Right Wing Nut House

9/11 COMMISSION: FROM L TO R: THOMAS KEAN, LEE HAMILTON, STAFF MEMBER DEITRICH SNELL

You’ve got to hand it to the 9/11 Commissioners. When push comes to shove, they know when to duck:

The Sept. 11 commission concluded that an intelligence program known as Able Danger “did not turn out to be historically significant,” despite hearing a claim that the program had identified the future plot leader Mohammed Atta as a potential terrorist threat more than a year before the 2001 attacks, the commission’s former leaders said in a statement on Friday evening.

The statement said a review of testimony and documents had found that the single claim in July 2004 by a Navy officer was the only time the name of Mr. Atta or any other future hijacker was mentioned to the commission as having been known before the hijackings. That account is consistent with statements this week by a commission spokesman, but it contradicts claims by a former defense intelligence official who said he had told the commission staff about Able Danger’s work on Mr. Atta during a briefing in Afghanistan in October 2003.

“Not historically significant?” How’d we get there from “if the briefers had mentioned anything that startling, it would have gotten their attention?”

You don’t have to read between the lines to see what’s going on here. In fact, 9/11 Commission spokesman Felzenberg couldn’t have made it any more plain when he said “The information that he provided us did not mesh with other conclusions that we were drawing” from the commission’s investigation.” And just to make sure that we understood perfectly that the Commission ignored the Able Danger revelations because it didn’t fit their pre-conceived ideas they were pushing in the 9/11 narrative, Mr. Felzenberg repeated himself by saying “This information was not meshing with the other information that we had.”

As the Captain points out, the Commission’s entire defense boils down to two facts: 1) The Commission had no previous evidence that 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta was in the country at the time Able Danger says he was; and 2) The reason they know when Mr. Atta was in the country and when he wasn’t was because he always used his real name while traveling abroad.

Huh?

The Captain explains:

…it’s also worth noting that the Commission had an unusual standard for determining Atta’s timeline — they relied on him to travel under his own name at all times. I discussed this in earlier posts, but it bears repeating: terrorists can change tactics situationally. All the report can possibly state was the first time Atta traveled under his own name or any known aliases, and then only if immigration records picked it up. It doesn’t take much imagination, however, to think that he may have traveled here under a separate cover once or twice first to test the system and to do preliminary research for his mission.

The question should be asked of the 9/11 Commission staff - especially Deitrich Snell who interviewed the Able Danger team member in July, 2004 - why they didn’t try to either prove or disprove his story by asking the Pentagon about the data mining operation. There’s also the question of the arrests in Germany of Iraqi Intelligence operatives in March of 2000; operatives that the Germans said “uncovered what they considered to be serious indications of cooperation between Iraq and bin Ladin,” and that “acting on CIA recommendations, [the Germans] had been focused on monitoring the activities of Islamic groups linked to bin Ladin.”

That makes two pieces of potential evidence ignored by Commission staffers (or not informed by the CIA about the German-Iraqi spy arrests?). How many other facts were discarded because, in Mr. Fetzenberg’s words, they didn’t “mesh” with conclusions already reached by the staff?

The Commission has made an effective counter to Congressman Weldon’s charges, placing the burden now on him to prove the Commission liars. The only way to do that would be to hold hearings and put some people under oath.

Expect those hearings to begin shortly after the August recess is over.

UPDATE

Kevin Drum:

The Able Danger program was classified, of course, so we may never know exactly what it was and what it found out — especially since if the Pentagon was aware of Atta in 2000 it’s not likely to want to admit it in any case. However, I’m going to stick with my original guess: it produced some general information about al-Qaeda, but nothing specifically about Atta or the other 9/11 hijackers. That’s why no one ever mentioned Atta in the original reports. Later on, frustrated because their story wasn’t getting enough attention, Weldon and his source embellished it to suggest that Able Danger had specifically uncovered actionable intelligence about an al-Qaeda cell in Brooklyn headed by Atta.

Suitably cautious but fails to account for the fact that there are two different sources telling the Commission about Able Danger - once in October, 2003 (at the same time that Sandy Berger was getting sticky fingers in the National Archives) and July, 2004 which was at a time as Drum suggests that the Commission’s Final Report had mostly been written.

However, Drum may be correct in that it appears according to what the Commission staff is saying, Atta was not mentioned in the October, 2003 meeting. My reading of Weldon’s interview with Government Security News is that someone is lying; either the Able Danger team member or Commission staffers:

According to Weldon, staff members of the 9/11 Commission were briefed on the capabilities of the Able Danger intelligence unit within the Special Operations Command, which had been set up by General Pete Schoomaker, who headed Special Ops at the time, on the orders of General Hugh Shelton, then the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff. Staffers at the 9/11 Commission staffers were also told about the specific recommendation to break up the Mohammed Atta cell. However, those commission staff members apparently did not choose to brief the commission’s members on these sensitive matters.

UPDATE II

AJ from The Strata-Sphere who’s been on top of this issue since it broke:

There is no ‘credibility’ issues here! None. Able Danger is as credible as the other leads the government dropped and only realized post 9-11 they were missed.

Baldilocks:

The commission’s response only leads to more questions. I don’t know whether the answers will come out without this military official having to be named in public.

I’m afraid she’s right.

The Counterterrorism Blog:

The INS Headquarters National Security Unit (NSU), which was created in the late 1990s in spite of considerable obstacles generated by the INS High Command, was one of the few and small success stories within the INS. The INS/NSU, circa 1999-2000, tried to post a liaison officer to the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) specifically to tap into DoD intelligence on counter-terrorism matters. The NSU Director at the time approved it and DIA bought off on the plan…but INS senior management above the NSU Director nixed it so it never happened.

Hindsight is alwayas 20/20 and the refusal of the INS to approve the liason with DoD, given the pre-9/11 mindset, was both to be expected and understandable. It should go without saying, however, that it would be nice to know that the situation has been rectified and such nonsense is no longer being practiced by the INS.

UPDATE III

Rusty Shackleford and Ed Morrissey are having fascinating back and forth regarding the Iraqi spies caught in Germany and whether or not they could have been connected to Mohammed Atta’s Hamburg cell.

Read the whole thing here. And here’s the Captain’s original post and follow up.

And here’s Rusty’s original post where they have a back and forth in the comment section.

I’ll confess to not being an expert about much of anything. And being a “generalist” has many, many drawbacks when trying to write coherently about the War in Iraq. I’ve never served in the military so I can’t speak to what our soldiers are enduring on the ground as they try to stamp out what appears to be a never ending insurgency that continues to take its toll in American lives and treasure. I was never much of a “policy wonk” so it’s difficult for me to write about how the White House and Pentagon are formulating and carrying out our policy there.

All I can do is read. So for 10-12 hours a day I sit in front of my computer as the world tries to squeeze itself through my little 17″ monitor and enlighten me. I try to cram as much information and opinion as I can on a wide variety of issues that interest me. But what takes up most of my day is reading about the war.

I don’t write about Iraq as much as I used to because frankly, I’ve been pretty confused. I’ve contented myself with writing about the fight here at home between right and left believing that it’s vitally necessary to counter what Michelle Malkin so aptly describes as “Bush Derangement Syndrome,” seeing in that disease a real danger to both our continuing effort in Iraq and the poisoning of political discourse that makes governing here at home so much the harder.

I think what I am good at is detecting and recognizing trends. It’s quite simple, really. Flood your mind with enough information and the most fantastic computer ever built - the human brain - does the rest. As long as you arm yourself with a good enough bias detector (and B.S. detector) there really is nothing to it. And the trend I’ve been most concerned with lately has a dual track; the progress the anti-war left is making in playing to the war weariness of the American people and the situation on the ground in Iraq that is not improving and, in some ways, is worsening.

I’ve taken the President to task before on this site for not putting the war front and center on his agenda. In fact, the problem the President now has is if he tries to refocus the American people’s attention on Iraq and why we are there, he can rightfully be accused of playing politics with the issue. His approval rating on Iraq is going down because he has abandoned the issue to his political and ideological opponents. You can have administration spokesmen giving speeches all over the country and Congressional Republicans talking about the war until they”re blue in the face. But no one can grab the attention of the American people like a President speaking about war. The people are anxious and not a little confused. With the left wing in full cry against the war and the President personally along with continuing and in some respects escalating violence in Iraq, the people need to hear their President constantly, patiently, and doggedly explain why we are there, what losing the war would mean, and defining the rough parameters of victory.

It’s not that the American people don’t know these things already. It’s that they need to hear it again and again to buttress their faith against the faithless and steel their resolve against those whose major domestic concern is a humiliation of the President personally and the United States in general.

