Right Wing Nut House

From almost his first day as Director of the CIA, Porter Goss was in trouble with the intelligence establishment. Long time employees who had reached the zenith of their careers prior to 9/11 - especially in the clandestine services - and who were wedded to a culture that demanded very little and rewarded those playing it safe, were at first puzzled, then outraged at Goss’s reform measures. By all reports, those measures cost the agency dozens of senior managers whose expertise many of those left behind are saying will be sorely missed in the coming months and years as the United States is forced to deal with rogue states seeking to develop nuclear weapons, a continuing terrorist threat, and other challenges in Russia, China, and South America.

Indeed, Goss was not hired to “reform” the CIA as much as he was picked to grab it by the throat and shake it vigorously. But why? What kind of culture existed that needed shaking up in the first place?

The 9/11 Commission:

The CIA’s Directorate of Intelligence retained some of its original character of a university gone to war. Its men and women tended to judge one another by the quantity and quality of their publications (in this case, classified publications). Apart from their own peers, they looked for approval and guidance to policymakers. During the 1990s and today, particular value is attached to having a contribution included in one of the classified daily “newspapers”- the Senior Executive Intelligence Brief-or, better still, selected for inclusion in the President’s Daily Brief.76

The CIA had been created to wage the Cold War. Its steady focus on one or two primary adversaries, decade after decade, had at least one positive effect: it created an environment in which managers and analysts could safely invest time and resources in basic research, detailed and reflective. Payoffs might not be immediate. But when they wrote their estimates, even in brief papers, they could draw on a deep base of knowledge.

When the Cold War ended, those investments could not easily be reallocated to new enemies. The cultural effects ran even deeper. In a more fluid international environment with uncertain, changing goals and interests, intelligence managers no longer felt they could afford such a patient, strategic approach to long-term accumulation of intellectual capital. A university culture with its versions of books and articles was giving way to the culture of the newsroom.

Is it any wonder these guys missed 9/11? Or the India and Pakistan nuke tests of 1998? Or any one of a number of other intelligence flops, failures, and missteps along the road to war with Iraq?

The fact is, the CIA does not foster a results oriented culture. Again, the 9/11 Commission:

Yet at least for the CIA, part of the burden in tackling terrorism arose from the background we have described: an organization capable of attracting extraordinarily motivated people but institutionally averse to risk, with its capacity for covert action atrophied, predisposed to restrict the distribution of information, having difficulty assimilating new types of personnel, and accustomed to presenting descriptive reportage of the latest intelligence. The CIA, to put it another way, needed significant change in order to get maximum effect in counterterrorism. President Clinton appointed George Tenet as DCI in 1997, and by all accounts terrorism was a priority for him. But Tenet’s own assessment, when questioned by the Commission, was that in 2004, the CIA’s clandestine service was still at least five years away from being fully ready to play its counterterrorism role. And while Tenet was clearly the leader of the CIA, the intelligence community’s confederated structure left open the question of who really was in charge of the entire U.S. intelligence effort.

And while it is true that the end “product” of intelligence analysis is necessarily vague and full of qualifiers, the fact is that by all reports, the analyses on the terrorist threat, on al Qaeda, on Bin Laden, and now on Iran have been uniformly poor thanks to a watering down process that occurs between those whose job it is to analyze these threats and those whose job is preparing and presenting the intelligence product to policymakers.

The 9/11 Commission calls this effort “playing it safe.” In any large bureaucracy - in the public or private sector - one does not advance their career by going against the grain or thinking outside the box. What this means specifically for the Agency is that lower level analysts who work long hours consuming massive amounts of raw intelligence have their analyses picked over and shaped by more senior managers in order to have them conform to Agency thinking. Couple this with a shocking disdain held by many of these managers for the policymakers and elected officials who consume their end product and you have a recipe for failure.

This is the culture that Porter Goss was hired to shake up. According to many, he not only went about it the wrong way but demoralized the Agency in the process:

Porter J. Goss was brought into the CIA to quell what the White House viewed as a partisan insurgency against the administration and to re-energize a spy service that failed to prevent the Sept. 11 attacks or accurately assess Iraq’s weapons capability.

But as he walked out the glass doors of Langley headquarters yesterday, Goss left behind an agency that current and former intelligence officials say is weaker operationally, with a workforce demoralized by an exodus of senior officers and by uncertainty over its role in fighting terrorism and other intelligence priorities, said current and former intelligence officials

[...]

“Now there’s a decline in morale, its capability has not been optimized and there’s a hemorrhaging of very good officers,” Brennan said. “Turf battles continue” with other parts of the recently reorganized U.S. intelligence community “because there’s a lack of clarity and he had no vision or strategy about the CIA’s future.” Brennan added: “Porter’s a dedicated public servant. He was ill-suited for the job.”

The above is quoted from Dana Priest’s largely one sided article in today’s Post. But even friendly Republicans on the Intelligence Committees echo the criticism that Goss didn’t appear to have an overall strategic goal for the Agency, that he delegated too much to his aides. In this respect, it could be that Goss was not tasked with long term planning as much as he was put in place to rock the boat and see who fell off. In the proudly independent operations directorate, he appears to have had the most “success” at least from the standpoint of fulfilling his goal of turning the culture inside out. Estimates of early retirees from the ranks of overseas postings are between 30 and 90 Station Chiefs as well as other top level operations employees.

Of course, it was no secret that one of the major reason Goss was hired was to ferret out leakers and, as much as possible, put a stop to efforts by active duty personnel to undermine Administration policy on the Iraq War:

Goss’s counterinsurgency campaign was so crudely executed by his top lieutenants, some of them former congressional staffers, that they drove out senior and mid-level civil servants who were unwilling to accept the accusation that their actions were politically motivated, some intelligence officers and outside experts said.

“The agency was never at war with the White House,” contended Gary Berntsen, a former operations officer and self-described Republican and Bush supporter who retired in June 2005. “Eighty-five percent of them are Republicans. The CIA was a convenient scapegoat.”

Perhaps a couple of different perspectives on the idea that “The agency was never at war with the White House” would be in order:

The Daily Telegraph 10/10/04:

A powerful “old guard” faction in the Central Intelligence Agency has launched an unprecedented campaign to undermine the Bush administration with a battery of damaging leaks and briefings about Iraq.

The White House is incensed by the increasingly public sniping from some senior intelligence officers who, it believes, are conducting a partisan operation to swing the election on November 2 in favour of John Kerry, the Democratic candidate, and against George W Bush.

Jim Pavitt, a 31-year CIA veteran who retired as a departmental chief in August, said that he cannot recall a time of such “viciousness and vindictiveness” in a battle between the White House and the agency.

John Roberts, a conservative security analyst, commented bluntly: “When the President cannot trust his own CIA, the nation faces dire consequences.”

The Wall Street Journal 9/29/04:

Then there’s the book by “Anonymous,” a current CIA employee who has been appearing everywhere to trash U.S. policy, with the approval of agency higher-ups. And now we have one Paul R. Pillar, who has broken his own cover as the author of a classified National Intelligence Estimate this summer outlining pessimistic possibilities for the future of Iraq.

