Curiouser and Curiouser - Get Donkey discusses a Cox Newspapers story about that vague, broad, useless Phoenix memo:

WASHINGTON --A memo written by a Phoenix FBI agent two months before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks linked Arab flight students to a radical Islamic group in England that has ties to alleged "shoe-bomber" Richard Reid, according to new information that emerged Wednesday.

The electronic communication from FBI Special Agent Kenneth Williams on July 10, 2001, lists eight Arab men and their connections to Al-Muhajiroun, a radical Islamic group based in Great Britain that has expressed violent views about the United States.

Al-Muhajiroun alumni include Reid, the British citizen who tried to blow up an American Airlines flight enroute to Miami last December by igniting explosives hidden in his sneakers.

The nonprofit organization's leader, Sheik Omar Bakri Mohammed, has issued a series of fatwas -- an Islamic call for action -- declaring that U.S. interests are legitimate targets.

What we don't have yet, apparently, are the names, so there's no indication as of now that any actual hijackers were on the list.

Law enforcement officials said that some of the men listed in the memo have left the country. Some have been "washed out" as a threat. And several are still under investigation.

The eight men mentioned in the memo were students at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Prescott, Ariz., where they were studying how to fly, mechanics and other aviation-related classes.

Curious internal contradiction in the article that Unqualified Offerings can not resolve. First:

During the congressional briefings, lawmakers asked Williams [author of the memo - ed.] if he had talked to the CIA during his investigation. Williams said the names were checked out last summer by the CIA, but there were no "hits" on their names.

Second:

When the CIA received the full memo a few weeks ago, they were able to connect two of the men to al-Qaida. One of the persons mentioned in the memo, who did not attend the flight school, was linked through a telephone call to Abu Zubaydah, one of bin Laden's chief of operations who is now in U.S. custody.

So supposedly the CIA checked out the list last summer and found no links to al Qaeda. And supposedly when they got "the full memo" a few weeks ago, they did find links. Elsewhere the article suggests that the memo was not shared with the CIA before 9/11. It's all very curious.

Then there's this:

Before he wrote the memo, Williams told lawmakers that he discussed his suspicions about the flight schools with CIA operatives in Arizona. But the agency did not have any information about suspicious flight schools.

Because the flight schools themselves were not suspicious. It was those darn students.

"Flight schools don't fly occupied planes into occupied buildings: people do."

How Low Can You Go? Or, How Bloody-Minded Can You Be?

Here's a bitter notion: What's the biggest danger of the war against al-Qaeda, and what some speculated 9/11 was aiming toward in the first place? Pakistan's nukes falling into the hands of al Qaeda or another anti-American group.

Now suppose Pakistan and India go to war, and that war goes nuclear, and at the end of it, every Pakistani nuclear bomb has been used or destroyed.

On one level, it works out pretty well for us...

On the Bright Side - Just think of all the hits I'm going to get now that I have an item with "teen sex" and "fucking" in it. Especially from poinsetta fetishists!

Sauce for the Goose - Moira Breen has a conservative bone in her body! In her interesting item on the blogosphere's topic-du-jour, teen sex, she worries that

it seems to bother no one that these girls [from the US News article that started it all], who should be thrilling to the very idea of sex - blushing, awkward, obsessed, boy crazy, baffled, a little frightened, all agog - sound like a bunch of played-out party girls for whom sex is a chore and a bore and a source of resentment. 15! These girls are saying, quite plainly, that they don't want to have the kind of sex they're getting, and the right-minded adults babble on about how we just need to make sure we stuff them with pills and teach them to be "sex-positive" (gak, what a cheery dreary, profoundly unsexy social-engineer turn of phrase), because after all if teens want to have sex...

Unqualified Offerings has been reluctant to join this topic. Frankly, teen sex is a sensitive subject for this site: it never had any, and if it understood that Stephen Hawking book it read years ago, it is unlikely to ever have teen sex. (Late Bloomer? UO was a fucking poinsetta!)

