understand it."

"It's funny," Twellman says. "You don't hear the same criticism about hockey. What's the difference between soccer and NHL hockey?"

(Actually, there's quite a bit of difference. The NHL champion Detroit Red Wings averaged 3.1 goals per game this season. The MLS's two division-leading teams, the San Jose Earthquakes and the Columbus Crew, are averaging 1.46 and 1.38 goals per match, respectively. The Women's United Soccer Association's best team, the Philadelphia Charge, is chugging along at 1.9 goals per game.)

The scoring issue is vexed. In fact, hockey is the fourth of the major team sports in the US, behind football, baseball and basketball, and it's not a close fourth. Of course, Canadians love hockey. (They just can't afford it.) Ironically, they're the same people who attribute the alleged superiority of their brand of gridiron football to the fact that "there's more scoring." (And let's complicate things still further! Unqualified Offerings once took this particular disagreement to its guru in these matters, Mr. Excel. Mr. Excel said that the average CFL team scored about 3.5 more points per game than the average NFL team. That is, the average CFL game features the equivalent of a single extra touchdown.)

Needless to say, if scoring were all Americans care about, arena football would be more popular than NFL football, basketball would be more popular yet, and straight-rail billiards, where scores in professional play routinely hit 10,000, would be the undisputed king of sports.

The most intriguing explanation Unqualified Offerings has heard comes from suddenly-national Washington sports radio personality Steve Czaban. Czaban's theory, not on his website but spoken on Sportstalk 980's sports reporters show the other night, is that soccer's lower appeal to Americans is because it lacks intermediate successes. Football has first downs. Baseball has hits. Basketball dispenses with intermediate successes in favor of lots more scoring successes. Hockey has little in the way of intermediate success opportunities, but it does have around twice the shots-on-goal that soccer has. And there's a tangible change in pitch and tempo during power plays.

In soccer it's mostly all or nothing. You don't get that regular gauge of "How'm I doing?" You also don't get many statistics. And American sports fans love statistics. (I tried to find the blogger who recently made this point so I could link to him. If someone clues me in I'll add a proper credit.)

The mark of a good hypothesis is that it sheds light on problems beyond the one it was designed to solve. In the case of the Czaban Theory, the bonus is that it explains why so many of us don't bother to tune in a basketball game until the fourth quarter. Basketball makes scoring so promiscuous that a single basket is devalued. Scoring deflates from "success" to "intermediate success." The real success is the final score, and only the end-of-game baskets seem material to it.

UO provisionally accepts the Czaban Theory as the last word on American coolness to whatever the hell that game was we were unaccountably interested in for the last couple of weeks.

UPDATE: Added the link to Paul Farhi's article that I left out the first time. One noteworthy "they just don't get it" feature of the article is the way the American soccer players and coaches come across as utter scolds. They are as condescending as any postmodern academic. I predict it will make them every bit as popular.

The Personal Aspects of Blogging - There are two flies in this office. They have been here all week. They are fast. They never land. I am going to go mad.

Blogology - Eve Tushnet has a full report of the blog panel she participated in Wednesday night. (Apologies to Eve for my absence; I had company to entertain.) The report makes it clear, without anything even approaching self-puffery on Eve's part, that the organizers were very, very smart to include her on the panel. Here's one striking insight of hers as a taste:

The final nifty characteristic of blogs that I discussed was the personal nature of the writing...

That also makes it easier for others to be persuaded--we can imagine what it would be like to live all day as a leftist, a conservative, a pro-lifer, an Objectivist, and we can see that it needn't make us lousy people. So much of contemporary politics is about personal preferences and affiliations--were the leftists you knew condescending? Were the conservatives rich bigots? Who do you want to hang out with--a Gore voter, a Bush voter, or a Nader voter? Blogs show that there are leftists/conservatives/whatever who don't fit your stereotypes--there are people who are kind of like what you might be like if you were a leftist/conservative/whatever. And seeing people who you might want to be like can help you evaluate their beliefs without worrying that if you start agreeing with them you'll turn into a jerk.