The left’s effectiveness in instilling war weariness in the public is the result of a constant drumbeat day after day of saying exactly the same thing; the President lied about WMD in Iraq. From this, all other critiques of the war resonate because, according to polls, people are now convinced this is so. Amplified as it is by a sympathetic media, the left’s message is falling on fertile ground because of the President’s unwillingness to take his critics head on, unashamed and without apology.

Once the President’s honesty about the reasons for going to war is successfully questioned, it’s simply a matter of people picking and choosing what other criticisms of the war they wish to believe. Is this a war for oil? For Haliburton? For Israel? To “finish the work” of his father? Take your pick. Once the President’s credibility is destroyed, anything is possible.

Mark Noonan points out the consequences of the President losing his credibility:

For the longest time I didn’t care much about the conspiracy theorists - putting them down as harmless nuts. This was a mistake on my part: a lie is a lie, and all lies are bad. We’ve become used to lies here in the United States - indeed, in a lot of cases a lie is much more easily believed than the truth. As it relates to our War on Terrorism, there is a built-in ability to believe a story about the President lying to get us into Iraq. We should have resolutely fought against the conspiracy theory lies right from the beginning, rather than allow them to become woven into the fabric of our society.

The price we are paying for allowing lies to gain currency is being paid in blood - the blood of our soldiers, as well as the blood of innocent non-combatants. You see, the people who believe conspiracy theories about the war might seem like laughable lunatics to most of us, but to our enemies they seem rational beings who, because of MSM puff-pieces on them, represent the average American - and in representing the average American, they play up to enemy propaganda about us. Unlike our domestic leftists, our Islamist enemies are not at all shy about stating their conspiracy theories in public - the theory that Mossad carried out 9/11 is underground in the United States, but it is front page news in the Arab world…to have paranoid theories “confirmed” by the statements of Americans protesting against President Bush and the war is like water in the desert to terrorists in Anbar province…and their masters in Damascus and Tehran.

This is why the Cindy Sheehan campaign is starting to pay dividends for the left. Contained in her “plea” for the President to “explain” why her son died is the accusation that he lied in order to start a war. In fact, the Sheehan drama is a two ring circus; one ring is the grieving mother seeking answers to her questions about why her son had to die. The other ring is the fiery, anti-war activist that accuses the President of doing the bidding of Israel and the oil companies. The first ring speaks to the fairness and compassion of the American people. The second ring feeds their doubts about the President’s motives.

I still think Mrs. Sheehan will self-destruct - especially now that apparently every loon who wants to get his face on TV is descending on Crawford. This will turn the “Cindy Sheehan show” into something similar to what happened to the right during the Terri Schiavo tragedy. The extremists will take center stage and the American people will turn away in droves.

This won’t solve the President’s political problem of re-invigorating the war effort here at home. For that, he could use some help with good news about Iraq both from a military and political standpoint. At the moment, neither seems likely.

For the last several months, the analysis I’ve read from people whose opinion is generally respected by both the left and the right has slowly been changing from cautious optimism to growing alarm over several trends in Iraq. They include:

1. An insurgency that is getting more sophisticated in their tactics and more deadly in their ability to inflict casualties. This sophistication includes being able to mount attacks aimed at causing political damage to the new government as well as escalating sectarian tensions.

2. A growing dismay at the lack of concrete progress in the training of the Iraqi army.

3. A deepening worry over sectarian militias that call to mind Lebanon’s fractious past.

4. The real possibility that despite the best efforts of government and religious leaders, civil war is growing more likely.

5. The political struggle over the form and content of the Iraqi Constitution that now appears will result in a delay in approving the document.

6. The battle at home over troop withdrawal which will test both the unity of the Administration as well as the President’s ability to resist the impulse to leave too soon.

Greg Djerjian on many of these trends I outlined above:

But to win this thing we need to be decimating the enemy–not disrupting him–with overwhelming force. And we simply don’t have that amount of force in theater. So we are doing the best we can with the resources at hand (do we really need all those troops in Germany, by the way?), scraping by really, and hoping against hope that the political process will improve and help us turn some corner in the not too distant future.

But hope isn’t a strategy, and to all those (and there are more and more) ready to give up (or fakely declare victory in that we weren’t strictly ‘defeated’ on the battlefield) and say to hell if Iraq degenerates into civil war, we gave it our best shot–let me be clear. An Iraq mired in large-scale sectarian conflict, let alone full-blown civil war, would be a cluster-f*&k of epic proportions. Why? Because it would mean a failed or failing state smack in the center of the Middle East. We would have created an embittered Sunni para-state, a terror haven really, roiling and destabilizing the region (such an unstable state of affairs would help foster radicalization of Shi’a behavior also, of course, in ways not helpful to the U.S. national interest).

Iran, Turkey, Syria and even Saudi Arabia and Jordan would have direct interests implicated too, of course. Need I sketch this out more? (Hint: Borders wouldn’t be treated with any sanctity by the neighbors, friends). The point is, leaving Iraq to fend for itself without a viable, stable polity in place would be a disaster–for the thousands and thousands (coalition and Iraqi alike) who will have died in vain, for the region, for our national prestige, for the war on terror generally.

Does the President have the political courage not to mention the political skills necessary to dramatically increase troop strength in Iraq? What kind of resistance would he get from the military? Would an increase in troop strength only serve to heighten sectarian tensions, feed the insurgency, depress the Iraqi armed forces, and embitter the average Iraqi citizen? Or has the military situation made all those concerns ancillary to the need to establish some semblance of order so that an elected Iraqi government can function?

This is why I think we’re in the biggest crisis of the war. We’re at a crossroads. And the decisions taken over the next few months by the President will determine whether the war is a success or failure. What makes me a little bitter is that this is taking place as the President seeks to put the war to the side as he pursues domestic concerns. The war may be a political downer for the White House. But we’ve got 138,000 men and women in Iraq who don’t give a fig about politics. They only want to get the job done and come home. And if getting the job done means increasing troop strength in the sort term then so be it.

The long and short of it is we need the President to do his job. I find it hard to imagine that FDR or Lincoln could have endured as political leaders if they had sought to sweep the war they were waging under the rug. If the President’s hope is that the American people will forget about the war, someone should dash that hope for him immediately. His opponents and the press won’t let that happen. If that ’s the case then the President has a choice; he can either treat the war with the seriousness and focus that it deserves or he can continue on as he is now.

It’s no longer a question of whether or not he should be more active in dealing with the war. It’s a question only of whether he will attempt to take control of events and guide the country to a far distant shore where Iraq is a peaceful, democratic state or whether events will instead control him. If it’s the latter, we will have no chance of succeeding. The former, we wing big.

There really is no other choice.

It’s a fascinating day here in blogland. We have dueling blogswarms between the left and right, each trying to push a story into prominence in the mainstream media.

On the left, there’s the Cindy Sheehan story and what’s rapidly becoming something known as “Camp Casey.” The lefties believe that the image of a mother who has lost her son in Iraq camped out in front of the President’s ranch in Crawford, Texas begging for an audience (her 2nd) with George Bush is somehow a tipping point in the Iraq War.

On the right, there’s a story that’s getting curiouser and curiouser about a top secret Pentagon intelligence team called Able Danger whose data mining operation apparently uncovered the al Qaeda terror cell of Mohammed Atta a full year before 9/11. This fact, known to the 9/11 Commission staff at least 10 months prior to the issuance of their final report, was inexplicably not included in the 9/11 narrative. Nobody knows why and as I write this, Commission staff - the very same staff who failed to include the information in the first place - is over at the National Archives trying to find out why they were too stupid or too partisan to report it.

For sheer volume, the left wins in a walk. As of 3:00 PM central time, there were 4370 posts on Cindy Sheehan while only 468 posts were on Able Danger. However, most of those posts on Sheehan were written before this last Tuesday when the Able Danger story hit the fan. And many, many more righty bloggers are posting about Cindy Sheehan than lefty bloggers are posting about Able Danger.

In fact, while the left has gone off the deep end with the Sheehan story, calling the disturbed woman the “Rosa Parks” of the anti-war movement and other equally over the top encomiums, the counter reaction from the right has been equally vigorous, albeit with as much hyperbolic rhetoric in opposition to Mrs. Sheehan as can be found in support of her.

By contrast, the reaction on the left to the Able Danger story has been muted and dismissive. None of the top left blogs are even posting on it. Then again, they aren’t doing much Cindy Sheehan coverage either. Why do you suppose that is?

