Members Only - eLibertarian.com is a new site that aims to become "a community site for libertarians where they can meet, trade and exchange information," and, what's more, to make money doing so. The least you can say is that it's an ambitious concept. (They intend to offer a "libertarian dating" service. Presumably these are dates where the "non-initiation of force principle" is observed by both - or however many, I suppose - parties. I am sure we would all agree that this is the best kind of date.)

There's at least an implication that by using the site one could manage to cut non-libertarians out of one's life entirely. In addition to dating, it offers "libertarian lodging," "libertarian jobs," "libertarian friends," and "libertarian" goods and services. ("Exchange...with people who believe in the sanctity of contract.")

I certainly understand the impulse toward finding a fellowship of the likeminded. Being a libertarian in Montgomery County, MD is a bit like being a rabbi in Iran. I'm also very sure that it's a bad idea to restrict yourself to nothing but a fellowship of the likeminded. It's also unclear that it's possible to deliver a meaningfully "libertarian" job, for instance. Whatever contractual arrangement you and the employer imagine yourselves to come to, the regulatory state and an expansive tort system don't disappear and won't let you make them. Both of you could swear up and down not to go outside the terms of your contract, but the state apparatus will be available to whichever of you changes your mind, I suspect.

Then there's the competition. There are a lot of us on the net giving it away. Libertarianism on the internet is like pornography on the internet - if you're paying for it, you're just not looking hard enough.

But eLibertarian's links page looks interesting (this site appears under the "personal pages" section) and the columns for Libertarianism, Objectivism and Anarcho-Capitalism each include a section called "Opposing Views." I, uh, didn't find one of those on Democrats.com.

Contest Announcement - On What She Really Thinks, Ginger Stampley invites you to prove her wrong.

(Note: On the item immediately below her contest, she actually is wrong. She writes that "Blogging, Like Amateur Poetry, Is Really for Other Practicioners." In fact, contemporary professional poetry is also really for other practitioners, at least in this country.)

Hasten Down the Wind - A couple of good Warren Zevon links:

Eric Olsen has some thoughts and links on Blogcritics.com.

A pretty good LA Times story.

Probably a better story in the USA Today by Edna Gunderson. (Fair's fair: Unqualified Offerings kicked Gunderson around pretty good over Bruce Springsteen last month, so it's nice to be able to applaud her.)

The official Zevon website offers an e-mail address where you can send good wishes.

The Zevon Fan Web Page has a message board where people are leaving their thoughts.

If it would do you some good to vent a little hostility, try this substantially clueless and cliched item from E! Online. It does exhume a cool quote, though:

"If you're lucky, people like something you do early and something you do just before you drop dead. That's as many pats on the back as you should expect," Zevon once told Entertainment Weekly.

RollingStone.com's Zevon page offers a free MP3 of "I Was in the House When the House Burned Down" (link goes direct to the sound file) - or claims to. (It hasn't actually loaded on my PC yet.)

Yes, this story is really bugging me. And I'm not the only one. The Minor Fall, The Major Lift sounds uncharacteristically subdued. And Instapundit.com says, succinctly, "that sucks."

The French Inhaler - The news that Warren Zevon has inoperable lung cancer is one of those awful tidings made more bitter because it makes perfect sense somehow.

I owe Zevon for a lot more than some great records he made in the 70s and Oughts. (Betweentimes, Homer nodded.) Not that I don't owe him for those. The incongruous yodel that begins "Little old lady got mutilated late last night..." The stately piano at the beginning of "Frank and Jesse James" (a song that, by today's standards, surely qualifies as a hate crime). It takes, no matter how much he might deny it, a poet to string together the phonemes of

And he dug up her grave and built a cage with her bones

and a prodigy to set it to that long, fluttering descant.

