Technical Bulletin - Probably going to suffer a brief outage Monday and a day or two beyond. Be warned.

UPDATE: Should the outage come, you should be able to reach this site at the following address: http://medea.hmdnsgroup.com/~clearing/

If you bookmark it now you'll be ready for the worst.

Um, you do think this site going down is the worst, right? Right?

Good!

Who Knew - Awhile back, Kevin Drum wondered who, if anyone, argued before Gulf War Phase II that Iraq did not in fact possess Weapons of Some Destruction. Some answers:

BruceR of Flit called Iraq's WSD's "largely illusory I suspect" back in September 2002. As he does not shrink from reminding us.

Australia's chief weapons inspector, who led the 1998 UN team, told Australian troops just before the war that 'Iraq had possessed the remnants of weapons of mass destruction but its ability to use them on the battlefield was "almost zero" ,' according to The Age. Via Hesiod. But inspector Roger Hill says that he warned the troops that ""did they have enough to kill soldiers? Yes." Which explains all the Coalition troops who died from Iraqi chem and bio weapons, I suppose. Via Hesiod, who probably oversells the import of Hill's statements.

Then there was former pre-unperson Scott Ritter, the object of Zizka's consideration in a Seeing the Forest item today.

Peddle to the Mettle - Aaron Haspel has a fantastic item about "influence peddling." Excerpt:

One evening a lobbyist for chemical companies tried to explain his job to me. This man was a moral idiot; the interests of his clients circumscribed his universe. He literally could not distinguish between robbing and being robbed, between, say, supporting a subsidy and opposing a regulation. He was no less instructive for that.

That belief effectively reduces the importance of individuals by saying that they can all be expected to react to certain things in a certain way--it dehumanizes them, just as it dehumanizes all of us. - Brooke Oberwetter has the real story on the breakup of Ben and J-Lo.

Guilty Guilty Guilty - Because somebody has to be the last blogger to link to the latest Plame Game developments.

Quote of the Day comes from avowed conservative Dirk Deppey: "that a socialist believes something is insufficient evidence that it's untrue."

True. I think libertarians might agree with this even more than conservatives. If there's an advantage to having fringe political beliefs, it's that there aren't all that many people around who think like you do. To keep yourself in reading material, you have to spend a fair amount of quality time with authors who don't think like you do. That can be valuable.

Aside to Dirk and Neilalien: Come on, guys. It upsets us children when the parents fight.

Micro-Blogwatch - No time to add value to it this week, but Dave Fiore has the Watchmen-blogging ball now and is running with it. Very much worth your time, even in the parts where he's wrong. Start with the first item and scroll up. I mean, scroll up after you read the first item. Otherwise things won't make any sense at all.

They Have a Word for It - And if they don't, try the Random Word Generator. It's famissible. Your uniseccutor will think so too.

Fanboy Follow-Up - Last week I had harsh words for the final segment of the first issue of DC: The New Frontier. It seems to have caused a bit of a stir, and I may be on my way to getting a reputation as the reviewer who makes Baby Jesus cry, about which I feel conflicted. Anyway, some interesting reactions out there:

Augie De Blieck Jr., who turns out to be a very Calpundit of traffic generation, kindly cites the item and says it changed his mind about the issue. (Scroll down to "Updates and Corrections.")

Someone posted an excerpt from the review to the DC Message Boards, which started a, ahem, lively discussion. The initial thread bred many subsequent ones along the same lines. (See the New Frontier section.)

Most interestingly, Darwyn Cooke himself started a response thread in which he posted the Hal Jordan backstory that justified the action of the story in his mind. (Link via Fanboy Rampage.) DC's boards post the most recent message first, so to read Cooke's own contributions you have to go to the bottom of the last page and work up.

Cooke's explanation is well worth reading, and it leads me to soften my criticism to this extent: he mostly just told the story wrong. Too much of the background needed to be foreground. It's not that, as he said, the story "could have been 1000 pages long" and there just wasn't room for all the justification. The justification needed to be in the book as well as in Cooke's mind. The whole chain of events and intentions still strikes me as low-probability, but within the realm of the conceivable. We just weren't given enough to conceive it.

The important thing, though, is that Cooke seems to recognize that some version of my assertion that "Hal Jordan is a moral coward" is true, and that he intends to develop the issue further in the series. Which means that, on the extremely unlikely chance that my initial item convinced anyone to drop the book, it's worth strongly reconsidering that decision.

Here We Go Again - More germs in envelopes, and for awhile now:

In November, a letter postmarked Chattanooga, Tenn., and addressed to the White House was intercepted at an off-site mail sorting facility in the Washington area, sources told ABCNEWS.

The powdery substance in the letter tested positive for ricin. However, the tests indicated that the poison was in a low-potency, granular form that posed no health risk, the sources said.

According to two law enforcement sources, the intercepted letter addressed to the White House was signed "Fallen Angel."

It's Peter David's Fault!

Apparently our newest bioterrorist is a rogue trucker:

That letter complained about new federal trucking regulations requiring more rest for drivers. The letter described the author as "a fleet owner of a tanker company" and contained this threat: "If my demand is dismissed I'm capable of making Ricin . . . I will start dumping."