That document was also leaked to the New York Times earlier this month, and on Monday columnist Robert Novak reported that it had been prepared at the direction of Mr. Pillar, the National Intelligence Officer for the Near East and South Asia. Mr. Novak reported that Mr. Pillar identified himself as such during an off-the-record gathering last week and, while denying he leaked the document, accused the Bush Administration of ignoring the CIA’s prewar speculation about the consequences of war with Iraq. Others have since confirmed the thrust of the Novak report.

Keep in mind that none of these CIA officials were ever elected to anything, and that they are employed to provide accurate information to officials who present their policy choices for voter judgment. Yet what the CIA insurgents are essentially doing here, with their leaks and insubordination, is engaging in a policy debate. Given the timing of the latest leaks so close to an election, they are now clearly trying to defeat President Bush and elect John Kerry. Yet somehow the White House stands accused of “politicizing” intelligence?

Former NSA Chief Admiral Bobby Inman:

I was utterly appalled during the 2004 election cycle at the number of clearly politically motivated leaks from intelligence organizations — mostly if not all from CIA — that appeared to me to be the most crass thing I had ever seen to influence the outcome of an election. I never saw it quite as harsh as it was. And clearing books to be published anonymously — there was no precedent for it. I started getting telephone calls from CIA retirees when Bush appointed Negroponte, talking about how vindictive the administration was in trying to punish CIA, and I was again sort of dismayed by the effort to play politics including with information that was classified. What is the impact on younger workers who see the higher-ups engaged in this kind of leaking

Clearly, Priest and other reporters are downplaying the idea today that there ever was a conflict between the CIA and the White House and if there was, it was the fault of the White House. This idea is not supported by the facts. The tensions between the two factions were real and leaking done immediately prior to the 2004 election was unprecedented from a supposedly non-partisan Agency. One might argue that opposition to the Iraq War may not have been a partisan issue within the Agency. But leaking a classified pre-war analysis two days before the first Presidential debate that showed the Administration had been “warned” about the unstable post-war environment in Iraq could have one purpose and one purpose only; to hurt the President politically. If there is another definition of partisanship, I’d like to hear it.

If some senior and mid-level civil servants were “unwilling to accept the accusation that their actions were politically motivated,” are they saying that Goss didn’t even have the right to ask that question? This would be ridiculous given the circumstances. Perhaps it says more about the egos of these men and women than it does about Goss himself that they resigned.

Porter Goss will not be remembered kindly by those in the CIA who are left behind. But if he was able to shake the agency up so that the next Director can actually build what the American people deserve - the best intelligence agency in the world - then he would have fulfilled a valuable purpose.

After a little more than a year and a half of dealing with charges of politicizing the agency, sinking morale, and a too aggressive posture on leaks, DCIA Porter Goss has resigned.

CIA Director Porter Goss resigned unexpectedly Friday, leaving behind a spy agency still battling to recover from the scars of intelligence failures before America’s worst terrorist attack and faulty information that formed the U.S. rationale for invading Iraq.

It was the latest move in a second-term shake-up of President Bush’s team.

Making the announcement from the Oval Office, Bush called Goss’ tenure one of transition.

“He has led ably,” Bush said, Goss at his side. “He has a five-year plan to increase the analysts and operatives.”

[snip]

He came under fire almost immediately, in part because he brought with him several top aides from Congress who were considered highly political for the CIA.

He had particularly poor relations with segments of the agency’s powerful clandestine service. In a bleak assessment, California Rep. Jane Harman, the Intelligence Committee’s top Democrat, recently said, “The CIA is in a free fall,” noting that employees with a combined 300 years of experience have left or been pushed out.

Some quick observations and questions:

* It’s no secret that the operations branch of the Agency was angry and bitter at Goss. Within a month of taking charge, Goss forced out the #2 and #3 people at CIA including the Director of Operations and his deputy. This cleaning house was seen by many in the operations branch as a political hatchet job although Goss had come to office with a mandate from the President to try and fix what any fair minded person would have to admit was a dysfunctional organization. When it became clear who would obstruct him in this task, Goss took action.

* We on the right will probably make much of the fact that the resignation of Goss has come so soon following the firing of leaker Mary McCarthy. While its possible there may be a connection, I would have to say at this point that the move has more to do with internal White House politics where Goss obviously lost out. His allies were few and far between and if the President gave Chief of Staff Bolten carte blanche to clean house, Goss was going to be toast. Even Republicans in Congress were grumbling about Goss.

* On the other hand, the left will be playing up the possibility that Goss is going to be caught up in “Hookergate.” They will point to Goss’s close aide and #3 at the agency Dusty Foggo being under investigation by the Agency’s IG as well as the FBI for possible contract irregularities (Foggo was in charge of CIA contracts). Foggo’s relationship with Duke Cunningham conspirator Brent Wilkes is being put under the microscope as well as his connection to the “Poker Room” at the Watergate Hotel sponsored by Wilkes and where the FBI is investigating the possible employment of prostitutes to bribe federal officials. This is also an unlikely reason for his resignation as the investigation of Foggo has been going on 3 months and has not revealed anything illegal to date. But is it possible that the investigation of Foggo has given the White House the jitters? Bolten may figure why take the chance?

* Goss’s efforts to reform the agency hardly made a dent in the year and a half of his tenure. It is clear that many in the Agency see themselves above elected officials and therefore do not need to defer to their judgement. How widespread this attitude is came out in the defense of Mary McCarthy by active duty personnel. With few exceptions (if MSM reports can be believed), there was great sympathy for what she did. And we have the evidence of the last three years where the leaking of classified data in order to undermine Administration policies became so commonplace that a recent trip by the head of Israel’s Mossad to Washington and his conferring with our intelligence people on Iran’s nuclear abilities was considered remarkable because the news leaked from Israeli sources. The fact is, in retrospect, Goss may have not been precisely the man that Bush was looking for although it’s hard to fault his effort.

Goss did start the ball rolling on leak investigations - a ball that continues downhill and may yet yield more surprises. It is perhaps unfortunate that the DCIA got caught up in Josh Bolten’s broom that appears about ready to sweep away Secretary of the Treasury Snow next.

And it’s also a pity that those who continue to leak classified information for whatever reason - out of a misplaced sense of patriotism or out of pure partisanship - will be staying while Goss will be going. Perhaps who ever succeeds Goss will take it upon themselves to have the leakers follow the Director out the door.

UPDATE

I’m not going to give much reaction from the right. Allah has that covered nicely over at Hot Air, a site that seems to be starting to find a nice niche in the blogosphere - A/V plus a blog aggregator. Sort of a one stop shop for writing ideas and interesting links.

Also at Hot Air is an interesting link to a Time Magazine article that echoes my thoughts above; that a White House faction led by Negroponte forced Goss out.