Go read.

Before We Were So Rudely Interrupted I had completed a long post about a matter that broke out on Andrew Olmsted's eponymous site today. Andrew is as fair as the day is long, and it's summer, so his site is a good place to start. I have more to say but not the will to say it now.

Condemned to Repeat It - Loyal Readers who tried to log on in the last hour or so will have discovered that "it" happened again - the Movable Type database got corrupted in mid-post. The good news is that I knew how to rebuild everything after the last time, and was able to do it relatively quickly. The bad news is that, once again, item-specific anchors are hosed. If you linked to a specific Offering in the last two weeks, well, sorry. If you have the energy and more patience than the problem deserves, you could update with the new link to the same item. But why would you bother.

This is getting frustrating. I like Movable Type fine, but it's twice this month it's eaten my entire site, for whatever reason. Ginger is right about backups. It seems like the only prudent thing to do is to download the entire database folder to my hard drive before a posting session, just in case. Whee.

Monopole of Evil - Ginger Stampley notes that Bill Clinton has beaten another rap. That's how Unqualified Offerings read it anyway.

Back to the Future - Reader Mary La Croix, whose name meets all Canadian regulations pertaining to bilingual onomastic content, and who previously delighted UO readers with her guidance on proper tea preparation, announces that the ass of this site has been fact-checked: "Unqualified Offerings went live on October 21, 2002," UO claimed, implausibly, last night. It meant, of course, that Unqualified Offerings went live on October 21, 1002, with hard-hitting, controversial and yes, thoughtful critiques of what it considered the overly bellicose illuminated manuscripts of Glen Raginwald and the displaced celtic monk Andrew Suileabháin, then fulminating against the angles on behalf of the jutes.

Unqualified Offerings is glad we cleared that up. Instapunditwatch also noted the error, which I suppose takes her on the first step down the road of becoming Unqualified Offerings Watch as well.

That would be so cool, to have my own personal scold. Outside the family, I mean.

Lifeboat Games - Here's a very good Instapundit post, about whether the country should mass-vaccinate against smallpox, given that the vaccine poses rare but measurable health risks.

My own feeling is that we should vaccinate. That's because vacccination doesn't just have a preventive value, but a deterrent value: terrorists are less likely to attempt to use smallpox if the target population is vaccinated. And that's important because any effort by terrorists to use smallpox produces a high likelihood that it will spread around the world and once again infect people in places where lousy healthcare and infrastructure will make it hard to get rid of. I think that possibility has to be weighed in the balance: by vaccinating, we're not just protecting Americans, but Indians, Somalians, Cambodians, etc. (Interestingly, the Islamic world, because of bad healthcare systems and the tradition of the Haj, is especially vulnerable to such "collateral damage," though I'm not sure the terrorists are smart enough to realize that -- or perhaps inclined to care even if they do).

Upstarts! - Now there is Instapundit Watch, which says it "Fact checks Instapundit's ass, because he doesn't bother to." The site models itself on Warbloggerwatch, right down to the initially anonymous proprietor, though IPwatch is a better-designed site and said proprietor writes more gracefully than WBW founder "Eric A. Blair." (Warbloggerwatch has since added better writers.)

But tell Unqualified Offerings: Who do you have to fuck to get a link in this town? Don't let all these Johnny-Come-Latelies cloud the blogosphere mind, darnit. This site was warbloggerwatchin' and Instapunditcheckin' back in the day. Word, Yo.

Unqualified Offerings went live on October 21, 2002. On October 22, it gently chided Instapundit for leaping to conclusions about bin Laden and the assassination of Rehavim Ze'evi. The next day it chided Andrew Sullivan rather less gently for his disappointment that the President wasn't nuking someone in response to the anthrax attacks. (Unqualified Offerings lives close enough to Fort Detrick to be very glad the President has held off so far.)

It's not like it ended there, either. But don't take my word for it. We keep these archives around for a reason. Was it some parvenu leftie antiblogger who wrote

If Reynolds is going to restrict his energies to promoting greater zeal among the menfolk, he risks attaining to the condition of ideal Confederate womanhood.