Must be a Syrian trucker. Or maybe Iranian. I haven't checked the schedule in awhile.

A Reminder - You can get the news today from Knight-Ridder

The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue, didn't dispute that the CIA failed to accurately assess the state of Iraq's weapons programs. But they said that the intelligence efforts led by Cheney magnified the errors through exaggeration, oversights and mistaken deductions.

Those efforts bypassed normal channels, used Iraqi exiles and defectors of questionable reliability, and produced findings on former dictator Saddam Hussein's links to al-Qaida and his illicit arms programs that were disputed by analysts at the CIA, the State Department and other agencies, the officials said.

or from Unqualified Offerings last March:

More likely, we're simply witnessing the curruption - perhaps "beat-down" might be a better way of putting it - of the intelligence analysis function by its political masters. In the face of relentless pressure from above, dubious defector reports get upgraded to reliable, dodgy-looking documents get reclassified as authentic. Then it's off to the UN or the Halls of Congress (SOTU, e.g.) with the "evidence."

Official Statement of the NFL - See NFL.Com:

We deeply regret the appalling incident that occurred during halftime celebrations at the Super Bowl yesterday. For 40 years and more our league has been tantalizing our fans with partial views of women's breasts. We have been committed to showing cleavage and, failing that, the outline of women's breasts on our cheerleaders, in the commercials of our sponsors, the silhouettes of our network sideline reporters and the crowd shots by our network broadcast teams - to titillate and to fill downtime. We have hoped that our viewers would discuss women's breasts and imagine women's breasts, speculate on their authenticity, ponder nipple color and size, daydream of seizing those spongy masses and twisting them this way and then that way, of burying one's face in them like a spaniel at the dinner bowl. Above all, we have hoped that our viewers will associate women's breasts with the National Football League.

But we never meant to show you the whole thing. We sincerely regret that our half-century long tease overshot its mark yesterday. We urge our viewers to forgive us, and to continue to content themselves with veils and innuendo in our future seasons.

P.S. And no pussy. Ever. Quite.

Sincerely,

Paul Tagliabue
NFL Commissioner

Unqualified Offerings salutes the Commissioner for saying what needed to be said. I only hope it's enough for Michael Powell.

Go Go Go! - Let's be clear: I have no desire, none whatever, for the US to "democratize" Iran by force. Iran needs to work out its own political destiny, and we'll be better off if we let them. But I'm definitely rooting for the liberals there, and salute their attempts to break the hold of the fundamentalists.

"An election whose result is clear beforehand is a treason to the rights and ideals of the nation," one of the resigning legislators, Rajab Ali Mazrouei, told the parliament.

More here.

Everything You Need to Know about the sudden discovery that the Administration was misled by the CIA into believing Iraq had extensive special weapons capabilities is contained in a single Matthew Yglesias item. That said, Atrios is having tons of fun playing Remember When with Post columnist Jim Hoagland and others, starting here and scrolling up.

This is Sports Center with Unqualified Offerings - Close Super Bowl, down to the last seconds, and yet, somehow less involving than other recent thrillers. RGB Bill, with whom I watched the game, agreed. There's nothing quite so anticlimactic as a game in which the trailing team comes back to tie the score or go ahead too soon. Any more, when I team comes from behind with more than a minute left on the clock, I expect the other team to march right down the field and win at the very end - it seems to happen over and over. And that a freak play, Kasay's OB kickoff before the last New England drive, bulked so large in the outcome of the game feels like a cheat somehow.

And I missed Janet Jackson's boobie. (Not work safe, except that all your co-workers will be looking at it too.

And did they make an announcement ahead of time that none of the advertisers were going to do anything impressive this year? Budweiser doesn't even give us Leon?

Bitch bitch bitch. Yeah, I was rooting for Carolina, but unlike Bill the Jets fan, I'm not broken up that New England won. For whatever reason, and I'd love some ideas, this game wasn't up there with Patriots/Rams, Rams/Titans or Packers/Broncos, which might get my vote for best Super Bowl ever. Okay, it definitely gets my vote for best Super Bowl ever, and I say that as someone who rooted for the Steelers in the 70s and the Redskins in the 80s.

Tuesday Morning Quarterback did pretty well for itself too. The Panthers violated two Immutable Laws: "Kick early, go for it late" and "Live by the blitz, die by the blitz."

Can we start the next season now? I want to see Joe Gibbs back in action already.

Weekly Fitness Blog Item - Frankly, there is nothing much to report this week. As for marathon prep, hah! It's so freaking cold the only running I would do is to my car - if the ice didn't make that a deadly temptation. So we're already at the end of the item, which means it's time for the weekly stats: weight 165, waist 33.5", pulse - no award. More next week. Maybe not much more, but something.

Your Only the British Press But... Link of the Day - Is to a Guardian story by Peter Beaumont, Gaby Hinsliff and Paul Harris, who write that

Senior American officials concluded at the beginning of last May that there were no weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq, The Observer has learnt.