Ahem. Where was this site? Oh yes. Teen sex. Surely Unqualified Offerings knows more about being a libertarian isolationist than Moira Breen, and Moira Breen knows more about being a fifteen-year-old girl than Unqualified Offerings. But UO had a different interpretation of the girl talk in US News than Moira did.

Kate, Lara, and Lynn place their orders at a Princeton, N.J., pizza parlor (plain slices, Diet Cokes all around), share a tiny pot of strawberry lip balm, and settle in for an afternoon chat.

"Now that we've had sex, my boyfriend says I'm being a tease if I'm too tired and just want to kiss," says Kate, a pert blond in a hooded Abercrombie sweatshirt.

"Yessss!" they all chime in. "I was just having that exact conversation with my boyfriend. Once you have sex, every time you hook up, you have sex," adds Lara, who also wonders whether "it's normal, the way he talks to me. He does have a temper and stuff."

These are high school sophomores, 15 years old.

Once you get over the punch line effect of the last sentence, the exchange actually suggests

• Girls do mature earlier than boys, just like they say. These girls don't sound "played out" to me. They do sound like they are past an immature belief in the overriding importance of sex and on the way to a mature understanding of what it is and isn't worth.
  
• You know what's frightening? This "Lara" makes her boyfriend talk about her feelings about stuff. (Sex in this case.) That's cruel! But seriously, here's what it really is: evidence that Lara understands her own concerns and is prepared to act on them.
  
• Not only does this conversation not sound necessarily jaded, it is itself only one conversation. We not only don't know what they have to say about sex in other discussions, we don't even know what else the US News reporter may have recorded that got left out of the article. We do know that news magazines are unlikely to publish a "Teen Sex: Why Worry?" item, and are likely to select against dialog or statistics that would inspire calm. Another dynamic that is likely at work here: please the grownup. If the reporter sounds worried about sex, help her out as much as possible.
  
• "Kate" says she doesn't like being pressured to have sex when she's tired. Unqualified Offerings knows for a fact that grownup women can feel this way too. It also knows a happier thing: Just because women don't like being pressured to have sex when they're tired doesn't mean they don't like sex at all, or are jaded or "played out."

It sounds to Unqualified Offerings like the real "social engineer" problem is, as usual, the impulse driving newsweeklies to write alarmist stories about normal stuff. No doubt US News has their "New Teen Drug Epidemic" and "AIDS: It's Going to Kill Us All - Again!" stories scheduled for later in the summer.

(Yes, Unqualified Offerings has a baby girl. And yes, it will encourage her to have as much sex as she finds fulfilling and sensible - just as soon as she completes her PhD in Physics.)

The Penny That Should Have Dropped - Remember the item a few days ago about the pre-9/11 warnings from Jordan and Morocco? The Public Nuisance points out something that Unqualified Offerings did not know. (In itself, no great feat, but read.)

Now that code name, "The Big Wedding" is highly significant. For Islamic radicals, it would indicate a suicide operation, since they believe that terrorists are married to 72 virgins in heaven. The invaluable Memri site discusses this in this report:

The death announcements of martyrs in the Palestinian press often take the form of wedding, not funeral, announcements. "Blessings will be accepted immediately after the burial and until 10 p.m. …at the home of the martyr's uncle," read one suicide bomber's death notice.[12] "With great pride, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad marries the member of its military wing… the martyr and hero Yasser Al-Adhami, to 'the black-eyed,'" read another.

Al Risala, the Hamas mouthpiece, published the will of Sa'id Al-Hutari, who carried out the June 1, 2001 suicide bombing outside the disco near the Dolphinarium in Tel Aviv that killed 23, mostly teenage girls. "I will turn my body into bombs that will hunt the sons of Zion, blast them, and burn their remains," Al-Hutari wrote. "Call out in joy, oh my mother; distribute sweets, oh my father and brothers; a wedding with 'the black-eyed' awaits your son in Paradise."

The phrase "The Big Wedding" would seem to indicate that a large operation with multiple suicide terrorists was planned.