Ever since John Negroponte was appointed Director of National Intelligence a year ago and given the task of coordinating the nation’s myriad spy agencies, he has been diluting the power and prestige of the best known of them all, the Central Intelligence Agency. From day one, he supplanted the CIA Director as the President’s principal intelligence adviser, in charge of George W. Bush’s daily briefing. Other changes followed, all originating in the law that created the DNI — and all traumatic for CIA fans. But now, in a little noticed move, Negroponte is signaling that he is moving still more responsibility from the CIA to his own office, including control over the analysis of terrorist groups and threats….

This is akin to getting kicked in the stomach for the DCIA. Once all powerful, he was going to be reduced to being an errand boy, shuffling reports and analysis between Langely and 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Quite a comedown, that.

Former intel pro Spook86 has the McCarthy angle - and a chilling one at that:

What disturbs me about the Goss resignation is the possibility that internal battles may have worn down the director, and eventually convinced him to throw in the towel. It’s no secret that Goss has been fighting pitched battles against staffers who oppose Bush Administration policies, and the new management team at the CIA. Goss recently fired CIA officer Mary McCarthy for unauthorized contacts with the press, and there are hints that other agency staffers may be implicated as well. But earlier this week, the CIA launched an investigation of the agency’s #3 official–a Goss appointee–in connection with the bribery scandal that sent former Congressman Randy “Duke” Cunningham to federal prison. Given the timing–and announcement–of the inquiry, there was some belief that the probe was something of a “counter-attack” by agency’s anti-administration cabal.

Spook is blaming jousting inside the Agency which very well could be the truth. However, the investigation of Foggo has been going on since late February which would seem to discount the pushback against Goss for the McCarthy investigation. This is not to say that the anti-Bush faction didn’t make Goss’s life hell these last few months but it does limit the scope of what they could have done to put pressure on him to leave.

On the other hand, as I predicted above, the left is all agog over the possibility that Goss is hip deep in Hookergate. They practically have him in bed with his very own Fanne Fox/Sherry Rowlands not to mention giving the government away on a silver platter to Dick Cunningham’s conspirators.

Wonkette informs us that the Washington Post has an “exclusive” story coming up tonight that will probably start connecting some dots between Goss and another Cunningham crony Mitchell Wade as well as increase speculation about other connections to Hookergate. Sounds to me like someone at the Post as a bad case of Pulitzer fever but nothing is impossible at this point.

My own guess is that the Post story won’t go half as far as the left is drooling for but at the same time will go twice as far as the right is willing to stomach. In other words, it won’t tell us too damn much, probably regurgitating what’s been churning on lefty blogs for the past 10 days or so.

Donald Rumsfeld told a bald faced lie yesterday. In the process of telling the lie, the Secretary of Defense showed that public officials still don’t get it, that with the advent of the internet and its powerful search engines, every utterance made in public yesterday can be recalled immediately and compared for accuracy today.

This familiar fact is not being absorbed by the political and journalistic elites, nor by academics, celebrities, and business leaders who continue to supply the fodder for ravenous blog beasts who delight in pointing out discrepancies, flip flops, prevarications, and misstatement of facts in the words of the high and mighty.

Are our elites really that clueless? The short answer is yes. Those of us who spend a lot of time on the net tend to forget the truly revolutionary nature of the New Media. We take so much for granted we naturally assume that everyone is as plugged in as we are. Hence, when the Secretary of Defense denies making a statement that has been highlighted about a dozen times in various postings on blogs, forums, chat rooms, and the growing number of E-Zines, we are surprised that someone could still not be aware that the rules have changed and that public officials can easily be held accountable for what they’ve said in the past.

Rumsfeld’s folly occurred yesterday at a forum in Atlanta where the Secretary was supposed to be talking about security issues but instead found himself continuously having to deal with the “speaking truth to power” crowd and other free speech advocates - the “free speech for me but not for thee” nitwits who are too dense to realize the snickering irony inherent in their “protests.” Constantly interrupted with attempts to shout him down (something Rumsfeld has evidently gotten used to), it was in the Q & A session where Rumsfeld unleashed his whopper.

Somehow, rogue ex-CIA agent Ray McGovern had been invited to the event. McGovern you may recall is on the steering committee of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), the group which has carried out an insurgency against the Bush Administration during a time of war that in another age, at another time, would have led to the satisfying spectacle of McGovern and many of his friends in VIPS swinging from a White Oak tree for treason. McGovern has also advanced the theory that the United States government was involved in the attacks of 9/11 and has urged active duty intelligence officers to leak classified information to the press.

The fact that he is a hero on the left shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. And the fact that he was in attendance at this forum in the first place proves that the disruptions and protests were about as spontaneous as Saturday night sex for an old married couple. This was a planned op carried out to maximize media exposure not to mention the goal of embarrassing the Secretary of Defense.

They needn’t have bothered because Rumsfeld embarrassed himself. During the question and answer session. Mr. McGovern got a hold of the mike and began to fire questions at the Secretary:

Rumsfeld: …it appears that there were not weapons of mass destruction there.

McGovern: You said you knew where they were.

Rumsfeld: I did not. I said I knew where suspect sites were and…

McGovern: You said you knew where they were. Tikrit, Baghdad, northeast, south, west of there. Those are your words.

Rumsfeld: My words-my words were that-no-no, wait a minute–wait a minute. Let him stay one second. Just a second….

For the record, here’s the familiar exchange between ABC’s George Stephanopolous and Rumsefeld on March 30, 2003:

MR. STEPHANOPOULOS: Finally, weapons of mass destruction. Key goal of the military campaign is finding those weapons of mass destruction. None have been found yet. There was a raid on the Answar Al-Islam Camp up in the north last night. A lot of people expected to find ricin there. None was found. How big of a problem is that? And is it curious to you that given how much control U.S. and coalition forces now have in the country, they haven’t found any weapons of mass destruction?

SEC. RUMSFELD: Not at all. If you think — let me take that, both pieces — the area in the south and the west and the north that coalition forces control is substantial. It happens not to be the area where weapons of mass destruction were dispersed. We know where they are. They’re in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat.

The irony here is that McGovern was accusing Rumsefeld of “lying” in 2003 while the Secretary ended up lying about actually telling the truth. What was the truth? That Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, George Bush, the overwhelming majority of analysts in our intelligence community, the intelligence agencies of the western world, Hosni Mubarak, the Emir of Kuwait, Vladmir Putin, and Saddam Hussein himself all believed there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

To accuse someone of lying when they believe what they are saying is true is idiocy. Does a child lie when he talks about Santa Claus coming on Christmas eve? According the left, the answer is yes. The child believes whole heartedly in Santa Claus and talks about him as if he is a real person. But for the left, this doesn’t matter. The child is lying through his teeth and should be “called out” for his prevarications.

This ground has been covered thoroughly in the past three years. The American people made their determination about these “lies” in the election of 2004, rejecting the leftist interpretation of the “truth.” And this is why Rumsfeld’s lie about what he said back in 2003 (and given the wide play those words have received over the past three years I find it highly unlikely that the Secretary did not recall exactly what he said) was so unnecessary but perhaps indicative of the state of the executive branch of government in modern America.