Intelligence sources, policy makers and weapons inspectors familiar with the details of the hunt for WMD told The Observer it was widely known that Iraq had no WMD within three weeks of Baghdad falling, despite the assertions of senior Bush administration figures and the Prime Minister, Tony Blair.

Contemporaneously, I noted that the Administration wasn't acting like it believed Iraq had WSDs - it was too nonchalant about securing sites and deploying survey teams. They were acting at a pace that, had the weapons existed, would have ensured that real terror groups could get their hands on them before we could. The choice was simple: either the government was criminally nonchalant about Iraq's arsenal, or it knew perfectly well the arsenal didn't exist.

A problem is that both the US and British governments continued to act, toward their publics, as if the question were far less settled than it actually turns out to have been - indeed, they continued to act as if it were settled in the other direction:

Indeed, comments from a senior Washington official first casting serious doubt on the existence of WMD were put to Downing Street by The Observer - and rejected - as early as 3 May.

Did the US and British govrnments believe that Iraq had WSDs before the war? Keep in mind that governments are compound entities, and "Weapons of Mass Destruction" is an elastic concept. I think the strongest case you can make is that those commanding the invasion phase of the war believed Iraq had some deployable battlefield chemical weapons. That belief was probably shared, with varying degrees of conviction, throughout the national security sector of the government (up to and including the White House). I base this not just on the official statements during the war that leaders believed our troops were about to cross a line beyond which chemical weapons would be used but on the fact that, for most of the invasion, the troops were instructed to adhere to CBW defense protocols. It's possible the military leaders were themselves deceived by clued-in political appointees eager to put on a good show, but the implications of the possibility are unpleasant and I reject it in the absence of positive evidence.

What about the rest of it? The years'-long bipartisan insistence that Iraq was rearming, or still armed, or about to add water to their "reconstituted nuclear weapons?"

The current, most popular apologias seem to be

1) Saddam tried to bluff the world into thinking he still had Bad Things to maintain power and status. We called his bluff. Boo hoo hoo.

2) Saddam was such a decreasingly attached-to-reality tyrant that his own military and technical people fooled him into thinking he still had functioning special weapons stockpiles and production facilities. We were as fooled as he, and too bad for him.

The first thing to note is that they can't both be true. Saddam could not simultaneously believe and pretend that he retained banned weapon capabilities. The second thing to note is that that doesn't mean one of them isn't true. The third thing to note is that both theories have a strong sense of "latest line of defense" about them - when so many previous pro-government positions have crumbled in series, and the rhetorical declension proceeds from "weapons of mass destruction" through "weapons of mass destruction program-related activities," there's scant reason to believe the Ball of Disillusion has come to rest against its final wall.

So what the hell happened? The official hawks, like bad dope dealers, got too fond of their own product. They wanted it to be true and convinced themselves of their desires. From the mid-1990s on, we had a parade of defectors. Some of them said Iraq's weapons programs were kaput, some said they were worse than you could imagine, and the hawks systematically credited the most alarming reports. These defectors tended to be funneled through parties with an institutional interest in provoking war, like the Iraqi National Congress.

What about the rest of the government, from Clinton days to now? It's worth pointing out, yet again, that as recently as the Spring of 2001, Colin Powell argued that sanctions should be kept because they had prevented Iraq from re-arming. I suspect that, as the year goes on, we'll hear more and more reports that there was always a strong current of skepticism within the intelligence community, which will problematize the view that there was a universal consensus that Iraq retained chemical and biological weapons capability.

But, the fact remains: not just hawks within the bureaucracy agreed that Saddam's capabilities were more extensive than they turned out to be. (Reminder: they turned out to be nonexistent.) Why?

I suspect the answer is structural. If you're an intelligence professional and you're going to be wrong on the issue, you'll be less embarrassed to be wrong on the "safe side," the side that the danger is there. Furthermore, during the period where the consensus view was forming, the stakes were altogether lower than they became beginning in the Spring of 2002. Before 2002, the issue wasn't all-out-war or continued low-grade conflict - it was continued low-grade conflict or - continued low-grade conflict. There was little chance that pushing doubts about Iraq's capability would meaninfully affect policy, and a potentially big downside if one's doubts turned out to be wrong. So a default consensus gelled, and come the push for war, stuck.

Many of us doves in the civilian sphere allowed ourselves to be stuck in the consensus view. Since we believed the mere existence of Iraqi special weapons an insuffiicient case for war, we decided not to sweat the issue. We either believed that deterrence theory applied to Iraq or that the Winter Inspections program begun by the UN was capable of eliminating any weapons Iraq did have, so we either granted that Saddam had WSDs for the sake of argument or, in my case at least, accepted that the consensus view probably was correct, to the extent that Iraq had some level of tactical chemical or biological weaponry.

You can make a good case that, by so doing, we doomed our chances of prevailing. Our "reasonable" opposition gave the hawks too much uncontested ground. We should have been able to puzzle out the flaws in the consensus view from the start, and demanded that the hawks prove every inch of their case. Well, lesson learned.