Mrs. Sheehan comes off pretty well in 15-30 second snippetts. But if you sit her down in a chair at CNN or Fox or read an interview with her in a newspaper what emerges is a shrill kook whose anti-semitic rants against Israel and fantastic conspiracy theories involving Bush, the oil companies, and American “colonies” in the middle east mark her as someone the sane left is keeping at arms left. While both Daily Kos and Democratic Underground are wall to wall Sheehan, Josh Marshall, TPM Cafe, Wonkette, and Jerelyn Merritt have all kept their distance from the story. Wonkette even has a plea for sanity:

Is that what the debate has come to? Which side can corral the saddest crop of widows, parents, and orphans? Call it a harms race. Better: an ache-off. We hope the grimly absurd image of two competing camps of mourners illustrates why it is we’ve been somewhat reluctant to weigh in on Sheehan’s cause: Grief can pull a person in any direction, and whatever “moral authority” it imbues, we can’t claim that Sheehan has it and those mothers who still support the war don’t. The Bush administration knows all about exploiting tragedy for its own causes, including re-election. Whatever arguments there are against the war in Iraq, let’s not make “I have more despairing mothers on my side” one of them. The only way to win a grief contest is for more people to die.

Cindy Sheehan is a ticking media time bomb waiting to go off. I find it more than likely that she will eventually say something so grotesque, so outrageous, so off the wall, as to make her damaged goods. At which point of course, the left will abandon her.

That said, there is real danger on the right that instead of criticizing the message (and the people pushing the grieving mother forward) there will be a “piling on” aspect to criticism of Sheehan herself that will generate more sympathy for her. Some of the rhetoric I’ve seen directed against this poor woman has been despicable. This has certainly not been the finest hour for many righty bloggers out there (and you know who you are).

In the meantime, the left has another problem with potential revelations in the Able Danger story. One thing you might notice today is that just about everyone is going back in time examining posts they did last year on the 9/11 Commission. Several interesting tidbits have come to light including some tantalizing clues about what exactly Sandy Berger was stuffing in his socks at the National Archives last year. Did the Clinton Administration know about Able Danger and have Berger purloin documents in order to sanitize the record? A skeptic would want more proof but some timelines I’ve seen out there are compelling. Not proof - but enough questions raised that someone with subpoena power should be looking into the entire matter.

The problem for the left with the Able Danger story is that it may, in fact, reveal connections that destroy the national narrative on 9/11 put forth by the Commission. A re-examination of the record could reveal other tidbits - not the least of which is this eye opener the Captain found today about Atta’s Hamburg cell and a busted Iraqi Intelligence ring. The left’s entire anti-war rationale - that Saddam was not involved in 9/11 - may, in fact get a second hearing. And wouldn’t that cut the anti-war crowd off at the knees if any significant changes are forced upon the Commission.

The power of this new media will be on display over the next few weeks. Will the Sheehan story become more compelling as the hard left makes pilgrimages to Crawford to spout their conspiracy theories and preen for the cameras? Or will new revelations about what the 9/11 Commission knew and when they knew it regarding Mohammed Atta push its way to the forefront of coverage in the MSM and put pressure on Congress to investigate what John Podheretz has termed “the story of the summer” in Washington, D.C?

UPDATE

What better place for a post on blogswarms than the blog trackback party at James Joyner’s Outside the Beltway!

Watching Cindy Sheehan as she carries on outside of the President’s ranch in Crawford, Texas I’ve been struck by her apparent heartfelt sincerity. She really does believe that the President of the United States is personally responsible for the death of her son, Casey. She really does believe that the War in Iraq is a gigantic conspiracy involving Israel, the oil companies, and big business. This is not a bid for publicity on her part, at least not consciously. I believe that she thinks that the best way to honor her son’s memory is to have the United States cut and run in Iraq. And I believe that she’s sincere when she says that she wants to talk to the President and get an “explanation” as to why her son had to die.

Cindy Sheehan is in the grip of some pretty powerful emotions. Grief and anger can play very strange tricks on the mind. I can remember my mother blaming the government for the death of my father in 1981 because of exposure to radiation while he was serving in the army in occupied Japan. She would rail constantly against the government for killing her husband, for knowingly sending him to his death. There was no reasoning with her or talking to her about alternative reasons for the cancer that killed him. So, I just let her go on and on about it, hoping that eventually the grief and hurt would subside and she could move on.

She never really did. In the midst of her grief, Alzheimers disease began its slow, insidious work and I don’t know if she ever really came to terms with her loss.

I think Cindy Sheehan is going through something similar now. Her pain has become such a constant companion that it seems natural, a part of her life. She can’t imagine living without it. In short, in order to feel good, she has to feel bad. Her grief is like a comfortable old blanket that she wraps around herself in order to insulate her from the very scary prospect of moving on in life without her son.

This is why any Gold Star mother deserves our pity and yes, our respect. Losing a child under the circumstances of war is especially hard. And her questions about the government’s plans for the war’s aftermath are legitimate, as pertinent as questions mothers in World War II who lost a son at Anzio or the Battle of Hurtgen Forest, or Kasserine Pass may have asked. Those battles were American blunders that resulted in thousands of needless deaths.

Mothers ask these questions in every war. What makes Mrs. Sheehan’s situation unique is that she has chosen to make her ordeal a public spectacle. She has taken the personal and made it political. And she has made common cause with those whose actions in support of the terrorists in Iraq may have, in fact, assisted in the death of her son.

I’m not talking about the rational anti-war left whose critiques of Administration policy are harsh but do not descend into the kind of exaggerated, conspiratorial hyperbole that Mrs. Sheehan and the crazy left have adopted. The gimlet-eyed anti-Americans who have captured her cause and made it their own know exactly what they’re doing and where they want to go. They want to piggyback their agenda on Mrs. Sheehan’s grief and ride her until the media tires of the spectacle and moves on to something else.

Michelle Malkin calls them “grief pimps.” Somewhat vulgar, but apt. They are without principals and without honor. To try and cash in politically on someone who so obviously is suffering the kind of denial Mrs. Sheehan is going through defies belief. The simple, common decencies normal people take for granted do not apply because to them, the personal is political. This is the foundation of modern leftist ideology. It has brought us multiculturalism, identity politics, and a host of irrational idiocies that threaten to destroy our civilization. What R. Emmett Tyrell has called liberalisms “riot of conceits” now allows for the exploitation of grief. One may ask, well why not? The left has managed to exploit everything else, why not human misery?

There’s an extraordinary picture of National Security Adviser Steve Hadley sitting at the feet of Mrs. Sheehan a few days ago talking to her and listening to what she has to say. Her subsequent recollection of the meeting reveals what happens to mind and memory when grief and anger take over:

Joe Hagin [WH Deputy Chief of Staff] told me that he goes with the president when he meets with families, and that George Bush really cares about the soldiers and the families, and I said, “Don’t even tell me that! Because I met with him before, and that man doesn’t even have an ounce of compassion in his body.” And he looked really surprised. Don’t you think that’s something they would have known about before they had this little tete-a-tete with me yesterday

Contrast what she said there with this snippett from her meeting with the President in June of last year:

THE REPORTER of Vacaville, CA published an account of Cindy Sheehan’s visit with the president at Fort Lewis near Seattle on June 24, 2004:

“‘I now know he’s sincere about wanting freedom for the Iraqis,’ Cindy said after their meeting. ‘I know he’s sorry and feels some pain for our loss. And I know he’s a man of faith.’

“The meeting didn’t last long, but in their time with Bush, Cindy spoke about Casey and asked the president to make her son’s sacrifice count for something. They also spoke of their faith.

“The trip had one benefit that none of the Sheehans expected.

“For a moment, life returned to the way it was before Casey died. They laughed, joked and bickered playfully as they briefly toured Seattle.

For the first time in 11 weeks, they felt whole again.

“‘That was the gift the president gave us, the gift of happiness, of being together,’ Cindy said.”

I have no doubt that Cindy Sheehan remembers her meeting with the President the way she described it two days ago on Air America. She’s not lying. She has replayed that meeting over and over in her mind and where she first thought the President showed compassion, she now sees flippancy. She re-runs every word, every gesture of the President’s and each time she does, she becomes more convinced that the President is an unfeeling, uncaring monster. The two descriptions may not sound the same, but they relfect what she actually felt back then as well as the way she feels now.

The fact that this has now caused a split in her family is actually feeding the pain she needs to go on. Being encouraged by the left to carry a cross, her martyrdom would be complete if her family abandoned her. And this apparently is what she wants.