The Public Nuisance is clearly a smart guy, and he seems like an interesting writer. But if he understands the significance of the wedding metaphor in the world of Islamic terrorism, you like to think our area experts in the CIA or DIA or whoever talked to the Jordanians would know too.

I still think we're likely to find out that they did know, but not in time to make a difference.

Stray Thoughts on Kashmir

1. Not enough? Per the Times of London

Mr Ramana and other nuclear researchers at the US university have estimated that if only a tenth of the nuclear weapons of the two countries were exploded above ten of their largest cities, 2.6 million people would die or be injured in India and 1.8 million in Pakistan.

Their calculations are based on what would happen if ten explosions, similar in size to the one over Hiroshima in Japan in 1945, took place over some of India’s and Pakistan’s most populated cities.

The targeted cities used in the scenario are Bangalore, Bombay, Calcutta, Madras and Delhi in India, and Faisalabad, Islamabad, Karachi, Lahore and Rawalpindi in Pakistan.

Casualties on the Indian side would be 1.7 million dead and 900,000 injured, while the toll in Pakistan would be 1.2 million dead and 600,000 injured.

First off, Unqualified Offerings is very tempted to apply its near-infallible divide-by-ten rule to this estimate. Hoever, it's possible that poverty and crowding make the predictions from New Scientist less exaggerated than most. But UO almost wishes the estimate was plausibly ten times higher. There are a billion people in the belligerent countries; three tenths of one percent fatalities may scare some decision makers less than we wish it would.

2. The Lesson Has Been Spoken - Of all the things the US theoretically could or should do to keep India and Pakistan from war, possibly nuclear war, the most important has been done already: setting a fifty-year example, with our teaching partners in the Soviet Union, of how to manage a bilateral nuclear rivalry. No lie: I sure hope someone was paying attention. I like to think they were, too: from what I can tell reading the South Asian press, there appears to be a high degree of professionalism in the officer corps of both countries, notwithstanding the tendency of the Pakistani officer corps to keep taking over the Pakistani government. The British military tradition seems a vital legacy, so maybe it's not too much to hope that there are serious staff college-equivalents in each country where they've done some serious thinking about the problem.

3. Tricky Atal - Reading of Indian PM Vajpayee speak, seemingly almost jauntily, of India's readiness for war makes me wonder if he's trying to be India's Richard Nixon. Throughout Nixon's first term, his goal was to freak the Soviets out: to convince them that, in his words, Nixon is crazy. There's no telling what he'll do! Again, that was a movement in a forty-five-year minuet for which both Nixon and his opposite numbers had trained their entire adult lives.

4. China Card - Charles Dodgson brings up an excellent point: We're not hearing much about China's position in the current crisis, but they can't help but be interested. And as Charles says, "they're quiet. Too quiet." During the Christmas crisis they noisily shipped extra jets to Pakistan.

Also - If anyone cares to share why they continue to use Netscape 4, tell me that too. (Sincerely.) Microsoft hatred can't be a sufficient reason: there are three non-MS options out there for most operating systems (Netscape 6, Opera 6 and Mozilla - this last a late beta). I mean, what the heck, huh?

A Cry for Help - To the dismay of Unqualifed Offerings, its server statistics show a lot of its loyal readers using - Netscape 4.x. Unqualified Offerings loves its readers, it really does, and is grateful for every visit. But you really tick it off sometimes.

This site needs a volunteer, please. Its new, Movable Type-era prototype is ready to go. It looks just like it should in IE 5+ for Windows and Netscape 6.2 for Windows. It looks acceptable in Opera 6.

It is totally hosed in Netscape 4.7. This confuses UO. Yes, the new site uses CSS and layers instead of tables. But it's really simple CSS. Highclearing.com's own Amberway II site also uses CSS and layers, and it lays out fine in NS 4. So.

If YOU

• Understand stylesheets.
  
• Have NS4 available.
  