Ahem. I think not.

Of course, Unqualified Offerings admits to liking Instapundit a lot more than Instapunditwatch does - it agrees with him on many domestic issues and supports, on balance, war in Afghanistan, so perhaps this site is just...wobbly?

Oh There You Are - Either the Post finally put the Pincus article on al-Qaeda strategy online, or I just finally teased it out of their search engine. Unqualified Offerings considers it a must-read.

Also, What's Your Superpower is back online. And there's a successor quiz that, well, if it doesn't kill the whole meme still counts as a valiant effort.

What stupid online quiz are you?

Road to Serfdom Department - "The Prince George's County Council voted unanimously yesterday to allow Dryclean Depot to open in an aging strip shopping center in Bowie, ending a dispute that had divided the panel along racial lines," Wednesday's Post tells us. (Tuesday's Post told us about the divide.)

The council voted to allow the store to operate in the Marketplace center on Route 450, but with the provision that no more large discount dry cleaning stores be permitted in small neighborhood shopping centers in the county. They will still be allowed in industrial areas or large regional shopping centers.

The dispute pitted the applicants, two African American men, against independent dry cleaners, mostly Korean Americans, who said the discount operation could destroy their livelihoods.

There are nine members of the PG County Council, and

Councilmember Audrey E. Scott (R-Bowie) had introduced a bill to block the chain from the Bowie site, and in earlier votes, the council's four other white members sided with her, while its four black members sided with the applicants.

That Republican Party really does distinguish itself by its devotion to free market principles, huh!

White democrats voted with Scott yesterday. After the thing blew up, everyone voted to allow the Dryclean Depot to open today.

"This was never, ever, ever intended to pit certainly the Koreans against the African Americans, or the blacks against the whites on the council," [Scott] said. "It was most unfortunate, and it was a successful attempt to divide the council."

Which is what happens when political bodies make it their business to apportion opportunity like spoils. Here in Montgomery County, we "enjoy" the flip side of the same phenomenon, a "pro-business" Democratic Council Chair who keeps finding insufficiently upscale communities to "redevelop," which always means the county throwing small businesses out to hand the land underneath them to large chains and contribution-happy construction firms.

Unqualified Offerings has nothing against large national retail establishments, actually. It used to work for one. If a LNRE thinks it can make money in a neighborhood, fine. Provided they bear their own expenses. But it's pathetic for governments to subsidize out-of-town giants at the expense of local businesses. Especially if those local business are successful in their own right. (Here in Wheaton, MD, the retail vacancy rate is less than 10%. Our Council Chair wants to put those people out of business for the sake of the Discovery Company and such folks.)

So is there anyone in Prince George's County to speak on behalf of free enterprise? Yes:

Cole said he was also "disappointed a little that this whole thing played out as a racial issue, instead of as free and simple competition and changing the game midstream."

Yesterday's 9 to 0 vote followed an emotional hearing, during which Terrell and Cole tearfully told how they'd left their careers and invested their savings to open a dry cleaners, which they may own after two years.

The Dryclean Depot investors. The only pity is that they had to beg their putative betters for the opportunity.

That Way Madness Lies - Sideshow links to a Christine Quiñones item that links to a Richard J. Ochs piece suggesting

the anthrax attacks on Capitol Hill coincided with the debates on the USA PATRIOT Act. So apparently Congressmen passed the bill without reading it too closely because they were too scared of possibly getting killed by their mail to pay adequate attention to the legislation they were reviewing. Once USA PATRIOT passed, the anthrax attacks stopped as suddenly as they started.

So is it possible that Congress, and the major news organizations who also received anthrax letters at that time, are pulling their punches because they're aware that someone, who the FBI knows works inside the government, may try to off them with some other less conspicuous biological agent if they get too far out of line? Given the administration's obsession with secrecy, I can imagine that even talking about a threat of this sort might constitute cause for arrest and indefinite military custody. Recall the constraints on librarians even saying they've been served with a USA PATRIOT search warrant.