The lot more: A famous Zevon profile in a c. 1980 Rolling Stone issue led me to read the Lew Archer novels of Ross MacDonald. Lucky the young man at loose ends who stumbles upon these books, in so many of which a young man at loose ends tries to figure out how to live like a decent human being. MacDonald was my gateway to the wondrous world of the American mystery. Zevon also led me to the better sort of spy novel - I remember showing up for a concert at the Bayou in Georgetown with a copy of Ross Thomas' classic, Chinaman's Chance - hoping, of course, that Zevon would notice and make me his pal - didn't happen. Hey, the Bayou never started concerts on time! You had to entertain yourself before the show somehow. (At that one, a fan yelled out a request for "Carmelita," the Mexicali-flavored lament of a junkie novelist. Zevon's response: "I would rather stick things in my eye.")

The two Artemis reconds from 2000 (Life'll Kill Ya) and this year (My Ride's Here) are damn good. A couple of Life'll Kill Ya tracks suffer from the producers' apparent insistence that he sing them well out of his range. But on other Life tracks Zevon does some of his best singing.

The full course of his up-and-down fortunes I don't know. There were apparently some real downs. On a World Cafe interview a couple of years ago he was asked about an apparent change in his songwriting style from the earlier days. He explained, politely, that "There came a time in my life when I could no longer afford a grand piano," so he began writing all his songs on an acoustic guitar. He told another interviewer that the stripped-down production on "Life" was so that he could, if necessary, put the songs across playing solo in "some bar in Soeul."

I love this passage from "Don't Let Us Get Sick". I'd play the whole song for you now if I could:

The sky was on fire
When I walked to the mill
To take up the slack in the line
I thought of my friends
And the troubles they've had
To keep me from thinking of mine

Don't let us get sick
Don't let us get old
Don't let us get stupid... all right?
Just make us be brave
Make us play nice
Let us be together tonight

Imitation Tech Blog Post - Corel Photo-Paint has about the only photo-to-art filter I've found in a consumer-level graphics program that actually works (the watercolor filter). This is important to me, because a staple of one of the games I play, based on Roger Zelazny's Amber novels, is portrait cards called "trumps" which do all sorts of swell things. Problem is, neither I nor most Amber players can draw for beans. Some people cheat and publish "photo trumps," which I consider an abomination. Other people try art-effect filters, but most of those work about as well as I draw. For one thing, they all hose the eyes. For another, the end product usually looks less like a painting than like a photo that's had some weird filter run on it.

To my taste, the Photo-Paint watercolor filter actually turns photographs into something that really does look like a painting instead. (Not to say a good painting!) You can see some examples here.

Imitation Geek Blog Post - And if you're so burned out on commemorative things that even fan fiction - worse, game fiction - seems like a viable alternative, there's always this short story I put up yesterday involving an infant prince of Amber and all the terms for "breasts." About 2700 words.

Hey, I can't link to a Tech Central Station column like Radley Balko can!

Why We Write - I should have noted a big reason why I didn't undertake a blogging moratorium today - the example of Glenn Reynolds a year ago. If it was right, useful and necessary to blog during the event itself - and I have previously written about the greatness of the service Reynolds performed that day - then I don't see that it could have been otherwise on the anniversary.

Because I'm an anti-interventionist and Reynolds is not just an interventionist but among the most important of them, and because the question of intervention is the salient question of our day, an awful lot of references to his writing here are critical. I have to make my case. But some of my fellow anti-interventionists who came upon Reynolds' work late simply don't have the same relationship to it that we early adopters do.

A Last Post Before Starting Work - Crossed the American Legion Bridge into Virginia under the aegis of a circling Blackhawk, behind an Exxon tanker and a dump truck with a tarp over it. When the trucks hit the other side of the river and kept going, I felt like I'd won something. The timing worked out that I pulled off the Toll Road during ESPN Radio's moment of silence, and hit the booth as the President began his speech. And there, straight ahead, a passenger jet, climbing from Dulles into the morning sky. They're beautiful, planes. The President's address was not bad. The plane was better. God bless us, every one, says the agnostic.