• Have time on your hands, and
  
• A willingness to help struggling political diarists

please e-mail me at the address to the left. I'll give you the URL of the proto-site. You'll View Source and load the style sheet and tell me how I can modify things to make a minimally-acceptable Netscape 4.x browsing experience while not compromising the design for, um, real browsers. Note: Changing to a table-based design is not an option! Sorry, Unqualified Offerings is just difficult about some things. NS4 turns out not to even display the current table design right. All I'm after at this point is something legible.

Thanks in Advance!

Ain't No Blogspot Dude - Brian Linse has moved Ain't No Bad Dude.

A Libertarian Isolationist Reads the Newspaper II - The Washington Post's Jim Hoagland worries that "India and Pakistan are three to four weeks from a foreseeable war that the United States has done too little to prevent." As we've all heard, the war has at least the potential to go nuclear. Since we do find ourselves at war with Pakistan's quondam allies, the Taliban and al Qaeda, supposedly with Pakistan on our side, it's hard to argue that the US has no interest in this dispute. However. The beginning of wisdom is recognizing that if the worst does happen, and Pakistan and India start a nuclear war, the blame will most properly rest with India and Pakistan. They've been at the Kashmir business for 55 years now, and both countries have worked damned hard to get themselves to the point where they can jointly turn the subcontinent into hell on earth. While your respectable commentators and journals give the idea short shrift, the amazing truth is that these dusky foreigners have minds of their own, and interests to match, and may act for reasons wholly unrelated to the clarity of our signals or the strength of our resolve.

Unqualified Offerings suspects US attempts to "solve" the situation may make things worse. How? By removing the local actors' own sense of final responsibility. If the US shows up in its referee suit, then both sides commence a game of "Let's see how far we can go before the ref calls foul." Answer: Too far, easily. Because we don't really have the power to keep the subcontinent from blowing itself up. We can block their view of an abyss they need to see with absolute clarity.

(This related Airstrip One post is worth reading.)

A Libertarian Isolationist Reads the Newspaper - They've found Chandra Levy's body, as pretty much everyone knows by now. Last fall, your more pious commentators intoned that the September massacres had at least eclipsed "trivial fluff" like this young woman's disappearance and, as we all suspected, brutal murder. Chandra Levy may have been foolish, Gary Condit may have been a cad and the media may be shallow. But for any commentator who suggests that the brutal murders of young women are "fluff": scorn.

It All Fits Together! - Ginger Stampley sketches out the connection between Enron and the War on Terrorism:

The problem with this dribs-and-drabs method of releasing information, especially when the White House keeps fighting not to release each bit tooth and nail, is that it leaves people wondering what they weren't telling us this time. This is a dumb enough strategy when it comes to things like "how cozy were you with contributors like Kenny-boy?" but it's a heart-stoppingly stupid one when it comes to national security issues, where it's also the order of the day.

Anti-Anti- - Blowhard takes off after one of Unqualified Offerings' pet peeves. (Via Objectionable Content.)

Tribune Review - In this case, Michael Kelly is the tribune - of conventional wisdom - in his column this morning:

The obvious point in common about the monster-greats -- LBJ, FDR, Nixon, Clinton and, I would add, John F. Kennedy -- is that they all were maniacally driven men. They got the presidency because, in large measure, they wanted it so much that they were, in a sense, mad; they were great because they were monsters.

What of presidents who are not monsters? These, it can be argued, fall into three groups: (1) The mediocrities: the great majority of the leaders who were not monsters but also not great. (2) The true rarities: those who actively pursued greatness and who yet managed to be both great and good (that is, non-maniacal, non-neurotic, moral); Washington, Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, I'd say. (3) The accidents: those who were great because greatness was thrust on them, not because they were driven to greatness.

In this last group, consider two: Dwight Eisenhower and Harry Truman.