Unqualified Offerings is what Bill Clinton used to call an anti-government extremist. So it would be the last weblog to say "But our leaders would never do something like that!" But what we have here is a speculative cui bono and nothing more. And it leads down a road my southpaw confreres might better not travel.

As an anti-government extremist ("sowing a climate of fear and division^TM" - Bill Clinton) I remember the mid-nineties. Hell, I remember usenet in the mid-nineties. And I remember occasionally running into some fellow anti-government extremist or other, in print or in person, getting worked up over speculation that David Koresh had ties to intelligence agencies, or whether some of the Bradleys at Mount Carmel mounted flame throwers, or whether this international organization or that UN body had ordered this or that depredation; that is, a lot of people trying to find some "they" or other. What I told them is, "If there is a 'they,' they'd far rather you worry about the UN or the Rothschilds than about the things like no-knock raids, the profusion of federal SWAT teams, civil asset forfeiture and the administrative law court system, all overt, structural issues that got born in broad daylight. They'd rather you talk about how Waco had to be a UN plot than about the known facts that the BATF lied about a methamphetamine lab to get a warrant, and that the FBI spent six weeks trying to drive the Branch Davidians nuts - using the same psychological warfare tricks (sleep deprivation, lights, noise etc) we used on Manuel Noriega - so that afterward the President could say:

"Well, they were crazy."

The enthusiasts of the ridiculous theories - say "least provable" if you prefer - became the unwitting allies of the forces in power.

Same shit, different administration. And looking like one that is just as willing to demagogue their opponents as loons and traitors. Don't make it easy for them.

League of Extraordinary Sherbet-Colored Blogs - Over on Sideshow, Avedon Carol says she likes the new design of Unqualified Offerings, which pleases this site. Sideshow is also looking pretty spiffy these days, having become quite legible and clean-looking. Appropriately for the unabashed leftist, her trim color is pinkish (with shades of plum). Perhaps Unqualified Offerings (lime sherbet), Sideshow (plum sherbet) and What She Really Thinks (blackberry sherbet) will form a superhero team. Not an especially...butch superteam. But you get the idea.

How Long? - Mixed in with some energetic attacks on "conservatives" in general, Jeff Hauser makes some essential points:

1) Not everyone accused of terrorism will be guilty; one only needs to understand how frequently people are wrongly convicted of capital murder -- something you would hope could only occur after the greatest precautions by law enforcement -- to realize that this concern has some merit. Which is important because. . . .
2) This "situation"'s very nebulousness means it has neither a beginning nor end point.

...

So, the conclusion is that if we are sufficiently frightened NOW to undermine the Constitution, we need to recognize that logically, those Constitutional protections are never going to return. Never. That's the problem with defining war so broadly -- the tradeoffs we might make for anomalously threatened circumstances during a legitimate state of war invoke far greater threats to liberty when that status WILL NEVER BE REVOKED.

Michael Kelly and Jonah Goldberg tell us there's a war on and we can't get all fetishistic about our personal freedoms. Meanwhile Bush Administration figures and neoconservative policy organs tell us said war could last 10 years or a generation. How hard is it to see what those two allied claims add up to?

(Link via Sideshow.)

More Unfinished Business relating to our country's proven attackers, al Qaeda. This Post story talks about the difficulty of tracing the organization's financial assets. I was struck by this part especially:

Bonner and other senior U.S. officials said they believe bin Laden's inheritance from his wealthy Saudi family was far less than the $300 million that was commonly reported. Some officials said the amount was likely closer to $30 million, and that most of it was spent forming al Qaeda in the late 1980s and early 1990s in Africa and in Afghanistan.

U.S. officials believe al Qaeda derives much of its current funding from two sources: what Dam called "informal methods of moving their money," through Islamic charities and private remittance systems called hawalas, and storing money in "commodities like gold or diamonds, converting the commodities to cash only as needed."