The inability of public servants to admit to mistakes has gotten to the point of surrealness. There is something dreamlike about Rumsfeld’s continuing defense of the Pentagon’s performance and assessment of what has been happening in Iraq. It isn’t just a matter of Pollyanish briefings about the capabilities of the Iraqi army (although there has been marked improvement in the last 6 months) or about the level of sectarian strife (100,000 people fleeing from the violence and dozens of bodies being found every day). Rumsfeld’s folly extends to decisions made going all the way back to the beginning of the war starting with the number of troops that would be needed to pacify the country following the overthrow of Saddam. Despite the lawlessness that plagues Iraq to this day, the Secretary of Defense refuses to admit error in this regard.

The explanation that criticism would be overwhelming if he did so doesn’t hold water. Taking responsibility for your mistakes is part of the job - or at least it used to be part of the job for public servants. I distinctly remember the first time I realized that the rules had changed. It was following the total, unmitigated disaster at Waco and the deaths of 76 members of the Branch Davidians, 27 of whom were children. Attorney General Janet Reno should have been fired for her actions and the actions of her subordinates in the botched operation. Instead, President Clinton kept her on.

At the time, I racked my brains trying to think of any other President who would have kept an official who had committed such grievous errors in judgement. Certainly none come to mind even today. An important dynamic of executive leadership changed at that point; the fact that public officials are ultimately responsible for the results of their actions, not just their good intentions.

For Rumsfeld, the results have been less than adequate since Saddam’s statue was toppled. The Secretary may be a good manager. His ideas about a transformational military may prove to be inspired genius. And the performance of the troops under his command has been uniformly spectacular. But his refusal to acknowledge mistakes and adapt to new realities on the ground in Iraq has been a disaster. The insurgency, so long unacknowledged or shrugged off as Saddam bitter enders, was allowed to grow in strength until it has metastasized and will now require a monumental effort by the new Iraqi army to cut it out of the body politic. This inability to recognize the tribal and clannish nature of the insurgency despite being told repeatedly by his commanders of these facts on the ground has caused more problems than necessary to our troops.

Rumsfeld’s lie yesterday about something he didn’t have to lie about points to this changed dynamic in Washington that extends all the way to the office of the President. Accepting responsibility for mistakes both of omission and commission is necessary for our public servants. The American people recognize this which is why they are almost always quick to forgive an official who admits mistakes and apologizes. How and why this tradition has been lost probably has a lot to do with the polarization of our politics and the rabid, open hostility of the media to this President and his policies. But this really is no excuse. The people have shown that they are perfectly capable of making up their own minds about our leaders, even when they get most of their information through the prism of a press suffering from Bush Derangement Syndrome. George Bush’s re-election proves that point in emphatic fashion.

The Secretary’s lie will not get him fired. But given Rumsfeld’s performance over the last few years, perhaps it should.

The votes are in from this week’s Watchers Council vote and the winner is…ME! That’s right - yours truly walked away with top honors for “Defend Dissent: Punish the Leakers.” Finishing second was The Glittering Eye for “Tired.”

In the non Council category, Spooke86’s In from the Cold finished first with “The McCarthy Files.”

If you’d like to participate in the weekly Watchers Council vote, go here and follow instructions.

At the risk of angering many of the thoughtful readers who grace this site with their perspicacious comments, I think the jury in the Zacarius Moussaoui case did a brave and noble thing by sparing the killer’s life. Their decision validates our justice system in a way that brings honor to our values and the system of justice that protects those values.

No one should envy the jurors their task. And the fact that, in the end, they saw Moussaoui as a living, breathing human being and not some symbol of the terrible wrong done to us on 9/11 or as a stand-in for Osama Bin Laden speaks volumes about the careful and meticulous way the jury individually and as a group approached the penalty phase of the trial.

Moussaoui’s crimes were of omission and design; with foreknowledge of the attack, he could have warned the United States government of what was being planned. And he took part in a conspiracy where mass murder was planned as carefully and as dispassionately as if one were making arrangements for a long vacation. The fact that the plotter’s deliberations included maximizing wherever possible the number of innocent civilian casualties places Moussaoui’s crimes beyond the scope of normal conspiracy statutes and elevates his transgressions to the level of a crime against humanity. For many, justice cried out for this terrorist’s execution.

But a careful reading of the jury’s thoughts contained in the 42 page verdict shows that these 12 ordinary Americans (the foreman was a high school math teacher) resisted the impulse to lash out in revenge against Moussaoui and instead looked at the law, at precedent, and finally into their own souls to justify their verdict.

It may be well to place yourself in their shoes for a few minutes and think about what faced them as they struggled to do what is right and just. It appears that none of the jurors agreed on any one “mitigating factor” when making their decision. Many pointed to Moussaoui’s horrible childhood. Others to his limited knowledge and role in the actual attack on 9/11. Still others thought that racism played a part in the terrorist’s warped childhood development.

It could be argued successfully that any one of those factors should not be used to stop the execution of a man who so clearly wanted to to martyr himself and who holds the people and institutions of the United States in such contempt. The problem was in the application of the law; unless the jury’s verdict of death was unanimous, Moussaoui would get life in prison. And since all the jurors agreed that at least one mitigating factor was present, Moussaoui escaped death.

As the New York Times points out, the most telling factor could have been the 24 witnesses - many of whom lost loved ones on 9/11 - who testified for the defense, an unprecedented event in the history of the penalty phase in murder trials:

Neither group [of witnesses] was allowed to testify on their preferences for Mr. Moussaoui’s fate. But defense lawyers said they believed that the jurors inferred from their witnesses that some victims were not seeking the death penalty.

“The testimony of family members was immensely personal and also displayed the deep divisions that mark the issue of capital punishment in this country,” [Attorney for the defense] Mr. MacMahon said. “This is, to our knowledge, the only capital case where victims have testified as witnesses called by the defense. This testimony demonstrated resilience and the possibility of renewal.”

He said he had never expected anything but a death sentence.

Robin Theurkauf, who lost her husband in the World Trade Center and testified for the defense , said in an interview she was surprised but gratified by the verdict.

Ms. Theurkauf, a divinity student at Yale, said that by showing the jury that some family members were not seeking Mr. Moussaoui’s death, “We may have given them permission to free themselves from a obligation to respond to the massive grief with vengeance. We allowed them to view the case dispassionately.”

I sympathize with those who believe that it would have been enormously satisfying to put this man to death. But I think we have to have some sympathy for the jurors as well. Talk about executing a human being is cheap. Unless it is actually your responsibility, I daresay one’s outlook on the death penalty then would become very personal. Whether the jurors were looking for an “out” in order to avoid mandating another person’s death is beside the point. They followed the law, their consciences, and in the end, common sense. As our representatives, we couldn’t have asked for anything more from them.

One aspect that was not brought out in the verdict but which very well may have played a role in the jury’s deliberations was their decision to deny martyrdom to someone who so obviously wanted it. From a practical standpoint, Moussaoui will now fade into history even among those who admire what he stands for. His incarceration in a very deep and very black hole (it’s almost a guarantee he will not be placed into the general prison population and instead will be kept in solitary confinement) will mean that his name will eventually die even if he himself remains alive. That is a victory against our enemies of sorts.