Off to Work - Fixed some typos in this morning's items, all of which were composed without eyeglasses. I suppose I've proved that vows of silence just don't fit me.

Altogether Right and Fitting - James Lileks writes that we should remain angry about the murders of last year, and gives an example why:

Little Christine was Gnat’s age, give or take a month; bin Laden’s lackeys killed her - and did so to ensure that other fathers, mothers, brothers, and sisters died as well, preferably by the tens of thousands. This little girl’s death wasn’t even a comma in the manifesto they hoped to write. They made sure that her last moments alive were filled with horror and blood, screams and fear; they made sure that the last thing she saw was the desperate faces of her parents, insisting that everything was okay, we’re going to see Mickey, holding out a favorite toy with numb hands, making up a happy lie. And then she was fire and then she was ash.

I feel the same anger I did on 9/11; I feel the same overwhelming grief. Nothing in my heart has changed, and God forbid it ever does.

I'll demur on a couple of points. First, I'll plump for "hatred" rather than anger as the emotion of choice. Second, I'll try to explain the difference.

A few months ago, driving from work to poetry I found myself swelling with rage, not at the hijackers in general but at Marwan al-Shehhi specifically. Why him? Because of his picture.

Let's face it: Mohammed Atta looked like Satan's friend from school. But al-Shehhi looked like nothing so much as the dweeb in the next cubicle. You wouldn't give him a second thought if you saw him on the street. He could have been any of a million immigrants writing code, running restaurants, driving cabs, taking temperatures. My country is nowhere near as kind abroad as it imagines itself to be, but here at home, there are huge swatchs of the country where people like Marwan al-Shehi are not just tolerated, not just accepted, but welcomed.

"How's it going, Marwan?"

"Fine."

"Have a good week?"

"Soon I will kill you all!"

"O-kAAAY there. Catch you later, dude."

Marwan al-Shehhi was a fucking prick.

The moment of rage ebbed. The hatred remains. These people used what waws best about us to do their worst to us. If I had one of them before me I could cheerfully shoot him in the stomach and settle back on a rock to watch him die.

What's the difference between hatred and anger? Partly the fact that anger actually says so little about moral content. I can be angry at my wife - furious - without hatred, and without the anger meaning she had actually done wrong. I suppose that applies to hatred too - its mere existence guarantees no particular moral content.

No, for me the difference is in that word Lileks uses: "overwhelming." It is the difference between an emotion you wield and one that wields you. The difference between self-mastery and servitude. God forbid, indeed, that we not move from one pole to the other.

It's So Easy II - Many hawks say we should conquer Iraq (and Saudi
Arabia, and Iran, and Syria, and...) and "transform their cultures like we did with Japan and Germany after World War II." I've written before about the problems I have with the analogy. But there's another question: How did that whole post-WWII transformation work?

We've created a Japan that is incapable of defending itself from its most significant regional rival and that is so mired in paternalism - you think occupation may have reinforced that? - that they can't even rebuild a city after an earthquake. As for Germany, it's the driving force behind the EU, and we know what we right-wingers think of that. See any connection between the EU's pathological anti-militarism plus its mania for criminalizing dissent and the denazification experience? With its corporatist ideology and self-conscious attempt to create a "European" identity, the EU can be said to be, at best, "fascism with a human face." (Note that I do not say human brain. Or heart.) The ideology may run from Brussels, but it's made in Germany. I would suggest that we are good at transforming cultures, but not to our specifications. I can just imagine how Iraq turns out.

It's So Easy - Liberal critics of the Administration note, correctly, that it wants to rush off and straighten out Iraq, but Afghanistan is a mess. I can't join them on their next step, though, which is the claim that the problem is because the administration hasn't committed to "nation-building." The implication is that if only we brought in bigger aid packages and spread the peacekeepers around and set about to fostering a liberal society, that Hamid Karzai would not be, essentially, a ward of the US government, and Afghanistan would have hope.