If bin Laden is not as rich as everyone thought, it starts to make sense that Mohammad Atta tried to get a US government loan to kill us. Note also what is conspicuously absent from the list of funding channels: money from established governments and their intelligence agencies.

On the Rare Sense of Proportion front, the article says

The administration recognizes that "hawala dealers provide an important service" in low-cost money transfers to Muslim populations, particularly in parts of Africa with no access to formal financial services, he said. "We do not think that banning hawalas altogether is the answer."

Maybe we could spare some American institutions too, like, oh, judicial review and such.

Unfinished Business - Some interesting developments in the war against our actual attackers, al Qaeda, recently. This Sunday story from the Washington Post discusses the window into current al Qaeda strategy opened by the Saudis arrested in the "Gibraltar plot." Sadly, it accompanies a Walter Pincus article, "Al Qaeda Aims to Destabilize Secular Nations," that I can't find on the Post's website. The gist of the Pincus article is that the new Evil Plan comprises:

1. Geographical dispersal. For pretty obvious reasons.

2. Continued spectacular attacks on US soil aimed at large body counts and destroying the economy.

3. Small-scale attacks against American and Jewish targets in "countries where the population is muslim but the government is secular.

It's probably the best possible evil plan for them, given the circumstances. I've always thought al Qaeda's attacks on the US had an economic warfare component. Heaven knows that some of post-9/11 security measures, both already implemented and proposed, come with measurable economic costs already. And that's without additional attacks.

It appears, though, that al Qaeda cannot routinely pull off attacks of the scale of the September massacres on US soil. The attempts to destabilize muslim governments may appear more promising, and they've already started. The synagogue attack in Tunisia was part of it. The idea is to force the governments to crack down on "good muslim" terrorists in defense of evil Americans and Jews, theoretically outraging the ordinary muslim citizens and, it goes unsaid, those elite sectors capable of toppling the government in Egypt, Pakistan or Jordan. Pakistan, with its nukes, remains the jewel in the terrorist crown.

The plan sounds awfully like the terror war in Egypt in the late 80s and early 90s though, and that one didn't work out so well for the terrorists. You could argue that it helped freeze Israeli-Egyptian intercourse at a very low level as Hosni Mubarak's government moved to coopt the anti-Israel sentiment that partly animated his country's rebels. But Mubarak is still there, fatter and more aloof than ever. And recent reports of 9/11 tend to indicate that working Egyptian-Israeli intelligence contacts continue.

Since Egyptian Islamic Jihad merged with al Qaeda and veterans of its leadership are high in al Qaeda's structure, the destabilize strategy has the whiff of nostalgia trip about it. (A deadly one, to be sure.) It promises years of squalid, low-level violence, terror and reprisal from Gibraltar to the Himalayas. With tribunes who would put their nations through such, who needs a Great Satan?

The other picture that emerges is al Qaeda evolving from a monumentally bad-tempered NGO into something even less tangible. The war in Afghanistan has acted as a kind of atomizer, spraying a terrorist mist across the world now:

They were ordered to flee Afghanistan to whatever areas of the world they had previously operated from, including Asia, the Persian Gulf, Africa, Turkey and Europe. Bin Laden's decree directed them to launch terrorist attacks once they had become established in familiar areas.

"Members who were very knowledgeable about one region had to go back to that region to prepare and perpetrate terrorist attacks," said a senior Moroccan official.

Bilal specifically noted that operations against European targets could be launched from North Africa, and operations in the Persian Gulf from Yemen.

Although some in Gardez received very general orders, others, such as the Saudis, two of whom were married to Moroccan women, were given specific targets.

This does not, repeat not, in itself represent a failure of the war against al Qaeda in Afghanistan. al Qaeda didn't bring thousands of people to terror training camps in Afghanistan for the purpose of having thousands of people in terror training camps in Afghanistan. You do that precisely so that you can then send them out to commit acts of terrorism around the globe. The war on al Qaeda may have been mishandled, allowing too many of the enemy to escape. But to the extent that al Qaeda dispersed this winter and spring, they did it on our timetable rather than theirs. Agents will have been sent out with less planning and fewer resources than can have been intended.