It can also be argued that we need to seriously revise our standards of what makes a great president. It's a truism that establishment thinking judges a president "great" in direct proportion to the degree to which he expanded the power of the federal government. It also helps to be on the scene when a major war breaks out: Peace, prosperity and federal modesty cut no ice with the establishment either. It's also pretty astonishing to see Lincoln and TR described, however one might otherwise think of them, as "non-neurotic." It's striking that this theoretically (neo)conservative columnist leaves Ronald Reagan off his list of greats while including Nixon, prolonger of Vietnam and ratifier of the Great Society. Mind you, it is not Unqualified Offerings' purpose to advocate the greatness of Ronald Reagan; but it's surprising that it isn't Kelly's.

The Hits Keep Coming - Antiwar.com links to this International Herald-Tribune story about Arab-country warnings in advance of 9/11. The Jordanians passed along warnings from communication intercepts;

It said aircraft would be used. But neither hijacking, nor, apparently, precise timing nor targets were named. The code name of the operation was mentioned: in Arabic, Al Ourush al Kabir, "The Big Wedding."
.
When it became clear that the information about the intercept was embarrassing to Bush administration officials and congressmen who at first denied that there had been any such warnings before Sept. 11, senior Jordanian officials backed away from their earlier confirmations.

Meanwhile, Morocco had reached the Grail of anti-bin Laden counterintelligence:

The reports said that a Moroccan secret agent named Hassan Dabou succeeded in infiltrating Al Qaeda. Several weeks before Sept. 11, the story ran, he informed his chiefs in King Mohammed VI's royal intelligence service that Osama bin Laden's men were preparing "large-scale operations in New York in the summer or autumn of 2001." The warning was said to have been passed on to Washington.

Dabou was said to have told his bosses in Rabat that bin Laden was "very disappointed" by the failure of the first bombing of the World Trade Center in February 1993 to topple the towers.

Author John K. Cooley writes, "The first of these cases has been authenticated by this reporter. The second remains to be proved beyond doubt."

Then there were the Israeli warnings. (And yes, these probably came as a result of the famous "art students.")

The Telegraph has learnt that two senior experts with Mossad, the Israeli military intelligence service, were sent to Washington in August to alert the CIA and FBI to the existence of a cell of as many of 200 terrorists said to be preparing a big operation.

"They had no specific information about what was being planned but linked the plot to Osama bin Laden and told the Americans that there were strong grounds for suspecting Iraqi involvement," said a senior Israeli security official.

The Iraq angle never panned out. But that's the only part.

So, what does it all imply, and what does it all mean?

Unqualified Offerings will go out on a limb here, based on one further factor. Back on The Day, before it had even become Unqualified Offerings, this site was kind of surprised that the media had the names of the nineteen hijackers within hours of the deeds. Sure there are passenger manifests, and there was teh abandoned car in Boston, but it still seemed like world-record collating to boil that down. When it mentioned this to Mrs. Offering, she said that an anchor on NPR shared that surprise, and asked reporter Nina Totenberg on air how the government could have known so much so quickly. According to Mrs. Offering, Totenberg's response was:

"[Anchorperson], somebody really screwed up."

It seems very possible that the government had at least the names of the suspects ahead of time (quite possibly via Mossad) and the hijackers simply beat them to the punch: the last reel of a thriller gone horribly wrong.

That would suggest that there were specific operational mistakes by identifiable people behind the failure to prevent the September massacres, not some systemic "failure of imagination." The "failure of imagination," or "failure to take seriously" or your preferred handwaving phrase of choice, then becomes simply a way to avoid holding specific actors accountable for their screw-ups.

The irony is, of course, that that is the systemic failure.

It's the Metacontext, Stupid - Just noticed this long Outlook-section piece from Sunday's Washington Post on Maryland's fiscal situation. The state is facing an $800 million shortfall. The article spends a lot of ink on revenue-enhancement options. It broaches the notion of cutting spending only in passing, and only in reference to other states.

Several states have bitten the bullet, choosing to live within their means by laying off employees or reducing benefits. But many have opted to wait out the problem. At least half the states have tapped into their rainy day funds, and 17 are considering using some of the money won in the national tobacco settlement, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

At no point does the author, Tom Waldron, suggest that Maryland might consider some of this laying off and reducing. After all, there are a few things we haven't taxed yet!