I doubt whether Mrs. Sheehan will ever retreat from the precipace that has opened beneath her feet. It remains to be seen whether her friends on the left will push her over the edge or simply abandon her and move on. Either way she’s a lost soul. For that reason, I can’t be too harsh on her. I can only pity her as she wallows in her pain and grief and is exploited by people who aren’t fit to clean her dead son’s army boots.

In an interview with Government Security News, one of the Able Danger team members revealed that it was lawyers for the Department of Defense who prevented information gleaned from the data mining operation from reaching the FBI:

The intelligence officer recalled carrying documents to the offices of Able Danger, which was being run by the Special Operations Command, headquartered in Tampa, FL. The documents included a photo of Mohammed Atta supplied by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service and described Atta’s relationship with Osama bin Laden. The officer was very disappointed when lawyers working for Special Ops decided that anyone holding a green card had to be granted essentially the same legal protections as any U.S. citizen. Thus, the information Able Danger had amassed about the only terrorist cell they had located inside the United States could not be shared with the FBI, the lawyers concluded.

“We were directed to take those 3M yellow stickers and place them over the faces of Atta and the other terrorists and pretend they didn’t exist,” the intelligence officer told GSN.

DoD lawyers may also have been reluctant to suggest a bold action by FBI agents after the bureau’s disastrous 1993 strike against the Branch Davidian religious cult in Waco, TX, said Weldon and the intelligence officer.

Could political correctness have killed 3000 of our fellow citizens? And this charade of covering the faces of Atta and his cell with little yellow pieces of paper borders on the surreal. What kind of bureaucratic mindset could be responsible for such idiocy?

Well…before she became the #2 lawyer at the Department of Justice, Jamie Gorelick was a lawyer for the Department of Defense. Make sense to you now?

The next question would have to be: Is this practice still going on?

We know that the Patriot Act broke down many of these barriers between the CIA and FBI but did it also cure the timidity and stupidity that led to this fiasco?

Meanwhile, the Washington Post points out the interesting fact that we have the fox in charge of investigating the hen house regarding the 9/11 Commission’s probe into the Able Danger allegations; the same people who may have discarded the information about Mohammed Atta and his Brooklyn terror cell in the first place are investigating why they may have done such a stupid thing:

Staff members of the Sept. 11 commission are investigating allegations by a Republican congressman that lead hijacker Mohamed Atta had been identified as a potential threat by a highly classified Defense Department program a year or more before the attacks occurred.

Commission officials confirmed a report in yesterday’s New York Times that two staff members interviewed a uniformed military officer, who alleged in July 2004 that a secret program called “Able Danger” had identified Atta as a potential terrorist threat in 1999 or early 2000.

This is probably why a Congressional investigation is in order. Here we have the staff of the 9/11 Commission investigating themselves. And Congress should look into one particular Commission investigator, Deitrich Snell, who according to the NY Times story yesterday was the staff person who interviewed the Able Danger team member at Commission headquarters in July, 2004 - 10 days before the Commission’s Final Report was released:

Mr. Snell also prosecuted one of the Bojinka plot conspirators and turned down a deal with the terrorist:

Abdul Hakim Murad, a conspirator in the 1995 Bojinka plot with Ramzi Yousef, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, and others, was convicted in 1996 of his role in the Bojinka plot (see January 6, 1995). He is about to be sentenced for that crime. He offers to cooperate with federal prosecutors in return for a reduction in his sentence, but prosecutors turn down his offer.

Dietrich Snell, the prosecutor who convicted Murad, says after 9/11 that he doesn’t remember any such offer. But court papers and others familiar with the case later confirmed that Murad does offer to cooperate at this time. Snell claimed he only remembers hearing that Murad had described an intention to hijack a plane and fly it into CIA headquarters. However, in 1995 Murad had confessed to Philippine investigators that this would have been only one part of a larger plot to crash a number of airplanes into prominent US buildings, including the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, a plot that Khalid Shaikh Mohammed later adjusts and turns into the 9/11 plot

You may recall that the Bojinka plot involved the blowing up of 11 US bound airplanes over the Pacific Ocean, in January of 1996. This is the plot KSM eagerly took to Osama Bin Laden for approval only to have OBL scale the attack down to what eventually turned out to be the 9/11 attack. The behavior of Mr. Snell in this case is eerily similar to what he did with the Able Danger information. In other words, Mr. Snell has experience in burying information that may have led to discovery of the 9/11 attack.

According to today’s Washington Post, we may hear something from the Commission today about Able Danger and why the staff failed to include the information in the Final Report.

Question: Who would have the clout in the Clinton Administration to squelch an intelligence report that the military wanted to pass on to the FBI?

That’s got to be a pretty short list. First, it would have to be someone with the required security clearance. And second, it would have to be some kind of gatekeeper, someone who would liaise between both the Department of Defense and the Department of Justice.

Such an individual would almost have to work for the White House. Several bloggers are pointing to Jamie Gorelick as a possible culprit but I don’t think she would have had the authority to act on her own in such a sensitive matter. Her name may be on a memo somewhere but an interesting question is would the Justice Department have had the authority to act unilaterally in a matter of national security like this? I think not which brings us back to the White House and the possible involvement of Sandy Berger in preventing this intel from reaching the FBI.

Using timelines developed by AJ at The Strata-Sphere and Dr. Sanity two things jump out at you.

The first is the time that Berger was in the National Archives stealing documents compared to when staff members for the 9/11 Commission were interviewing Congressman Weldon’s source for Able Danger. Berger is accused of stealing the documents “during two visits to the National Archives in September and October 2003.” The 9/11 staff people visited the Afghan-Pakistan border in October of 2003 to interview the Able Danger team member.

Coincidence? Or Connection?

It would depend on what Berger knew about the Committee’s plans. Would Berger have known that they were going to interview the Able Danger team member? If so, who would have tipped him off? It would have to have been a partisan who was privy to the comings and goings of the investigative staff, many of whom were current and former Justice Department attorneys.

Curiouser and curiouser, no?

Try this on for size. Commission member Jamie Gorelick worked in the same high-powered Democratic party law firm as 9/11 Commission Staff General Counsel Daniel Marcus. The firm includes such luminaries as Lloyd Cutler, known as “the ultimate Washington power broker” who passed away in May. Gorelick joined the firm in 1997 while Marcus left in 1998. If Berger was tipped off by someone with specific knowledge of both the Able Danger operation and Commission staff travel plans to interview one of the AD team members, it would make sense for this someone to have had access to documents so that all traces that the Clinton administration knew of the operation’s warning but didn’t tell the FBI could be removed.

That someone could have been Berger himself.

Perhaps its time to reopen one of the really nagging questions surrounding the formation of the 9/11 Commission itself; why was Jamie Gorelick the only member of the Commission from either the former or current administration who had an axe to grind? In a March 5, 1995 memo to the FBI Director Louis Freeh, Gorelick reminded the director of the “wall” between foreign intelligence gathered and the FBI investigation into the first World Trade Center attack:

In the memo, Ms. Gorelick ordered Mr. Freeh and Ms. White to follow information-sharing procedures that “go beyond what is legally required,” in order to avoid “any risk of creating an unwarranted appearance” that the Justice Department was using Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrants, instead of ordinary criminal investigative procedures, in an effort to undermine the civil liberties of terrorism suspects.

Could one of the reasons Gorelick was placed on the Commission be that she would have been perfectly positioned to give a heads up to some of her friends in the Clinton Administration when troubling questions were coming up? Remember the context here. This was an election year. It was one of the major Democratic themes that 9/11 happened because the Bush Administration ignored warnings given by their predecessors. It would certainly be inconvenient if it came out that the Clinton White House had known of Mohammed Atta almost a year before the attacks.

The other curious thing that jumps out at you when looking at the timeline was that the second meeting with the Able Danger team member took place on July 12, 2004. Berger resigned from the Kerry campaign on July 21 after the document story came out. The Commission released its Final Report the very next day. Can’t say for sure if it means anything. After all, the FBI had been investigating Berger since February. It’s just curious that the information about the investigation would have come out when it did. It was remarked at the time that a probable culprit for leaking the Berger investigation was the Bush Administration trying to distract attention from the release of the 9/11 Commission report due the next day. That makes sense. But how about a little different take.

However, let me ask this — when would people prefer to have the information that the 9/11 Commission was denied access to highly classified material relating to the Clinton Administration’s response to terrorism — after the report came out, or before? For that matter, when would the commission itself prefer to find this out? I’d say it’s better to have this information in the public eye now, especially since the commission made such a show about public testimony, including that of Sandy Berger. If they publish a report based on incomplete evidence, I want to have that information in hand before assessing its credibility.