But what we can expect for the next several years is many small cells acting with little supervision, three or four or six or eight guys who just think up a way to kill some people and do it. It will be a challenge, particularly for the smaller, poorer (muslm) countries where the bulk of the violence will occur, and for the US effort to protect western targets in those countries.

That Seventies Show - Josh Marshall is convinced, tonight anyway, that Pat Buchanan was Deep Throat. He has a couple of items on the topic here and here. From his site, I found a link to a pretty interesting college project. Long but worth reading, even if you're not a Watergate obsessive. (I'm not.)

Marshall gets a little concerned, at the end, at an apparent "unqualified denial" by Buchanan of his Throatedness. But this site knows from "Unqualified," and Buchanan's statement, at least as Marshall transcribes it, is easy to see through:

And after a few yadas, Sawyer pressed Buchanan and he responded by what I heard as "I, Patrick Buchanan, am not Deep Throat."

As a hero of Joshua Marshall's political party once put it, it depends what your meaning of is is. Or rather, what your meaning of am is. Am. Um.

I, Patrick Buchanan, am not Deep Throat. Now.

But I was.

Question: Let's suppose it turns out that Buchanan was Deep Throat, making him a secret hero of constitutional government. Is that going to totally mess with a lot of people's minds or what?

Drunk with Power Department - Ideas Etc. has replaced its Virtual Toner Cartridge^TM and now comes to you in clean, readable black type. Unqualified Offerings is grateful, grateful and will not even mention the serif font.

Israel and 9/11 Warnings - When Unqualified Offerings tells its readers that there is another piece on Antiwar.com about the behavior of Israeli Intelligence in the run-up to the September massacres, it expects there will be much groaning. But wait:

The complex and often uneasy relationship between Israel's Mossad and the U.S. intelligence community is emerging as a prime reason for the catastrophic failure of the CIA and FBI to act on advance warnings of an impending attack on America.
Eight days before the September 11 attack, Egypt's senior intelligence chief, Omar Suleiman, informed the CIA station chief in Cairo that "credible sources" had told him that Osama bin-Laden's network was "in the advanced stages of executing a significant operation against an American target."

Prior to that, the FBI whistleblower Coleen Rowley had revealed, there was a similar warning from French intelligence.

Both warnings, Globe-Intel has established, originally came from Mossad.

The article is by Gordon Thomas of Globe-Intel, author of Gideon's Spies, a book I have not read.

A golf clap for Justin Raimondo, who has pushed pretty hard the theory that the Israelis kept what they knew about al Qaeda in America to themselves so that "Now you'll know how it feels" for giving prominent play to a seemingly authoritative piece that says otherwise. It will be interesting to see what impact the Thomas piece has on Justin's own columns. It will be just as interesting to see if the folks who have pooh-poohed the "art students" story as an "urban legend" will now trumpet it as proof that if only we had trusted the Israelis... So what happened, according to Thomas?

The Israeli intelligence service chose to pass on its own intelligence to Washington through its contacts in French and Egyptian intelligence agencies because it did not believe its previous warnings on an impending attack by the bin-Laden network had been taken seriously enough in Washington.

And why is that?

Behind this admission is the long-standing suspicion that both the FBI and CIA have about Mossad and its ongoing activities in the United States.

Ostensibly, Israel denies it has ever spied on its most powerful ally. But the reality is otherwise. Both the FBI and CIA regard Mossad as a clear and present danger to U.S. national security. It places the Israeli spy agency just below the espionage totem pole that has China's Secret Intelligence Service at its top.

I've suspected for some time that while the Israelis passed on warnings of an al Qaeda operation against the US, that they probably blunted the effectiveness of the warnings to protect their own "sources and methods" - that is, spy operations on American soil.

The Face Is Familiar But the timing is off. Junkyard Blog has been the prime source of speculation on the possible identity of Jose "Abdullah al Muhajir" Padilla and John Doe #2 of Oklahoma City Bombing fame. His long, careful, sober account of the evidence for and against is here. It's a solid job of collating and teasing out possibilities.