I think that's naive.

The Soviet Union conquered Afhganistan in jig time in 1979. You could look it up. That's when the trouble started. I think the Administration recognizes perfectly well that more "peacekeepers," more domestic advisors and more aid workers would simply mean more targets. To coin a cliche, our quarrel is not with the Afghan people but with select factions, some foreign to Afghanistan, some domestic, who are or would be highly motivated to attack us, no matter how benign our mission (to us). "Warlords" don't become warlords because they "lack hope," they become warlords because they love power. They take their power seriously, even if Westerners don't. To "disarm" a warlord is to make yourself his enemy. (Cf. "Return to Somalia" in the 'best of" section at right, if you haven't.)

If anything, our mistake has been in the other direction, selling the war to topple the Taliban as a humanitarian mission when it was not. It was an attempt to dislodge our sworn enemies and proven attackers (al Qaeda) from their power base. At that, it was largely successful. For propaganda purposes, though, we spoke as if it were a war for the general improvement of Afghanistan. That has not occurred, nor could we, realistically, have accomplished it. Most women still wear the burqa. Most armed factions still go armed. Afghanistan's various groups hate only one thing more than each other, and that's whichever foreigner is attempting to redo their country on them.

I think the Administration recognized this all along. It has left them with a lot of bad policy options and they chose the least bad. Afghanistan is still at risk of lapsing into quagmire or outright failed state again. It's why, while I think the Afghan War doves were wrong, they weren't wrong by much.

Timing - Gene Healy writes, anent Christopher Hitchens' "exhilaration" at seeing the face of his enemy 365 days ago:

It reminds me uncomfortably of Bill Clinton's wistful comment in the twilight of his presidency, that he wished he'd had the challenge of a war, as a crucible in which to prove his "greatness". There's something a little warped here, a baby-boomer conviction that, in the end, it's all about me. Disgust, yes, rage, of course--but exhilaration? Pleasure at the prospect of fighting (in Hitchens' case on the battlefields of Vanity Fair and the Atlantic Monthly) in such an interesting war?

After the initial disbelief and rage, for me the feeling that remained was a kind of nausea: History was back and it was going to grind a lot more people under its wheels before it was through. I guess that's interesting enough, but I can't take even a grim pleasure in it. I'd rather be back talking about Chandra and Condit.

There was another kind of nausea too, for people like me and (presumably) Gene. Al Qaeda made it harder to argue for policies I think are in the long term interest of the United States. Moreover, they made it impossible, for a time, for the US to carry them out. I felt and feel that we should disengage from the Middle East tar baby, in all its aspects. But the component steps of that have to be taken, and seen to be taken, on our own initiative. To do so in the face of attacks demanding those very actions is simply to invite people to start killing us whenever they want something. (Dilemmas of the right-wing peacenik.) On top of all the other reasons to despise the killers of September 11 and their patrons, I felt toward them the same rage I felt toward Timothy McVeigh, who sullied the critique of the increasing militarization of law enforcement just as we were actually making headway on getting the country, and even its elites, to understand the baleful things Waco portended.

To say all that is not to agree that we should contrariwise install a generations-long suzerainty from Suez to Samarkand, as too many hawks urge us to do. It's to acknowledge that the atrocities of last year make "de-intervention" a project requiring the nimblest diplomatic and military maneuvers - and that if we had a government that saw the wisdom of the policy.

Happy Anniversary? - Truck bombs on multiple Potomac River bridges. A bomb at the base of the Empire State Building. An airport massacre. A cropduster spraying memorial crowds at Shanksville with poison.

If nothing like that happens today, it's a sign of just how much we're winning.