There will be no shortage of things for the commission to study. Why is it, for example, that if you get your muffler replaced, you pay 5 percent sales tax on the muffler, but no tax for the repairman's service? Similarly, if you lease a car, you don't pay a sales tax, but if you buy one you do.

It astonishes Unqualified Offerings that Marylanders aren't already clamoring for the chance to pay more to get their cars repaired! Just a month ago, this site set off for work as usual, and within four hours had spent six hundred unanticipated dollars on what Offering Boy named "Beige Car." If only it could have spent $630 instead!Oh but it gets so much worse!

Then there's the income tax, laughably out-of-date and flat enough to make Steve Forbes happy. The highest tax rate for 2002, 4.75 percent, will be imposed on any income above $3,000, whether you're making janitor money or Peter G. Angelos money.

The author doesn't mention the county surcharge that piggybacks on the state tax, typically 60% now. That raises the effective income tax rate to 7.6%, which is FICA-level taxation. UO knows no one who considers their FICA withdrawal insignificant. Then there's the 5% sales tax on almost all goods, including food, medicine and clothing, and property taxes. These are set at the county level, but are substantially higher than Virginia's for comparable counties. To compare rates to counties in a state like North Carolina, you need the times sign.

Now the Outlook section is for opinion pieces. It's worth noting, though, that the author, Tom Waldron, "a former reporter for the Baltimore Sun, covered Maryland government and politics for more than a decade." I'm sure he did.

Give the People What They Want - After a week of light posting and light posts, this site's statistics are finally starting to show the effects. Hence, Unqualified Offerings resolves to get back to the business of providing the hard-hitting, controversial yet thoughtful content readers have come to expect. In a single post!

Instapundit.com - right about some things, wrong about others.

Justin Raimondo - right about some things, wrong about others.

Virginia Postrel - right about most things, wrong about some.

The Middle East - Meshuggah!

The War Against al-Qaeda - Hope we win!

Pakistan - Gotta watch those guys.

Eve Tushnet - right about some things, wrong about others, but even when she's wrong, she rocks.

Gary Farber - Whoah! Cool!

Ginger Stampley - The best! Sometimes wrong though.

The Farm Bill - Hiss!

George Dubya Bush - Eh. What can you do?

Anti-Idiotarian - Sure you are.

Capitalism - Oh yeah!

Socialism - suxxxx!

Cloning - Okay, if UO gets to provide a "please do" and a "please don't" list.

Abortion - Man, that's a hard one.

Iraq - Don't go there!

The EU - Stands for "Evil Union."

Guns - For 'em.

Butter - Buy your own.

Haiku - Must you?

Rhyme - By all means!

Symbolism - Prefer synechdoche.

Electrolite - Rocks.

Spiderman - Very good.

Star Wars - Phooey.

Democrats versus Republicans - Evil beats Evil and Stupid every time; hence, Republicans keep losing the big ones.

Democrats versus Republicans - Lions versus Kiwanis.

Libertarians versus Reform - Oddfellows versus Moose.

Insolvent Republic of Blogistan versus the Illuminated Donkey - Have you ever seen them together?

Frost versus Yeats - Frost.

Pound versus Eliot - Eliot.

Stevens versus Williams - Stevens.

Eliot versus Frost - Frost.

Eliot versus Stevens - Stevens.

Stevens versus Frost - tie.

The New Traditionalism - Jesus! the new Instapundit site looks good. Unqualified Offerings still doesn't like black text on a white background for webpages. It would help readability if the font were slightly larger yet. (Reynolds has apparently increased it already today.) And UO doesn't care for the Movable Type-default style of making link text slightly smaller than regular text instead of same-size-underlined. (Yes, Unqualified Offerings adheres to the same practice on other blogs, but that is because it is lazy.)