In this scenario, the Commission itself (who had been informed of the Berger matter) leaked news of the investigation to bolster its credibility. Possible, but let’s try a “wag the dog” scenario.

Suppose you had a PR problem with a former Clinton national security official who was being mentioned as the probable next Secretary of State in a Kerry Administration. You know that once the investigation comes to light that this officials dream of heading up the State Department is finished. But in order to minimize PR damage, you leak news of the investigation into this official’s conduct the day before some other news is absolutely going to swamp it; say, the release of a much anticipated bi-partisan report on the 9/11 attacks?

Just thinking out loud…

“Oh what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive.” (Sir Walter Scott)

It appears that the “non-partisan” 9/11 Commission has some explaining to do. For the last 48 hours, they’ve tried to deny knowledge of the fact that a secret military intelligence unit known as Able Danger, had information on a terrorist cell headed up by 9/11 hijacker Mohamed Atta. The unit, that pieced together the information using data mining techniques, subsequently tried to share the information on Atta with the FBI only to be rebuffed by the Justice Department due to the artificial “wall” put in place by the Clinton White House between the CIA and FBI.

At first, the Commission denied they had been briefed on the matter. But as this New York Times article makes clear, that’s not entirely accurate:

The Sept. 11 commission was warned by a uniformed military officer 10 days before issuing its final report that the account would be incomplete without reference to what he described as a secret military operation that by the summer of 2000 had identified as a potential threat the member of Al Qaeda who would lead the attacks more than a year later, commission officials said on Wednesday.

The officials said that the information had not been included in the report because aspects of the officer’s account had sounded inconsistent with what the commission knew about that Qaeda member, Mohamed Atta, the plot’s leader.

But aides to the Republican congressman who has sought to call attention to the military unit that conducted the secret operation said such a conclusion relied too much on specific dates involving Mr. Atta’s travels and not nearly enough on the operation’s broader determination that he was a threat.

The briefing by the military officer is the second known instance in which people on the commission’s staff were told by members of the military team about the secret program, called Able Danger.

The meeting, on July 12, 2004, has not been previously disclosed. That it occurred, and that the officer identified Mr. Atta there, were acknowledged by officials of the commission after the congressman, Curt Weldon of Pennsylvania, provided information about it.

The Captain sums up the significance of the Commission’s apparent cover-up of the briefing:

Why didn’t the Commission press harder for military intelligence, and if the Times’ source has told the truth, why did they ignore the Able Danger operation in their deliberations? It would emphasize that the problem was not primarily operational, as the Commission made it seem, but primarily political — and that the biggest problem was the enforced separation between law enforcement and intelligence operations upon which the Clinton Department of Justice insisted. The hatchet person for that policy sat on the Commission itself: Jamie S. Gorelick.

Again, this begs the question of what else the Commission ignored, especially in terms of military and civilian intelligence, in order to reach its conclusions. It also undermines their recommendations to create two new levels of bureaucracy for the intelligence services. Instead, if the Able Danger development pans out, it means that the best fix is the Patriot Act and a reduction in bureaucratic drag on intelligence, not an increase in it. Congress needs to start from scratch and completely re investigate 9/11, this time outside the heat of a partisan presidential election cycle.

First, it may be interesting to examine why so many were skeptical when this story first came out. Reason number one is Congressman Curt Weldon himself.

Weldon wrote a book that was published a few months ago in which he claimed the CIA was ignoring a growing nuclear threat from Iran. He also claims that Iran “is hiding Osama bin Laden, is preparing terrorist attacks against the United States, has a crash program to build an atomic bomb and, as a Shiite country, is the chief sponsor of what is a largely Sunni-directed insurgency in Iraq.”

Weldon used what the CIA has termed “fabricators” as sources for information in the book. He is also known for stunts such as carrying around what he laughably claimed was a replica of a suitcase nuclear bomb. Weapons specialists have debunked the claim that a nuclear weapon could be carried around in a suitcase although small devices such as nuclear artillery shells could probably be rigged to fit inside a good sized steamer trunk.

So Weldon’s credibility was pretty low to begin with. And then when the first denials from the Commission regarding Able Danger came in, the thinking was that Weldon had screwed the pooch again.

Apparently, not this time:

In a letter sent Wednesday to members of the commission, Mr. Weldon criticized the panel in scathing terms, saying that its “refusal to investigate Able Danger after being notified of its existence, and its recent efforts to feign ignorance of the project while blaming others for supposedly withholding information on it, brings shame on the commissioners, and is evocative of the worst tendencies in the federal government that the commission worked to expose.”

Those “worst tendencies” are as old as government itself - the perceived necessity to cover up mistakes. It would have been so much easier if the Commission staff members, instead of denying contact with the member of Able Danger who was Mr. Weldon’s source for the information on the data mining project at the Pentagon, had just told the truth and said that yes, we met with the gentleman and he briefed us on what his unit had come up with regarding Mr. Atta but at the time, we didn’t think it was important enough to include in the final report.

Instead, now they look like they’re really hiding something that may or may not be important enough to affect the Commission’s final conclusions. Because even if domestic law enforcement had known of Mr. Atta and his cell, given the pre-9/11 mindset of the FBI, it’s doubtful whether it would have made a whit of difference.

John P. O’Neill was the FBI’s Counterterrorism Chief until his resignation in the summer of 2001. For several years prior to that, O’Neill had tried without success to get the FBI off the mark and make a concerted effort to counter what he rightly saw as a build up of terrorist assets here in the United States. FBI Chief Louis Freeh would have none of it. And O’Neill himself, by all accounts a flamboyant and somewhat abrasive man, didn’t help his case any by criticizing superiors for their lack of action. Despite his correct interpretation of al Qaeda’s goal of striking the United States, the pre-9/11 FBI was institutionally incapable of doing anything about it. This, along with the artificial “wall” put up by civil libertarians in the Clinton Justice Department, was cited as the main reasons why the 9/11 plot succeeded.

Could one more warning from one more source made a difference in preventing 9/11? Perhaps. But given the dysfunction of our intelligence agencies prior to that horrible day, I find the idea less than compelling that anything would have changed.

UPDATE

Michelle Malkin is tracking the blogswarm and has her usual great link roundup. See especially The Anchoress regarding a possible Sandy Berger connection. Was Able Danger the reason Berger purloined the documents at the National Archives? Also AJ at The Strata-Sphere (who posted on this speculation two days ago) has a neat timeline.

Now wouldn’t that take the cake? Sandy Berger covering up for his old boss to shift blame to the current Administration in an election year? Put that in your pipe and smoke it!

Also, Tom Maguire takes time out from the Plame-Wilson-Rove controversey and posts some excellent thoughts somewhat along the line that I took:

As to how significant an error this was - obviously, after the fact Mohammed Atta was very important. Although I assume Able Danger did not offer any specific projections about hijacking planes, if Atta had been put under closer surveillance, the 9/11 plot might have been disrupted. Still, a point to ponder - was Atta noted by Able Danger as a key Al Qaeda figure even in 2001, or was he just one name among fifty, or five hundred?

In a further update, Ed Morrisey links to his Daily Standard column in which he details the strange case of Mohammed Afroze and his plots to carry out terrorist attacks in India and Australia in conjunction with the 9/11 attacks. Afroze was convicted in an Indian Court - a fact that seems not to have made the cut when the MSM was doling out news about al Qaeda terrorists.

UPDATE II

Take a whiff. Do you smell what I smell? I smell a blog feeding frenzy about this story. And it’s just getting started.

Beth at MVRWC:

It looks to me so far that this is in no way some bullshit Valerie Plame story, though; and even so, the significance of 9/11 makes the Plame Game look positively LAUGHABLE. No freaking way am I going to go blind looking at their meltdown at the DUh or Kos, though. I saw enough with a quick Technorati search.

I’d have to agree. The Plame Game looks like it’s stalled anyway. Also, Beth links to a post by the smartest Doctor around Dr. Sanity who has more on the possible Berger connection. Now THAT would be a story for the new millenium!

I want a new drug
One that won’t make me sick
One that won’t make me crash my car
Or make me feel three feet thick

I want a new drug
One that won’t hurt my head
One that won’t make my mouth too dry
Or make my eyes too red
(Huey Lewis and the News)

God I miss getting high.

And drunk. And stoned. And wired. And Buzzed.

I miss getting wired and playing quarter poker for 36 hours straight.

I miss getting stoned at 8:00 AM on Sunday morning and watching cartoons.

I miss getting high and watching hockey on TV.

I miss doing a few lines and walking into a bar feeling like I was goddamn Richard Gere, Tom Cruise, and Superman all rolled into one.