Last fall, we could legitimately worry that our enemies could pull off an atrocity on the scale of the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks every month. We now know that they can't. Living in Washington DC, I have enough friends and neighbors doing highly classified work to hear, relatively often, "My spouse/parent/child says that if we could hear all the things they're hearing, we'd never get to sleep," and I'm sure that's true. But so far, whatever hidebound and haphazard countermeasures thrown together have been adequate to the task, and our enemies have not been. While it's true that the toppling of the Taliban has scattered some dangerous people all over the globe instead of keeping them in one place, it has done so at our initiative, not theirs. Bin Laden almost certainly was making a recruiting video a year ago today, not trying for a tangible tactical victory. This is what all the ascriptions of "nihilism" to al Qaeda miss - they're playing on a bigger time scale than that.

But not an infinite one. To truly hurt this country, or to convince others that it can be hurt, nothing less than a steady diet of spectacular attacks will do, and spectacular attacks on US soil at that. One plausible outcome of this week is that police throughout the world round up a lot of the Islamist diaspora as its constituent elements independently - and desperately - attempt to pull off something to mark the baleful anniversary. Another possibility - I like to think a smaller one - is that something really bad happens today or tomorrow. Whatever doesn't happen is the measure of their defeat.

And here's another - this morning's MSNBC headlines on my MSN homepage:

Terrorist risk level raised to 'high'
Bush calls on Americans to be strong
Christopher Reeve improving

Go, Christopher Reeve!

Media Glut - The networks, teh cable shows, the pullout sections of the newspapers. The, um, blogs. If it all seems like too much, remember, it's not all for you. There's more than you need because more people than you have needs. And not, this is crucial, only on the demand side. Capitalism is like that.

There will be people trying to use this day to harness your emotions to their ambitions. There will be people trying to use this day to harness your emotions to their bank accounts. Take what you need and let the rest go by. I've said fairly freely this week that if we're making this kind of deal over the September massacres next year at this time, we will definitely have gone overboard. By that point, you could say for sure that the nation as a whole was lovingly caressing a scab. This is not next year.

So Much for Just Another Day - All kinds of reasons for sleeping poorly tonight - the humidity returned yesterday but we kept our windows open; my hair has gotten a tad longer than is comfortable at night (I buy "for oily hair" shampoo and use it every day out of necessity); an ear infection has my right ear so full of fluid that it is sometimes completely deaf; a restless child in and out of the bed with Mommy and Daddy (ah but what made him restless?); pillows I really need to replace; the adrenalyn of having finished a writing project late last night. But all that just lay the track on which my mind has been running a mile a minute. Thoughts of those bastards from last year and everything since. I renounce sleep. I'm a victim! Good morning.

They, Who Were Not the Ones Dead - A couple of bloggers I respect a lot, Chad Orzel of Uncertain Principles and your Talking Dog, have announced a blogging pause tomorrow for the anniversary of the September massacres. Each has serious reasons for taking this step, and I can't gainsay them. There may be others doing this, too.

As of now, I won't be one of them. If I don't put up anything tomorrow, it will be because of contingencies unforeseen. (Or because I wake up feeling vastly different than I do now.) I thought seriously about keeping Offering Boy out of school and driving up to Shanksville. But Mrs. O. was understandably uncomfortable having him skip school, and other people have pointed out that the area will probably be mobbed; parking is anyway limited there. (On the bright side, if al Qaeda were to try anything funny at the spot, one thing Western Pennsylvania does not lack is guns...) Nor will I necessarily be writing exclusively, or even any, anniversary pieces. I have no idea what I'll write. I understand the complaints about overkill, wallowing, sentimentality and the sheer inadequacy of most outlets to the task.

But writing is what people like me do. I cherish the fact that people exist who are happy to read what I write - I got a touching e-mail just today from someone I'd never heard of, and it really lifted my spirits. But as the cliche goes, I do it as much for myself as for anyone. It's how I "deal." The other thing I do is read a lot, and I expect to do that too. If you're on a reading moratorium tomorrow, that too is nothing I'd want to challenge or have a right to challenge. I hope you'll come back Thursday. Be well.