A close call, but a correct one. And I don’t think that even those among us who support the death penalty but agree with this decision would have been terribly upset if the verdict had gone the other way. As it is, I’m glad that justice triumphed over revenge.

UPDATE

I think this is going to be one of those days…

A quick perusal of conservative sites shows that I am all alone in my opinion regarding the jury’s decision. A sampling:

Dr. Shackleford: “A Travesty of Justice.”

Misha: “The Worst BullS**t Verdit of All Time”

Jay at STACLU: “I’m a little very disappointed here. I was hoping they were gonna fry this creep.”

Mike at Cold Fury: “Choking on it”

Stephen Green (even the libertarians are against me!): “The First Mistake”

And Goldstein: “Meanwhile, somewhere in a cave complex in the wilds of Pakistan, Usama bin Laden smiles the smile of the strong horse and enjoys a plate of figs and mountain berries… ”

Sully sorta agrees with me: “A vile human being. I oppose the death penalty, but if I had to make an exception, it would be him.”

Not Kurt at Flopping Aces: “A disgusting verdict.”

Eric Lindholm: “Three thousand Americans dead – Moussaoui gets life”

Pat Curley: “I am not a huge fan of the death penalty, but if there was ever a case that cried out for it, it’s this one.”

At least my brother Jim still loves me. His excellent piece (that actually influenced my thinking a bit) that ties in the Nuremberg Tribunals can be found here.

UPDATE II

Attywood quotes Newsweek’s Michael Isikoff on Hardball and has a good question: “Why won’t the government try the real criminals of 9/11?”

This entire Moussaoui trial was a side show. The Justice Department indicted him at the time, they thought he might have been the 20th hijacker. They later learned he was not. But there was a feeling, that for altogether understandable reasons, that the country needed a trial, the cathartic effect of a trial to deal with the most horrific crime in American history.

But the point is that after the time that they indicted Moussaoui, we came to get into custody the people who were directly responsible for that crime, the architect, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed (pictured here at top), Ramzi bin al-Shibh, who was Mohammed Atta`s collaborator at every step of the way — twice in 2001, Atta leaves the country to consult with Ramzi bin al-Shibh about the for the attack — the financier who was also in custody, Qualli bin Atassh (phonetic) who helped planned it at the Malaysia meeting.

As I’ve said on many occasions, this is exactly why Congress must act to settle the question of detainee rights once and for all. The White House isn’t going to do it. And it appears that the courts are not only taking their own sweet time about doing so but our judges also seem reluctant to rule very broadly on the issue which leaves the door open for more motions, more rulings that are making an absolute hash of the entire situation.

Did the Administration make a deal with KSM to not execute him if he talked? Did he talk under the influence of torture and thus prosecuting him would not only expose the Bush Administration to withering criticism but also make it impossible to convict him?

The New York Times:

So far only 10 of the 490 people still stashed away in Guantánamo have ever been charged with anything. The rest were hauled up before military proceedings that were a joke, if the available transcripts are any indication, to determine whether they should continue to be held without any rights or process under the phony label of “unlawful enemy combatant” that the Bush administration concocted after 9/11 for just this purpose. This is not even a half-hearted stab at a day in court, and it leaves hundreds of people under indefinite, illegal detention.

Among them are about 150 prisoners whom the government says it would like to send home because they pose no threat to the United States, but feels it can’t. Some, like the Uighurs — Chinese Muslims — would face possible prison or torture if sent back to countries without basic regard for human rights. The Bush administration has put itself in a bizarre situation when it is forced to worry about the humane treatment of people it whisked off to Guantánamo without any serious attempt to determine who they were, much less what crime they may have committed. They were then held without charges, many under abusive conditions that sometimes amounted to torture, for more than three years.

I disagree with the way the Times, in typical Bush bashing fashion, characterizes what the Administration felt it had to do. Nevertheless, their point is well taken. There are some legitimate questions surrounding the guilt of some of the detainees. This is not just the determination of wacko liberal groups like ACLU and Amnesty International. Several respected criminal attorneys representing detainees have said exactly the same thing.

And this brings us back to what rights these detainees have under American law. Must they “prove” their innocence in order to be released? What rights do they have to see the evidence against them, even if that evidence is classified? Do they have a chance to confront any witnesses who spoke against them?

I hope you see where I’m going with this. Just because they’re in Gitmo or Bagram doesn’t make them guilty. Some kind of determination - some rudimentary form of justice must be meted out or it gives the lie to our entire legal system.

In a letter published in today’s American Spectator, I take James Bowman to task for his execrable review of the film United 93.

Here’s Bowman’s review.

To which I replied (second letter from the top):

Regarding James Bowman’s curious “review” of United 93, it is a pity that the gentleman lost his spectacles and was unable to view the film the same way most of the rest of us did. Surely the film he writes about could only have been shown in his imagination and not in any real world setting where audiences were horrified, mesmerized, and finally moved to tears by the movie’s unrelenting realism and intimacy. Otherwise, his grousing about “too soon” and “no heroism” ring hollow indeed when measured against the film’s power to prick the memory and gnaw at our emotions, still for many an open wound from that awful day.

I actually sympathize with Bowman’s reasoning about why United 93 might be too soon. And if we were talking about looking at events with a historian’s eye, I would agree with him. There is much to be said for space to be created not “between illusion and reality” as Mr. Bowman thinks but rather between “news and history.” The great Civil War historian Bruce Catton half-joked that the French academy never used to allow the study of any subject more recent than the Napoleonic Wars, believing that at least 100 years should pass before the historian can approach a subject with the proper perspective. And while it may be proper to allow an event to age and ripen in our minds before gaining a valid historical outlook, no such stricture needs to be placed on an artist. In fact, immediacy can add to the emotional impact of the artist’s work. It certainly did in United 93.

Mr. Bowman really leaves the tracks when he posits the jaw-dropping notion that United 93″shows some signs of being influenced by the liberal and revisionist view of the events of 9/11, namely that the attacks were at least partly our own fault.” Where? How? There is not one single moment in the film that I can recall where I felt director Greengrass played overt politics with the story. There was certainly some subtext in the film that was critical of the government response that day. Good God! Bowman can’t be thinking that the response of the FAA or the military was adequate, can he? If, by extension, that means criticizing the President then Greengrass certainly went a lot easier on Bush than the 9/11 Commission. Beyond the confusion and the disbelief shown by the people who perhaps could have mitigated the effects of 9/11 (how that could be possible is not even hinted at in the movie) what the response of the United States government in the film showed above all else was that we were woefully unprepared for those kinds of attacks. The 9/11 Commission pointed this out regarding FAA protocols: “On the morning of 9/11, the existing protocol was unsuited in every respect for what was about to happen.”