I’ve done ‘em all. Anything I could swallow, smoke, snort, eat, or wear.

And there’s no way I’d still be doing them because if I kept doing what I was doing, I’d be the very first pajamahadeen live blogging the afterlife. (Might do wonders for my ecosystem rankings).

What brought this on was a pretty wild rant by Jeff Harrell at Shape of Days who was responding to a laughably naive NY Times Op-Ed by John Tierney on how interesting it would be to legalize drugs. And fun. And how much better off we’d be because the war on drugs isn’t working besides most drugs aren’t that bad for you they just seem that way and even if they are bad for you what the hell business of it is the government’s and just think we could go after all the murderers and rapists if they weren’t too busy busting teenagers for having a roach in the ashtray and yadayadayada…

In an over the top reaction, Bill Ardolino takes a few pounds of flesh off of Mr. Harrell:

What extra-special brand of scribal Tourette’s is required to author a screed like this?

I may have to go back on my declaration that the lefties exclusively dominate the blogosphere’s nasty discourse, as avowed righty Harrell’s piece - in both its rhetorical style and illogical, absolutist, moonbat reasoning - is one of the most oddly harsh things I’ve read in quite some time.

The Tourette crack was uncalled for. Ardolino was correct in pointing out it was absolutist, illogical and nasty. But I think even Bill would recognize in that searing rant an emotionalism so irrational that Mr. Harrell would have been better off if he had not hit the “publish” button so soon. I know I’ve done something similar in the past. Thank God it passed under the blogosphere radar at the time. Jeff wasn’t as lucky.

As for Tierney’s column, it could have been worse. He could have said something really stupid like marijuana isn’t bad for you.

As someone clinically diagnosed as addicted to marijuana (Cannabis Dependent Syndrome or CDS) , I beg to differ. Anyone who says that marijuana isn’t a dangerous drug doesn’t know jack about it. It’s only been the last 25 years that serious scientific work has been done on marijuana and what they’re finding shows that people who say marijuana is harmless are idiots. The value of these studies is that they’ve disproved much of the early research that showed marijuana was as addictive as heroin, or caused irreversible brain damage, as well as studies that showed it to be harmless to the cognitive centers of the brain and completely non-addictive.

Marijuana can be a contributing factor to clinical depression, schizophrenia, and over production of serotonin, a brain chemical that regulates mood. Addiction can cause anxiety attacks, withdrawal symptoms, and loss of long term memory. To sum up, given the short and long term effects observed in the laboratory, heavy use of marijuana is about as bad as heavy use of alcohol, or amphetamines, or just about any other drug.

I describe the effects of marijuana because this is the drug that most of my libertarian friends throw in my face when talking about decriminalizing drug use. And while there may be some merit to the idea, as usual the libertarians are walking in the clouds while the rest of us have to exist here on planet earth.

Decriminalization would not rid us of the scourge of gang warfare over lucrative drug turf nor will it eliminate meth labs. It won’t stop the narco terrorists from funding Bin Laden or the Shining Path. And it won’t necessarily empty out the jails or unclog the courts because law enforcement will be free to go after anyone and everyone who deals the stuff.

All would be true unless you just want to go ahead and legalize the whole shebang. This would be absolutely fascinating to watch someone try and put into practice in the real world. In fact, it would be of such entertainment value that I would start a new humor blog just to write about the effort.

Because legalization would bring government into the previously illegal drug industry with both feet. And that’s something I would pay to watch.

Can you see the Feds negotiating with Peruvian drug lords for the best price on this year’s coca harvest? Or Afghan warlords for access to their poppy fields? Of course, there are limited supplies of both drugs grown for medicinal purposes but the expansion of fields and factories dedicated to satisfying market demand would be far bey0nd our present capability to meet. We’d have to deal with the thugs.

And the bidding war among the suits at Smith-Kline, Pfizer, Lilly, Baxter, and a whole host of pharmaceutical companies would be great theater.

It will never happen, of course. Most people have more sense than your average libertarian. Where the RINO’s are correct is in their critique of what the war on drugs has done to civil liberties and the madness in our criminal justice system. For that, the solution may in fact involve some form of decriminalization. Hell, if Bill Buckley can come out for decriminalization, how bad can it be?

The real problem with drug addiction is how to cure it. Currently, only some variation of the 12-step program initially used with alcoholics has proven even partially effective. There are some promising drugs in testing as I write this but even such a “magic bullet” does not address the underlying psychological issues that lead to addiction in the first place. Recidivism rates are astronomical for cocaine and heroin - approaching 95% after two years. That means that 95% of patients going through a treatment program will be using the drug 2 years later.

And part of that is a statistical problem. About 60% of the people receiving in-patient treatment aren’t there because they want to be, they’re in treatment because they had a choice to make between going into a hospital or going to jail. Crimes as various as domestic violence to attempted murder are taken off the court dockets by shuffling the perp off to a drug treatment center for a month. The only thing the perp is interested in is doing his time at the center, playing nice and trying to fool the counselors. I know because I’ve seen it. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t.

This leaves no empty beds for the people who really do want to quit, who are personally motivated to get the monkey off their back. People who have hit bottom are ready to turn their lives around. If there are no beds available, the chances are next to nothing that the addict will succeed on their own.

The answer here is obvious; stop court ordered drug treatment. A much better place for an addict to quit is in jail - as long as we spend gobs of money on facilities that are combination treatment centers and prisons. As it stands now, drug treatment in prison is a national disgrace. Prison treatment centers are for the most part ineffective because they don’t segregate the patient from the general population. And clinical progress is not tied to the length of a prisoners sentence, a motivational aspect of prison drug treatment most professional advocate.

Then there’s the personal liberty issue. Here’s a good summation of the libertarian position:

Let me tell you where I stand. Drugs are bad, mmmkay. The biggest problem with drugs are not their long-term effects, but their near term effects. That is, people do things under the influence of drugs that they normally wouldn’t do. I have a problem with that.

But, just because drugs are bad does not mean that they should be illegal. Stupid things that harm others ought to be illegal, not stupid things that harm yourself. And if the worst bads associated with drugs are when you do stupid things to others, then, well, we already have laws to cover those.

DUI, child abuse, etc.–all presently illegal, and rightly so.

The most common bads associated with drug use are not illegal nor should they be. Work absenteeism, poor relationship skills, and the most common one–stupid judgement in sexual relations–are all rightfully legal.

It’s an emotionally satisfying argument albeit one shot full of ethical loopholes and intellectual solipsism. The potential for harm to another human being as a result of drug abuse and addiction is not addressed satisfactorily. By saying that killing someone under the influence of crack cocaine is already covered under the criminal justice system - the extreme of what Dr. Shackleford is saying - and then say that society has no business taking the cocaine away from the murderer or keeping him from getting the drug in the first place is wrong.

Yes people who take drugs are only hurting themselves physically. But when they take a few other people down to the sewer with them - people who are completely innocent and wouldn’t ordinarily take the same fall as the druggie - then we have a problem. I can’t believe Dr. Shakleford and other libertarians are simply throwing up their hands and saying “tough luck” to those who find themselves in a situation where they’re dependent on an addict. That’s why I think there is a role for government in both interdiction and enforcement. A reduced role, yes. One cognizant of civil liberties yes. But a role nonetheless.

I tend to favor a more local solution. If someone is going to harm themselves by taking drugs, clearly we must get innocent bystanders out of the way. The problems associated with government taking away children from crack-addled parents are too numerous to go into here. Suffice it to say that the system is so broke that any additional stress could cause it to collapse altogether. The only way to fix it is to spend massive amounts of tax dollars as Children and Family Service Departments are woefully underfunded and understaffed nationwide. In a city like Chicago, it’s a disgrace.

Speaking from personal experience, taking drugs feels too good to stop for no reason. This is why we’re never going to “solve” the drug problem in any meaningful way. Decriminalizing drugs is not the answer. In fact, in my opinion it would be worse than what we have now because it simply doesn’t address the ancillary problems that drug addiction causes. It merely gives us the illusion that something is being done. From a civil libertarian standpoint, I buy the argument on a psychic level. But it’s a pointless intellectual exercise when children are starving to death because their mother spends money to feed her drug habit rather than her children.

I agree with Ann Althouse on this one: Is this for real?

IN THE presidential campaign, a new threshold in church-state relations was crossed when Catholic bishops threatened to exclude Senator John Kerry from the Eucharist because of his support for Roe v. Wade. The Senate Judiciary Committee is now fully justified in asking these bishops whether the same threats would apply to Supreme Court nominee Judge Roberts, if he were to vote to uphold Roe v. Wade.