But the overall look is very nice. It recalls the old page, but is sharper. It has more visual pizazz, but content retains its throne. Whether its good sense on domestic policy or nonsense on foreign affairs, all your favorite Instapundit things look better than ever.

Tool Time - Toiler came by to help this site fix the Official Toilet of Unqualified Offerings this afternoon, and offered these words of wisdom between trips to and from the main water valve for the house:

It turns out the most useful tool for dealing with plumbing problems is a pair of walkie-talkies.

Who Needs Movie Critics? Which of them could so efficiently dispatch Attack of the Clones as Virginia Postrel?

We saw the movie Friday night. It's not quite as good as the remake of Planet of the Apes, which should not be considered an endorsement of Planet.

That almost rises to the level of the legendary Damon Knight review of a Taylor Caldwell book: "The dust jacket begins, 'The eloquent novel,' thus commiting two lies in the space of three words."

Dearly Beloved - He really did it. Andy Kashdan has yanked his "A Libertarian Reads the Paper" site. (For an exercise in futility click here. Unqualified Offerings feels lonely, lonely.

And worried. People aren't going to expect it to take up the slack by reading all those awful New York Times op-eds, are they?

Let us pause to mourn the passing of a fine weblog. Andy, thanks. See you on the other side.

Speaking of Presidential Fecklessness... you can't beat this nugget from More Than Zero today:

Bush seems too much like Clinton. In some ways, this made Clinton preferable. This is because they both spend valuable political capital going against type and party line. Obviously, I'd rather have Clinton going against his "anything is possible with taxpayer funding" platform than Bush deserting his limited government campaign positions.

Patriot Act - Charles Dodgson is on fire lately. After a couple of excellent pieces on the personal background of George W. Bush, he wades now into the "What did the President know and why the hell not?" issue of the day

The line taken by the current administration's defenders is basically Friedman's --- that the facts were known, but no one could have put them together.

If you buy that argument, it only clarifies the spectacular inappropriateness of the administration's response to the attack after the fact, the ill-named PATRIOT act. They claimed that the attack showed that intelligence and law enforcement agencies needed to be able to gather more information, with far less interference from the courts --- eventually floating an omnibus bill with provisions including, among other things, nationwide judge-shopping for wiretaps, and requiring ISPs to turn over billing records without a warrant. When the Senate balked, the administration publicly threatened to blame them for the next attack.

The rationale for all this was that the government didn't have enough information. Now, they explain their failure to heed specific warnings, like the report by that guy out in Phoenix, by saying they had too much information, and no way to sort the wheat from the chaff. You can't solve that problem by adding more chaff.

And yet adding more chaff is what they have done, not just with the PATRIOT act, which had as one of its overarching themes Government Access to More, but in the subsequent fishing expedition which amounted to asking every Arab-American immigrant whether they were a terrorist --- questions which real terrorists will not answer honestly, and which loyal Arab-Americans whose cooperation the FBI may need will remember as an insult.

Dodgson has always been excellent on civil liberties, and excellent at seeing through the arguments for curtailing them.

Unqualified Offerings has no opinion on whether the Bush administration's handling of al-Qaeda matters prior to 9/11 was blameworthy. But the administration and its loyalists in punditspace and the blogosphere are poorly placed to accuse the Dems of inappropriately playing politics, given the energy some of them (Newsmax.com and Andrew Sullivan come to miind) put into blaming the whole business on the fecklessness of Bill Clinton.

You Can Set Your Clock by It - Heard a radio promo for upcoming Lifetime Network dramas. One struck me. The announcer says something about "the hip new party drug," then some young actress, in an excerpt from the show wails, in tragic disbelief, "You can't die from Ecstasy!"

Unqualified Offerings was born out of the loop and remains so, but two things are obvious from this promo:

1) The ONDCP's program giving advertising credits for antidrug messages written into network programming hasn't really stopped, no matter what they say.

2) If Lifetime calls Ecstasy "the hip new party drug," you can be damn sure the Ecstasy fad is over. The kids must have moved on to some drug Lifetime Networks will hear about in five years.