Wacky - "Accounts in Israeli banks used for terrorism, central bank believes" says Ha'aretz. Israel's commendable bank secrecy laws are temporarily slowing progress on the investigation, but the

Supervisor of Banks informed the Justice Ministry that he was willing to hand over details of the suspect accounts and transactions discovered by the banks, but requested that the ministry first solve the legal impasse that prohibits him from violating banking secrecy laws.

The Bank of Israel would like a formula similar to the one adopted by the Prohibition of Money Laundering Law, which requires the banks and the Bank of Israel to report to the Anti Money Laundering Authority any suspected violations of the law.

Big Time - Here it is only Tuesday, and I've already locked up Cynic of the Week!

Unqualified Offerings would like to thank the little cynics...

(Going for two in a row next week when I suggest that a government more interested in security than applause would let Jose Padilla enter the country unmolested and follow his ass all over the place to see whom he meets with. But in the meantime, Shh!)

Road to Smurfdom - Radley Balko explains why

Just goes to prove that while socialism might work for a short while, sooner or later everybody's going to get fucked.

Word Find - In Alan Bock's column today, he discusses the difference between preemptive war and preventive war, noting that "preemption" has a pretty settled meaning in the laws of war and that the proposed conquest of Iraq doesn't fit it:

"There’s a well-accepted definition for preemptive war in international law," Joseph Cirincione, Director of the Non-Proliferation Project of the Carnegie Endowment, told me on the telephone last week. "Preemptive war is justified by an imminent threat of attack, a clear and present danger that the country in question is about to attack you. In such a case a preemptive attack is recognized as justifiable."

(One paragraph later, Bock typos the 1967 Arab-Israeli War as "1973." Make the mental correction as you go.) Bock points out that what the Hawks are pushing for is more properly called "preventive" war. (Keep the scare-quotes too, because the attack being "prevented" is itself uncertain.) Unqualified Offerings still considers "prophylactic war" to be more apt yet.

Canada, Land of Peace and Tolerance - From the Globe and Mail:

Security officials at the university said the event was called off because about 200 protesters crowded inside the downtown university building where Mr. Netanyahu had been scheduled to speak.

Protesters inside the building tossed chairs and newspaper boxes at police before being driven back by police batons and pepper spray.

Police arrested at least five people following a melee inside the F. Hall building as other demonstrators tried to get in by smashing a window.

Netanyahu is a creep. (Says Unqualified Offerings.) The protesters are creepier.

Flit provides a link to a chilling report from the pro-demonstrator side.

Deprecation - Besides, how can this woman be Saddam's mistress? Everybody knows he's gay.

UPDATE: Oops! Scooped by Counterspin who has a photo!

Incubator Tales - Reader Eric Mauro noted this Christian Science Monitor story about another legend of Gulf War I - that Iraqi troops were "massed on the Kuwaiti border" for an attack on Saudi Arabia:

When George H. W. Bush ordered American forces to the Persian Gulf – to reverse Iraq's August 1990 invasion of Kuwait – part of the administration case was that an Iraqi juggernaut was also threatening to roll into Saudi Arabia.

Citing top-secret satellite images, Pentagon officials estimated in mid–September that up to 250,000 Iraqi troops and 1,500 tanks stood on the border, threatening the key US oil supplier.

But when the St. Petersburg Times in Florida acquired two commercial Soviet satellite images of the same area, taken at the same time, no Iraqi troops were visible near the Saudi border – just empty desert.

"It was a pretty serious fib," says Jean Heller, the Times journalist who broke the story.

The White House is now making its case. to Congress and the public for another invasion of Iraq; President George W. Bush is expected to present specific evidence of the threat posed by Iraq during a speech to the United Nations next week.

But past cases of bad intelligence or outright disinformation used to justify war are making experts wary. The questions they are raising, some based on examples from the 1991 Persian Gulf War, highlight the importance of accurate information when a democracy considers military action.