“In every respect” would seem to absolve the administration of the sin most frequently cited by its critics: that they should have expected hijacked planes to be used as missiles to destroy tall buildings. It also points to a theme that I believe came through loud and clear when viewing the government’s response during the course of the film in its totality; that the United States on September 11, 2001 had spent the previous decade sleepwalking through history and that the looks of astonishment on the faces of everyone from the FAA, to the air traffic controllers, to even our military said as much as the 9/11 Commission Report could ever say about this subject.

Finally, Mr. Bowman’s complaint about there not being any true “heroes” in the film and that some aspects of the passenger assault on the cockpit were downplayed is factual but misses the point. If Greengrass was going to make a film that highlighted the heroism and courage of the passengers — especially Messrs. Burnett, Glick, Beamer, and Bingham — the audience would have been catapulted out of the intimate, existential universe created by the director and thrust into fantasyland. I thought that the assault on the cockpit was an extraordinary piece of filmmaking and, ironically, in some ways mirrored the terrorist’s assault from earlier in the film. The looks on the passengers faces just prior to launching their attack was a carbon copy of the expressions on the terrorist’s faces just before they nerved themselves to carry out their mission. What struck me about this was how it reminded me of the faces of men at war. Whether intended or not, Greengrass reminded us all that, at bottom, 9/11 was an attack on American sovereignty. And the film’s power is in reminding us what it felt like to be an American that day.

And giving the hijackers more than one dimension by portraying them as pious men who had loving relationships with their family is no more a glorification of their cause than portraying Hitler as a man who loved children and dogs as was done in the powerful recent film Downfall. In a way, it makes what the hijackers did even more chilling and adds to the film’s overall realism. I daresay that if Greengrass had portrayed the hijackers as unemotional killers, it would have jarred the audience out of the world created so superbly by the director.

Hollywood, with its ability to turn reality into myth, is uniquely situated to add events like 9/11 to our national narrative in such a way as to bring understanding and closure. It is a pity that Mr. Bowman failed to absorb the nuances of the film and instead chose to judge the film from such an erroneous and superficial viewpoint.

Despite being shown in more than 1800 fewer theaters than the Robin Williams vehicle RV,, United 93 was the top grossing film for Monday, more than doubling the dollar per screen average of its closest competitors.

Figures from Daily Box Office reveal that the strong opening weekend for U-93 was no fluke and that as word of mouth about the picture spreads, the chances of the film becoming a sleeper hit are rising.

Grossing nearly $1 million ($969,225) compared to $888,385 for RV, U-93’s per screen average of $540 was more than twice that of its competitor’s $244. This reflects the kind of audience that is being attracted to U-93; married adults over 30. These are people much more willing and able to attend movies during the week. And what is truly remarkable is that a film with no appeal to teenagers, no established stars, a minuscule promotions budget, and what most would see as a “downer” storyline, would have such a strong opening weekend and now demonstrate appeal during the week.

U-93 will be swamped - along with every other film - this weekend with the opening of the Tom Cruise project Mission Impossible III. Since most films experience a fall off of between 1/2 and 2/3 their second weekend, it should be interesting to see if U-93 can maintain something around those figures - $4-6 million. Anything beyond that would reflect underlying strength which could bode well for the future.

UPDATE

A friend of mine in “the Biz” emailed me with an interesting fact. Sometimes when a blockbuster like MI3 opens, it helps business for most other films as well. “A rising tide lifts all boats” could be applied to any effect on U-93.

He also says that there are times when that kind of thinking is pure rot and MI3 just might suck the life out of every other film out there.

There you have the perfect industry analyst, a fact I was quick to point out. His response?

“I’ve got to make a living somehow!”

UPDATE II: TUESDAY’S NUMBERS

For Tuesday, RV barely edged U-93 for first, taking in $926,855 to U-93’s $870,575. Remember, RV is playing in 1800 more theaters.

U-93 maintained its per screen dominance by averaging $485 to its competitor’s $255.

UPDATE III: WEDNESDAY NUMBERS

U-93 still running strong in second place with $790,335 averaging $440 per screen. RV grossed $836,740 garnering $230 per screen. Total take for U-93 tops $14 million - considered a little above average for the genre.

People are comparing the film’s opening week to the Clooney project Syriana. The comparison may not be valid because the Clooney film enjoyed a limited release in 5 theaters for two weeks prior to its general release to 1755 screens. Such limited release usually gets a media buzz going about a film, something that the subject matter of U-93 did for that project. Both films showed unusual strength during the week with Syriana’s 2nd weekend falling off 50% against the blockbuster openings of both Peter Jackson’s King Kong and the family film Chronicles of Narnia.

Analysts are expecting a similar performance for U-93 this weekend as it plays against the opening of MI3.

I’ve had it with the smug, self-righteous group of immigration “reform” advocates who are calling those of us who support the rule of law over rule of politics “racists” and even (irony of ironies) “UN-American.” It reflects a towering intellectual dishonesty about the issue when your opponents feel free to distort the true nature of the opposition to illegal immigration by setting up so many strawmen that one would think the Scarecrow in the Wizard of Oz was on a self-replication binge, dotting the political landscape with enough copies of himself to populate a medium sized city.

The truth of the matter is that the Open Borders argument is political poison unless it is wrapped in the flag, buttressed by the politically correct buzzwords “tolerance” and “fairness” with a final appeal to pity by raising the specter of legal children being torn from illegal mothers by cruel, heartless, pro-enforcement monsters. This would all be bad enough. It is the attempt by this crowd to connect pro-enforcement advocates with neo-Nazis, skinheads, radical militiamen and the like that stinks of demagoguery and proves how truly mendacious the Open Borders groups can be.

The demonstration on May 1 is a case in point. Dubbed a “Rally for Immigrant Rights,” one would have to be brain dead not to have figured out that in fact, the “Rally” was about no such thing. Instead, as every 5 year old in America who has been following this movement knows, the May Day protests were about “rights” for illegal immigrants, a fact brought out in this article in today’s Washington Post:

While a series of marches focused much of the nation’s attention on the plight of illegal immigrants, scores of other Americans quietly seethed. Now, with the same full-throated cry expressed by those in the country illegally, they are shouting back.

Congressional leaders in Washington have gotten bricks in the mail from a group that advocates building a border fence, states in the West and South have drawn up tough anti-immigrant laws, and ordinary citizens, such as Janis McDonald of Pennsylvania, who considers herself a liberal, are not mincing words in expressing their displeasure.

“Send them back,” McDonald said. “Build a damn wall and be done with it.”

The anger evoked a word that immigrant organizers who opposed Monday’s boycott feared: backlash. McDonald and other Americans were particularly disturbed by Monday’s boycott and civil action, attended in large part by people who entered the country illegally and are now demanding rights enjoyed by U.S.-born citizens and immigrants who entered the country legally.

Of course, the Post reveals where they stand on the issue by referring to the “plight” of illegal immigrants as if sneaking across the border, purchasing forged social security and/or green cards, and trying to stay one step ahead of Homeland Security represents a hardship brought upon the illegals by anyone other than themselves.