More than anything, it's timing that makes me doubt that Padilla was Doe. In all the instances we know of, al Qaeda terrorists chosen for major jobs have first undergone lengthy training and indoctrination at camps (usually in Afghanistan) built for that purpose. This is not even unique to al Qaeda - the PLO, PFLP, Kurdish and Kashmiri separatists have all made the training camp a rite of passage. Even the 70s-vintage "red armies" of Western Europe were likely to go camping, either behind the Iron Curtain or in the same Middle Eastern camps the PLO factions used. By the Junkyard Blog's account, Padilla got out of prison in 1993 and didn't go abroad until 1998. The OKC bombing happened in the spring of 1995. It seems to be al Qaeda practice to make sure a promising American muslim convert is good and indoctrinated.

This is not to say that al Qaeda could not have had a hand in OKC. It's a layer more explanation than parsimony demands - McVeigh and Nichols didn't need Jihadists to come up with a motive for terrorism. But parsimony sometimes gets more than it demands, so who knows. But even if they turn out to have been operating partly at the behest of al Qaeda (or Iraq, for people whose dark thoughts tend that direction) McVeigh and Nichols do not appear to be muslim converts. They would be a whole different class of asset. (A kind that your-middle-eastern-villain-of-choice does not seem to have resorted to since.)

Now, it's possible that Padilla participated in OKC on a freelance basis and only joined al Qaeda afterward. But if not guided by al Qaeda, how does an ethnic-minority gangster in Florida end up in the orbit of white-supremacist veterans in the southwest?

It just doesn't hang together. Which is not a criticism of Junkyard Blog's work on this question, by any means. It's only because he put all the dates and places together in one handy spot that I'm able to resolve the question to my satisfaction.

(Link via Lake Effect.)

The Unqualified Offerings Effect - Sadly, the What's Your Super Power test now gives a Page Not Found error. No doubt all the extra bandwidth from Unqualified Offerings readers. Or not.

Caught You - Um, Me - Of course, Unqualified Offerings has played some fairly frank numbers games itself, and been willing to rely on utilitarian arguments. It has taken pains to deflate the portentous term "weapons of mass destruction" because it thinks that inflated danger estimates are being used to stampede the American people over the cliff of endless war. In taking these pains, it is responding to enthusiasts for empire and intervention making a "pragmatic" case - "We'll all die!" - for the United States abandoning a prudent reluctance to engage in major wars.

Utilitarianism is dangerous, but it has a role to play.

When Is a Challenge Not a Challenge - I have not seen a lot of response to Brendan O'Neill's challenge of early June:

Now, how about some of those who hide behind the numbers coming out as either being for the war, or against it?

There are some pretty good reasons why: The simple truth is that most bloggers have long since made their positions pretty clear. If you're not sure that Glenn Reynolds supports not just the war in Afghanistan but an extensive program of "regime change" in multiple countries in the Levant and the Gulf, that Ken Layne wants to depose the Saudi monarchy, that Matt Welch favors military action in Afghanistan and against al-Qaeda, or that Israel could take no action to which Charles Johnson would materially object, you haven't been paying attention. Most webloggers make their positions manifest with everything they choose to cite or not cite. Most of them have, at one point or other, offered reasons for their views.

War supporters cite low casualty figures because war opponents made so much of inflated estimates, both before the war and during. And if you don't like their doing that, it could be worse. Back before we learned that civilian casualties in Afghanistan would be as low as they are, a number of prominent hawks disgraced themselves by arguing that kiling civilians was no worse than killing enemy combatants. Many of these same hawks further disgraced themselves by suddenly deciding that it was unconscionable to kill civilians after all, if and only if the killers were Palestinian. It is indeed unconscionable for Palestinians to kill civilians. The disgrace lies in the serial hypocrisy. At the moment when it looked like America would kill large numbers of civilians, the concern of too many hawks was to legitimize the act in prospect. Once the country dodged that moral bullet, they felt free to criticize others for what they had been willing to countenance for themselves.