The bishops have made this question legitimate because Americans no longer know whether a Catholic judge can hear abortion cases without an automatic conflict of interest.

Asking the bishops to testify would be healthy. If they rescinded the threats made against Kerry, then Roberts would feel free to make his decision without the appearance of a conflict of interest, and Catholic politicians who support Roe v. Wade would gain renewed confidence in their advocacy. If the bishops repeated or confirmed their threats, the Senate Judiciary Committee should draft legislation calling for the automatic recusal of Catholic judges from cases citing Roe v. Wade as a precedent.

That’s right. The author of the article Christopher Morris is advocating a law be passed to automatically mandate the recusal of a judge based solely on his religious beliefs.

Actually, this opens up some marvelous opportunities for legislative mischief aimed at miscreant judges. Imagine being able to bar minority judges from ruling on civil rights cases. Or white judges from ruling on reverse discrimination cases. Or women judges from ruling on gender equality cases. Or Quaker judges from ruling on death penalty cases.

While we’re at it, why don’t we make Catholic judges sew a great big red “C” on their cloak and make them clean the Supreme Court bathrooms?

A little too much hyperbole for you this early in the morning? Try not to choke on your danish when reading this:

One would think Catholic judges would want such a measure in place as a means of honoring their own convictions. That this proposal will no doubt be controversial should not be a reason for failing to pursue it: Political advocacy by religious organizations is on the rise and will only become stronger. If the subject is ducked this time by the Senate Judiciary Committee, it will only come up later in a more aggravated form.

It’s time to have this dialog. Without it, the decisions of our highest court, already tainted by the Bush-Gore election, will increasingly be perceived as self-serving, political, and illegitimate.

I like Dale Frank’s take on this:

Why, you know I hadn’t thought about that before. But, while we’re on the subject, maybe Jews could be forced to wear yellow stars, so they can more easily identify their fellow co-religionists in public. I mean, you know, they’d feel so much more secure if they could look around in a crowd and see a fellow landsmann, wouldn’t they?

Please note that all decisions of the Court have been “tainted” for their defiance of the Democratic party in upholding state election law in Florida which was passed by state legislators who were voted in by the people of the State of Florida. It’s amazing that to this day, liberal partisans like Mr. Morris are still grumpy over the fact that the Supreme Court refused to nullify state law and dictate to the state of Florida how the people’s representatives should conduct the business of elections.

But, hey! Why let a little thing like, you know, the law stand in the way when there are Christians to be publicly gored:

In theory, the same Holy Spirit that made evangelicals born again could also move them to change a social or political view at any time. (In drafting mandatory recusal legislation, senators should probe the foundations of these beliefs and persuade themselves that evangelicals retained a meaningful, not just a technical, choice.) Inquiry into Judaism, Islam, and other religions should also focus on whether any of them make threats against members who hold particular views about abortion.

In other words, in order to see if our Christian judge “retained a meaningful, not just technical choice” in their ability to change their minds about Roe V Wade, we should delve deeply into their religious convictions by asking them all sorts of personal questions not related to their ability to carry out their duties as impartial jurists.

Mr. Morris is not a serious man. He is instead, in need of attention. I recommend his mommy come to his home in Vermont and deliver a few well aimed whaps to his backside and give him the love and consideration he so obviously missed out on as a child.

If it’s attention he seeks, Mr. Morris has got it. And perhaps a little history lesson is in order for Mr. Morris and anyone else who seeks to revive religious litmus tests for any issue and for any public servant whose personal beliefs may conflict with the law.

The anti-Catholic bigotry that roiled this country’s politics for more than 300 years reached a zenith of sorts in the election of 1928 which saw Democrat Al Smith, a Catholic, face off against Herbert Hoover. The nauseating display of ant-Catholic bigotry which directly led to Smith’s defeat convinced both parties that nominating a Catholic for high office was the kiss of death.

This all changed in the election of 1960. Historians have long pondered the reason for the dissipation of anti-Catholic sentiment in the electorate that finally allowed for a Catholic to be elected President. At first, as historian Thomas Carty points out, there was even a high level of anti-Catholic bigotry among liberals:

Author James A. Michener recalled feeling quite startled when guests at publisher Bennett Cerf’s early 1960 dinner party challenged John F. Kennedy’s presidential candidacy on religious grounds. In an educated, professional crowd, Michener encountered “American liberals [who] … had the most serious and deep-seated fears of a Catholic in the Presidency.” One individual called the Vatican “dictatorial, savage[,] … reactionary … [and] brutal in its lust for power.” Others feared that clerical pressures would determine Kennedy’s political decisions. One colleague declared that “Irish priests” would manipulate a Catholic president “as if he were their toy.” A Catholic at Michener’s table characterized her church as antidemocratic and incompatible with church-state separation and religious liberty. According to Michener, these individuals claimed to know many other ideological liberals who mistrusted Catholic presidential candidates.

Kennedy had to prove to Kingmakers - even Catholic ones like Mayor Richard Daley in Chicago - that his Catholicism would not be a liability in a general election. The first test of his viability was in the West Virginia primary where his main rival, Hubert Humphrey, tried to play the old “Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion” card with elliptical references to Kennedy’s faith.

Kennedy fought back with both political savvy and a few dirty tricks of his own, trying to tar Humphrey as a draft dodger during WW II (he served variously as state director of war production training and reemployment and State chief of Minnesota war service program in 1942 and assistant director of the War Manpower Commission in 1943) while addressing the issue of his Catholicism head on.

In what author Theodor H. White pointed to as a public appearance almost as important as JFK’s speech at the Ministerial Association of Greater Houston, Kennedy was asked point blank at a press conference about his religion. Rather than remain silent on the issue as he had in Wisconsin two weeks before, Kennedy framed the issue as one of fairness. He said “I do not believe that forty million Americans should lose the right to run for president on the day they were baptized.” In short, Kennedy challenged voters to prove they were not bigots by voting for him. It was a brilliant political stroke and Kennedy’s subsequent win effectively ended Humphrey’s challenge.

Later that fall in Houston, Kennedy buried the issue before one of the most conservative Protestant organizations in the country, the aforementioned Ministers group. In one of the more memorable lines, Kennedy once again, gives people a reason not to use anti-Catholicism as a reason to vote against him:

I believe in an America that is officially neither Catholic, Protestant nor Jewish — where no public official either requests or accepts instructions on public policy from the Pope, the National Council of Churches, or any other ecclesiastical source — where no religious body seeks to impose its will directly or indirectly upon the general populace or the public acts of its officials — and where religious liberty is so indivisible that an act against one church is treated as an act against all.

On election day, the American people made a conscious choice to elect a Catholic President not because of his religion, but in spite of it. Now Mr. Morris would have us choose judges for exactly the opposite reason. In Mr. Morris’ world, either Catholic judges need not apply or they should be hamstrung with litmus tests and background checks and God knows what else. Once you let loose the dogs of legislation on judicial qualifications, we’ll have litmus tests for all sorts of issues; gay marriage, school prayer, eminent domain, and on and on.

For a country founded both because of religious freedom and in spite of religious differences, we’ve done remarkably well in tolerating one another’s religious viewpoints. But politics is another matter. There are still barriers to high office for people of certain faiths that need to come down.

Mr. Morris isn’t helping matters any.

We have a record!

This week’s Carnival features 32 posts that skewer the most outrageously clueless numbskulls of the week. And let me tell ya, there’s a passel of them:

1. Our very own President George Bush and his ideas on Intelligent Design.
2. The Democratic Party and their joy at losing the special election in Ohio’s 2nd Congressional District.
3. Cluebat Hall of Famer John Kerry
4. The ACLU
5. The left
6. The right
7. What? No libertarians? (We can fix that!)

And on and on.

If variety is the spice of life, have a tall glass of water handy because you’re gonna need a drink to cool your tongue after tasting this superb collection of fiskings of the follies of the foolish. Some will make you laugh. Some will make you think. All will entertain and enlighten.

So kick back and relax and browse to your heart’s content. You won’t be disappointed.

To be stupid, selfish, and have good health are three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost.
(Gustave Flaubert )

Yo,Gus! How’d you get Hillary Clinton’s talking points on National Health Care?
(Me)

Beth at My Vast Right Wing Conspiracy put on her liberal disguise and ventured into the fever swamps of the Democratic Underground and the dungeons at Daily Kos and came up with some of the weirdest conspiracy theories regarding John Bolton, George Bush, and…well, you just can’t make this stuff up - unless you’re a moonbat. It took Beth not one but two posts to tell the whole story.