That said, the article points out a difference that the Open Borders crew refuses to acknowledge and, in fact, obfuscates in order to tag their opponents as heartless gorgons. It is the difference between those who endure the bureaucratic rigmarole and long waiting periods to legally enter this country and those who take the sometimes perilous but nevertheless easier way by sneaking across the border in defiance of the law.

In truth, this is the club used by the pro-illegal lobby to beat enforcement advocates over the head. By successfully blurring the distinction between legal and illegal immigrants, they can portray those who support a rational immigration policy as ideological soul mates of the “Know Nothing” anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic party of the early 1850’s.

The anti-immigrant movement of that period was a direct response to the first mass migration of Irish to the United States. It is estimated that more than 1.5 million starving Irish left their home country between 1848-50 as a result of the almost total failure of the potato crop and the confused, heartless response of the British government to the starving millions on that unfortunate isle. So many foreigners (and Catholics to boot) overwhelmed some cities in the northeast which frightened many native born protestants into forming their own party. The official name of the movement was the American Party. The origin of the “Know Nothing” moniker came about as a result of the semi-secret nature of the party. When a member was asked about its activities, he was supposed to reply “I know nothing.”

It is a convenient whipping boy for pro-illegal advocates because many of the “Know Nothings” were absorbed into the new Republican party. Not knowing quite what to do with these nativists (Democrats of that period pandered shamelessly to the new arrivals), they were successfully marginalized in the election of 1860 by Lincoln’s “Free Labor, Free Soil, Free Men” platform.

But that doesn’t stop the Open Borders crowd from using the specter of the Know Nothings to skewer their opponents and tar them with the nativist label. The fact is, there are many in the pro-enforcement lobby who seek to dramatically increase legal immigration as well as make the path to citizenship for those who abide by the law less of a burden both bureaucratically and legally.

Almost 1 million people enter this country as legal immigrants every year. This number includes people whose temporary visas have expired and wish to stay on to work or to achieve citizenship. There are very, very few enforcement advocates who begrudge these potential citizens their rights under the law. And while there is a loud minority in the anti-illegal movement who seek to reduce or even eliminate legal immigration to the United States - the stated reason being homeland security - most pro-enforcement advocates actually support increased legal immigration.

But you would never know this if the only information you received was from the pro-illegal groups. They have successfully portrayed the anti-illegal lobby as anti-immigration - both legal and illegal - as well as proponents of a draconian “round-up” of illegals that would tear families apart and turn the United States into a police state. And while this may be the extremists view of the matter, such thinking is hardly in the mainstream.

On the other hand, how often do you read about International ANSWER and how they have expropriated the reform movement for their own nefarious ends? Those May Day protests were largely organized by the communists in ANSWER while being opposed by more mainstream immigration groups. In fact, few pro-reform websites bothered to inform their readers of this very salient point.

We will not have meaningful immigration reform until we all agree that the United States is a sovereign country with recognizable borders that must be defended. That defense includes shutting the door on people who would break the law to come here. It is such a basic concept that it is mystifying why the pro-illegal lobby deliberately ignores it. At times, they seem almost embarrassed by the fact that the United States has a right to determine who comes here and who doesn’t as well as determining its own requirements for citizenship.

In the end, this is what “sovereignty” is all about; the belief that being born an American is a privilege beyond words and that becoming an American should also be a privilege, earned by a legal immigrant’s hard work, obedience of the law, and desire to be a part of this grand experiment in self-government.

Anything less and you cheapen the idea of citizenship for everyone.

UPDATE

Michelle Malkin has an article about the Reconquista as well as much more information in her Vent segment at Hot Air.
I have read much on both right and left sites about whether or not the reconquista is a serious part of this pro-illegal movement or just a strawman set up by oppnents to scare people into opposing immigration from Mexico.

I find it interesting that those who subscribe to the latter view always start out by saying that the reconquista is not the goal of illegal immigrant groups and end up by saying that, in effect, it is. I don’t buy the proposition that this notion of taking back the southwest is some holdover from the radical 1960’s, not when through their rhetoric and actions, these groups show that reconquista is alive and well and is a not so subtle goal of the Mexican government as well.

Reconquista is not a strawman. And the fact that pro-illegal groups either support it or fail to oppose it says much about the ideological makeup of their movement.

Another good read on this as well as some excellent commentary about the state of the left can be found Alexandra’s All Things Beautiful.

Makes sure you wish her “Happy Birthday!”

UPDATE II

RECONQUISTA?

WHO US?

YOU DON’T REALLY BELIEVE ALL THAT STUFF ABOUT “AZTLAN” DO YA?

My first post about net neutrality was greeted with much skepticism by some of my conservative friends. In particular, Matt, who claims to be The Only Republican” in San Francisco , has an answer for those who say that the construction of a two-tiered internet by giant Telecos where big companies will pay a fee so that their sites and search engines receive favored treatment on the “information highway” is a trojan horse of sorts; that in fact, the concept of net neutrality is a way for government to control the net at the “router” level:

You should not be surprised that the loudest advocates of ‘net neutrality are those on the far left, including MyDD, and MoveOn. Their arguments are very much in line with things like McCain-Feingold and the old Fairness Doctrine.

It is also being sold as “fear the big bad corporations”. I don’t have any particular affection for any of the companies involved here, but I do know that customers know best. Some customers might indeed say, I will pay more for better video. Alternatively, the market may say “we like it the way it is”, which is neutrality de facto. In either case, we don’t need Congress or the FCC to make the call.

The history of the Internet has told us we should imagine the unimagined. Let’s preserve the absence of inhibition that has gotten us this far. Keep it libertarian. No new laws.

Read Matt’s entire piece which he calls a “Primer” for Conservatives on the issue.

This is all well and good. And there may be a way to address some of Matt’s concerns in the current Telecommunications Reform bill that just passed the Energy and Commerce Committee and where a net neutrality amendment went down to defeat. But is there a real threat?

Congress is pushing a law that would abandon the Internet’s First Amendment — a principle called Network Neutrality that prevents companies like AT&T, Verizon and Comcast from deciding which Web sites work best for you — based on what site pays them the most. Your local library shouldn’t have to outbid Barnes & Noble for the right to have its Web site open quickly on your computer.

Net Neutrality allows everyone to compete on a level playing field and is the reason that the Internet is a force for economic innovation, civic participation and free speech. If the public doesn’t speak up now, Congress will cave to a multi-million dollar lobbying campaign by telephone and cable companies that want to decide what you do, where you go, and what you watch online.

This isn’t just speculation — we’ve already seen what happens elsewhere when the Internet’s gatekeepers get too much control. Last year, Telus — Canada’s version of AT&T — blocked their Internet customers from visiting a Web site sympathetic to workers with whom the company was having a labor dispute. And Madison River, a North Carolina ISP, blocked its customers from using any competing Internet phone service.

To my mind, the potential is certainly there for mischief by both government and large corporations. The difference is that we can keep on eye on government and influence potential troublemaking a lot easier than we can at Comcast.