Bruce Rolston of Flit has also commented on this article. Author Scott Peterson quotes former congressman Lee Hamilton:

"My concern in these situations, always, is that the intelligence that you get is driven by the policy, rather than the policy being driven by the intelligence," says former US Rep. Lee Hamilton (D) of Indiana, a 34-year veteran lawmaker until 1999, who served on numerous foreign affairs and intelligence committees, and is now director of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington. The Bush team "understands it has not yet carried the burden of persuasion [about an imminent Iraqi threat], so they will look for any kind of evidence to support their premise," Mr. Hamilton says. "I think we have to be skeptical about it."

Hamilton did not note this upcoming opportunity for skepticism specifically, but he might as well have.

Drip Drip Drip - A pretty stunning episode in the annals of pre-9/11 national security just came out. Michael Isikoff reports in Newsweek that

At first, FBI director Bob Mueller insisted there was nothing the bureau could have done to penetrate the 9-11 plot. That account has been modified over time—and now may change again. NEWSWEEK has learned that one of the bureau’s informants had a close relationship with two of the hijackers: he was their roommate.

Who, when and where?

But both agencies can share in the blame. Upon leaving Malaysia, Almihdhar and Alhazmi went to San Diego, where they took flight-school lessons. In September 2000, the two moved into the home of a Muslim man who had befriended them at the local Islamic Center. The landlord regularly prayed with them and even helped one open a bank account. He was also, sources tell NEWSWEEK, a “tested” undercover “asset” who had been working closely with the FBI office in San Diego on terrorism cases related to Hamas. A senior law-enforcement official told NEWSWEEK the informant never provided the bureau with the names of his two houseguests from Saudi Arabia. Nor does the FBI have any reason to believe the informant was concealing their identities. (He could not be reached for comment.) But the FBI concedes that a San Diego case agent appears to have been at least aware that Saudi visitors were renting rooms in the informant’s house. (On one occasion, a source says, the case agent called up the informant and was told he couldn’t talk because “Khalid”—a reference to Almihdhar—was in the room.)

Malaysia as in the Kuala Lumpur al Qaeda meeting in January 2000 monitored by Malaysian intelligence and the CIA. Both men moved out of the informant's house by the end of 2000.

In the meantime, the CIA was gathering more information about just how potentially dangerous both men were. A few months after the October 2000 bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen, CIA analysts discovered —in their Malaysia file that one of the chief suspects in the Cole attack— Tawfiq bin Attash—was present at the “summit” and had been photographed with Almihdhar and Alhazmi. But it wasn’t until Aug. 23, 2001, that the CIA sent out an urgent cable to U.S. border and law-enforcement agencies identifying the two men as “possible” terrorists.

What's the least supported part of the article? This part:

The bureau did not realize the San Diego connection until a few days after 9-11, when the informant heard the names of the Pentagon hijackers and called his case agent

As Unqualified Offerings has previously noted, there is still the question of just how the government was able to provide the names of all the hiijackers as quickly as it did. This latest doesn't quite get us the answer yet. Is there more out there yet to discover? The congressional intelligence committees think there might be. Isikoff:

But the belated discovery has unsettled some members of the joint House and Senate intelligence committees investigating the 9-11 attacks. The panel is tentatively due to begin public hearings as early as Sept. 18, racing to its end-of-the-year deadline. But some members are now worried that they won’t get to the bottom of what really happened by then. Support for legislation creating a special blue-ribbon investigative panel, similar to probes conducted after Pearl Harbor and the Kennedy assassination, is increasing. Only then, some members say, will the public learn whether more 9-11 secrets are buried in the government’s files.

An aside, by the way. Liberals despise Isikoff for his role in covering the shenanigans of the last administration. Neocons have been pretty hacked off at his skeptical reporting on the legendarily unproven "Prague meeting" between Mohammed Atta and an alleged Iraqi intelligence officer. These things help convince UO that Isikoff is the best reporter in the country.