Jay at Stop the ACLU wants to stop the ACLU from taking away our Second Amendment rights. Some good points made on the ACLU’s selective interpretation of Constitutional rights that, if you’ve been paying attention the last few years, has become more and more a part of their political agenda.

Pstupidonymous (yes…that’s how it’s spelled. Don’t ya love creative names for blogs?) has an amazing tale of the Nanny State gone wild. As AlexC says: “These are the kind of nanny-state nonsensical ideas that we laugh at over-taxed and under-gunned New Jersey over.” Uh-huh.

Mark Coffey at Decision ‘08 has an explanation why British terror apologist George Galloway has made his “Jackass of the Week:” Some jackasses are more intrinsicially jackassical than others. Hard to argue with that.

Mr. Right is again spot on in a spoof of the Democrats and their laughable joy at finishing second in the Ohio Special Election last week. Says Karl Rove of Kos’ perfect 0 for 16 record in supporting Democratic campaigns: “I think the idea of someone with Markos Moulitsas Zúniga’s track record running as many Democrat political campaigns as humanly possible is absolutely marvelous!” Rove said. “When can he get started?”

Charleston Daily Mail columnist Don Surber submits a post from his “Ooops” department. The West Virginia state government gives us a sterling example of the people’s tax dollars at work…or not.

Elephants in Academia (more bloggy creativity!) talks about the “happy convergence” pointed out by the LA Times in the Administration’s Central Asian strategy. What the Times chalks up to mere chance, the Academic Elephant sees as the Bush Doctrine at work. Let’s see…Lebanon, Ukraine, Afghanistan, Iraq, Egypt, Kuwait, Bahrain,…sounds like coincidence to me but what do I know? I’m a Republican.

Someone please wake Harvey at Bad Example up from a bad dream. He’s dreaming that the United Nations is talking about controlling the internet. This from an organization that can’t take a collective piss without sending the idea to a Blue Ribbon Commission? What do you think download times of your favorite movies would be if the UN ran the net?

Beatrix at Multiple Mentality gives all you unattached men some excellent advice on How not to Pick Up a Girl in a Bar. ” For instance: “Are those real?” is not a good opening line” I dunno…it worked for me once. Maybe she thought I was talking about the snakes around her neck…

The Carnival goes international this week with this post from Angry in the Great White North who turns his gaze southward to discover some judicial idiocy right here in the good ole USA. How do some of these people get to be judges?

Bergbikr, subbing for The Maryhunter at TMH Bacon Bits illustrates the equivication of so-called “Moderate” Muslims and their attitudes toward the War on Terror. Is he overreacting? “Perhaps my reaction was heightened by the fact that a cell of ‘peaceful Muslims’ - some of their youths recently Jihadist trained in Pakistan - was just exposed in Lodi, CA a few dozen miles east of my home.” I think not.

Cao of Cao’s Blog (pronounced “key”) gives us an excellent history lesson on some of the less than honorable activities of some prominent leftists over the years. Every time I think how close John Kerry came to being elected President of the United States, I shudder.

Raven at And Rightly So wonders what happened to all those Democrats who were going to leave the country and move to Canada following the President’s victory last November. Darnit! All those “Bon Voyage” signs I made and I did it for nothin’.

Ogre at Ogre’s Politics and Views has a post highlighting some cluelessness of his local utility Duke Power and their “Fixed Payment Plan.” Maybe they think their customers are too stupid to add.

Hypnyx at Global Democratic Revolution brings to our attention a story that’s starting to get some legs in the sports media. A San Francisco radio host made some disparging comments about Latin American baseball players that have some prominent Latin personalities up in arms and playing the “victim” card. San Francisco Giants manager Felipe Alou goes off the deep end regarding the comments and refuses an apology from the radio host. Uncalled for cluelessness perhaps on both their parts.

Blog Pin-Up grrrllll Pamela (Ooooh! Check out them gams!) of Atlas Shrugs has an intelligent post on environ-mentalism (deliberate hyphenation) as religion. What are the consequences of listening to these nutcases? “It would be one thing if it were like Scientology and created small brushfires between vapid celebritites, it is quite another when we are clubbed to death with it like baby seals. Yep.

More galling stuff from George Galloway brought to us by Van Helsing of Moonbattery. Mr. Helsing asks the $64,000 question: “Where do we draw the line between the pernicious and irresponsible ravings typical of liberal politicians on both sides of the Atlantic and punishable treason?” My answer would be…it depends who draws the line, n’est pas?

My favorite fallen angel Feisty Republican Whore stops her street walking long enough to show us what life would be like with National Health Insurance - Canadian style. Un. Be. Lievable. Says the Whore: “I thought I’d kicked the Quaalude habit, but s**t like this is keeping the tranquilizer distributors in business.” Um…’kay.

From the “Believe It Or Not” file…Left Noose brings us a story of a 12 year old, local police, and gunshots. Oh yeah…and a mother that makes Joan Crawford look like Mother Teresa.

Elisa at Boxer Watch (No…not a voyeur site) has an interview with the Silly Senator from La-La Land facing off against the Senator from Virginia and potential President George Allen. If you compare and contrast the two, guess which one comes off as a grown-up, reasonable human being and who appears to be an infantile, clueless klutz?

Northstar at the People’s Republic of Seabrook takes President Bush to the woodshed for his excusing baseball player Rafeal Palmeiro his use of steroids. The President is speaking out of both sides of his mouth on this one as northstar rightly points out.

Blue State Republican of Mike Huckabee for President Blog gives us a link to a Paul Begala article at Huffington’s Post the contains possibly the stupidest prediction I’ve seen this summer. Bush Pardons Rove? BSR says: “Bush will pardon Rove when Rove did nothing wrong and will not be indicted, much less convicted of any crime??? Idiot.” That just about covers it.

Mr. Satire is back! Even though his blog is NOT SAFE FOR WORK, it would be worth getting fired to read his hilarious take on the Special Election in Ohio last week. What kind of a man was this fellow Hackett? “I am also an avid hunter and, unlike that sissy Kerry, I don’t shoot dead ducks. I go for the real thing - the RINOS and the yellow-belly elephants,” said Hackett, a gun-slinging NRA member. ”

Ferdy the Cat is on the prowl and has cornered Alan Dershowitz who thinks he has the solution to terrorism. After being reminded by Bruce to swallow the cheeseball in his mouth before talking, Ferdy says: “A satirical piece in the Huffington Post is hardly going to make religious fanatics wake up.” Who says cats are not the smartest animals on earth?

Dan Melson at Searchlight Parade has some off the wall reaction by Democrats to the recess appointment of John Bolton. Opines Dan: “After all the failures of the accomodationists to make the UN into a better organization, it’s time to give someone with a different philosophy a chance. It’s not like they can do much worse. Past time, I’d say.

Orac at Respectful Insolence has a very funny, must read post on the the use and misuse of that feller’s name who ran Germany a while back. He introduces us to the Hitler Zombie: “The creature doesn’t discriminate between left and right! Political activists of every stripe are dropping like flies, their brains eaten, and then making fools of themselves,” Truly spoken.

Mean ole Meany has a response to a request for funds from Hall of Fame cluebat John Kerry. Writing to the Splodeydope, MoM says: “The only thing missing from this e-mail is the mind-controlling subliminal sounds that you would have to play to get thinking people to believe one thing that you have said here.” Heh.

Minh-Duc of State of Flux Blog has a very serious, very sobering look at torture and who’s responsible. Is the military responsible for systematic, institutionalized torture committed against prisonoers? Read Mr. Minh’s entire post.

Jimmy K of But that’s Just My Opinion Blog has a short and to the point article about Israel’s handover of Gaza to the thugs of Hamas. I’m forced to reluctantly agree with Jimmy that this is a very bad move on Israel’s part probably done at the urging of Washington.

AJ at The Strata Sphere is looking in askance at the press and wondering where their heads are at. One would think copies of Who’s Who can be found on the desks of most reporters. Do you suppose it’s because they’re lazy? Naw!

Bill Teach of Pirates Cove has the story of a truly clueless candidate for Mayor of Durham, North Carolina. One more caveat to her candidacy; she’s a racist: Wagstaff is also a major race baiter, and, to put it correctly, a racist…If the roles were reversed, the local media would have coniption fits. Yup.

Finally, my own entry goes after President Bush for encouraging the ID movement who doesn’t just want ID studied…they want it studied in science class along side evolution. While the President didn’t say that, his comments gave the Luddites a boost. Next time, Mr. President; Shut Your Yap!

Part of the TTLB Uber Carnival