But this is another case of Unqualified Offerings losing the thread, which is why supporters and opponents of the war in Afghanistan talk about casualty figures. We're a practical people, particularly on this side of the pond. Utilitarianism, dangerous as it is philosophically and politically, runs deep. War opponents adduced high civilian casualty predictions as a reason to oppose the war. Alexander Cockburn even made it a racial issue, saying that an exchange rate of five brown lives for every white life augured about 30,000 Afghan dead. (He was working from the early 6-8,000-death estimates for the WTC. When the famous Marc Herold casualty figures came out, claiming 3,000+ Afghan civilian casualties, some leftists argued that we had, essentially, hit our limit: since the number of Afghan dead had now topped deaths from the September massacres, the war was now numerologically unjust. Certainly there is some level of suffering that many Americans, even those who otherwise support striking back at our attackers, would consider "too much." Those are the people that war opponents and war supporters have been trying to sway.

Since some doves were using casualty figures to critique the war, some hawks made it their business to rebut the figures - particularly since the casualty numbers constituted such weak arguments. But I know of no hawks who pretend not to be pro-war. (Glenn Reynolds' occasional claims to favor a foreign policy of minimal foreign intervention if only that were possible are not remotely plausible enough to confuse his readers about his actual views.)

I can't think of a single warblogger or pundit who has discussed civilian casualties whose views on the various wars occurring or pending were not explicit - indeed, if they were bloggers it was often so that they could make their support for the war(s) explicit.

That's the rub of course - "wars occurring or pending." We have more than one war to talk about, and will. (And have. But you get the idea.)

Self-Approbation Watch - Unqualified Offerings has added a couple of items to the "Best of..." section. One of them is its Spidey-smack of David Broder, "To Speak Up and Remove All Doubt," which generated a fair amount of kind mentions. The other is last week's "Weapons of Some Destruction," a skeptical look at a current totem phrase.

That item carried forward ideas from an early piece, "Silver Linings," which I have also added. It was where this site first propounded a general claim that casualty predictions and initial claims are almost always inflated by as much as an order of magnitude. It has stood its first key test - Afghan civilian dead estimates versus actual Afghan civilian deaths - pretty well. It could grow wearying, I realize, if I made a habit of informing you that this old piece or that one "turn out to be even better than I thought!" But at the time "Silver Linings" came out (early November) this site's only readers were, literally, Ginger Stampley, Michael Croft and my wife. So it seemed worth reviving.

Cheap Imperialism Metaphor Watch - From the gripping firsthand account of the carbombing of the US Embassy in Karachi by Kamran Khan:

The physical security cordon -- heavy planters like those outside the U.S. Capitol, waist-high concrete barriers, the towering perimeter wall, all the layers of reinforced concrete set up to protect the consulate -- had worked. But it appeared to have the effect of deflecting the blast back toward the street. Abdullah Haroon Road was littered with car parts, human parts and blood. Across the street, broken electrical lines sizzled and snapped in the grass of Freere Hall Park, a lovely, tidy expanse of green around a beautiful mansion.

They Know What You've Been Thinking - In other news, Amygdala and Istanblog both took the what's your superpower tests. Unqualified Offerings finds the results...disquieting.

With This Rock Dept. - With just the support of Israel and Turkey, the uberhawks tell us, the US can conquer, occupy and transform first Iraq and then "six or seven" middle eastern nations into modern, more-or-less democratic countries.

Here's the latest from Istanblog on the prospects for an orderly succession to ailing Prime Minister Ecevit:

So the possible post-Ecevit outcomes are 1) an ultra-nationalist who finds Turkey's human rights record to be too soft, 2) an Islamic moderate who the military is trying to get thrown in jail for "embarrassing the military" and praising the proto-Taliban a decade ago, 3) a coup, or 4) a miracle. My crystal ball suggests 1, 2, and 3 could well happen in succession, over a relatively short time (a year?)

The whole piece provides supporting detail.