The New York Times has come out four square for net neutrality:

One of the Internet’s great strengths is that a single blogger or a small political group can inexpensively create a Web page that is just as accessible to the world as Microsoft’s home page. But this democratic Internet would be in danger if the companies that deliver Internet service changed the rules so that Web sites that pay them money would be easily accessible, while little-guy sites would be harder to access, and slower to navigate. Providers could also block access to sites they do not like.

In another comment on my post, Matt has a pretty good response:

You don’t need to trust the telcos. Your supermarket can offer any product it wants, ditto the PC companies, ad infinitum, and these industries are serving consumers extremely well. The only place where customers are not served well are regulated utilities. That is exactly the model that the neutrality proponents are advocating.

Commenter “AM” says it’s all much ado about nothing:

There are some applications for which success falls from 100% to 0% at a particular latency and packet-loss threshold. The only way the service provider can assure that these applications will work when the net is under load is to provide differentiated services.

This is a technical issue, not a political one. Dont be conned – get informed.

Before your eyes glaze over, here’s “Cosmoreaxer” who agrees with him:

This has been covered for weeks on Digg, and it’s pretty clear if you take a moment to read more: This is the cable and telcos vs. the online content providers like Amazon and Yahoo. It’s not about the corporations trying to keep the little guy down, it’s about the corporations fighting with other corporations about whether to move certain packets (basically, video and VoIP) over the net faster than other packets (less intense, non-streaming info, i.e. e-mail and the web).

That’s it. This is what you’re shrieking like an anti-capitalist street protester about?

In fact, I’ve read that same complaint about net neutrality on several sites; that if you don’t stream a lot of video and VoIP, you’re basically paying for those who do. That’s an issue I would like someone to explain to me (just like you would explain it to your 5 year old child). Is it fair to ask people to pay for internet services they don’t use? And if that kind of service can be differentiated, isn’t it a matter of fairness that sites that use the tremendous bandwidth it takes to stream video pay more than those who don’t?

These are tough questions because they are 1) so highly technical that people like me feel totally inadequate in addressing; and 2) the answer appears to depend on what side of the liberal/conservative divide you come down on.

But is this really a “political” issue in the sense that it is right vs. left? I would love to be able to find a consensus as we did on the FEC regs that came down last winter. However, that seemed to be pretty straightforward as an issue of free speech. This net neutrality business makes me feel like I’m walking through cotton candy.

What we need is a good old fashioned debate with point/counterpoint responses and done in as non-technical a manner as possible. For all you geeks out there (and I use that term affectionately because I have tremendous admiration for your skills and knowledge) bless your hearts but when you start talking about “packets” and “load” I want to place my hands around your necks and squeeze. Please remember that many if not most us are computer klutzes and need a “Special Ed” approach to any technical issues.

One thing is for sure: There will be times over the next few years when we will be defending internet freedoms from both government and gigantic corporations. When you look at the growth of commerce on the net over just the last 5 years, you realize that big government and big corporations are like blood hounds who have picked up the scent.

And what they’re smelling is money - lots of it. It looks to me we may need that “Army of Davids” if we’re going to protect the net from the kind of intrusions that would alter our enjoyment and our quest for knowledge.

UPDATE

Firedoglake weighs in criticizing former Clinton politico Mike McCurry for his piece on HuffPo with typical gentleness, thoughtfulness, and understatement:

Tell us again, Mike you lying sellout, how we online activists are just a bunch of clueless, uncouth whiney kids. . . with whom the New York Times apparently agrees. Chris Bowers exposes the lying bulls**t about netroots activists you, Joe Klein and your other pecksniff power pimp sellouts keep hawking at the corner of 17th and L.

Let’s have a look at the names in your lobbying firm, shall we? Oooh, Randy Tate, one of the founders of the Christian Coalition. Tell me again, Mike, about your Democratic bona fides, how we should all be civil and moderate in tone? Let’s check out your clients. Oooooh. . . the Republican National Committee! Well, how-dee-doo! And the Lincoln Chaffee endorsing Sierra Club makes an appearance here, as do both the ACLU and the Department of Homeland Security. Interesting! Would any financial supporters of the ostensibly progressive groups on this list like to send a little note to them about Mike’s firm’s conflicts of interest?

Ed Cone is also disgusted by McCurry’s shilling for the telecos.

I’m guessing former Clinton mouthpiece Mike McCurry meant to sound tough and bloggy with this post about net neutrality.

It really didn’t work. He sounds like an angry insider who can’t believe a bunch of nobodies dared to challenge him.

Yeah, it’s rough out there in the comments, but you have to stay cool and on point.

It helps to mix a little Google into your act, too: McCurry sounds ignorant when he calls Vint Cerf “Vince.”

That’s one thing I would like to see addressed in ethics legislation; the “revolving door” in Washington. People should not be able to move from either Executive or Congressional branches of government into private lobbying gigs for at least 10 years. That sounds draconian but it’s just getting ridiculous.

UPDATE II: ASK AND YE SHALL RECEIVE

In the post above, I asked for a simple explanation of some of the issues. Not only have some excellent comments been left below (See Andy and Cosmoreax especially) but Dale Franks at Q & O has a great post on the issue as well.

Ain’t the internets somethin’?

With just three weeks left in the series (the last week will be a two hour spectacular), the final confrontations are taking shape, the sides are firming up, and we can now indulge ourselves in some intelligent speculation about how this thing is going to shake out.

THE GOOD GUYS

Martha

Emotional, unbalanced, maybe a little drugged up, but I’m pretty sure she will play the most important role in the upcoming confrontation with Jellyfish. She is as close to the edge of sanity as possible without being measured for a straight jacket. What might she do to stop her husband? Chew on that for a while but if I were the Secret Service, I wouldn’t let her anywhere near a gun.

Secretary of Defense Heller

…Is dead. Probably. Don’t bet the house on it.

Audrey

Out of action. Since she’s going to be in the CTU infirmary, when Henderson makes his inevitable escape attempt she may have to endure one more hostage situation.

Granny Hayes

Fully on the right side now that Jack has the recording. Still cannot trust any of her people. Watch for her and Bill to utilize CTU resources to help Chloe.

Bill

Will probably end up giving us what we all crave - a closed fist smackdown of Miles.

Chloe

Will do her geek thing. Will end up falling in love and marrying the Travelling Salesman, who it turns out, loves being tasered by anally retentive geek women.

Jack

Your guess is as good as mine. Since the writers have never allowed the shadowy groups behind all the series plots to be captured, Jack’s ultimate confrontation will probably be with Henderson who could be released from CTU custody by orders of the President as early as next week.

BAD GUYS

Logan

Will die. Bet the House on it.

Henderson

After being released from custody, he will realize that since Jack has the recording, the jig is up and he will attempt to flee the country.

Agent Stone Face

Aaron will reappear briefly to take care of him so that Logan will be vulnerable to an assassin.

Miles

Will turn into a weasel, but not before tattling on Granny Hayes to the President who will then try to replace her.

Mr. Big & Co.

Will get away scott free.

Feel free to add your own speculation in the comments. On Sunday, I will start my “24 till 24″ posts where the best, the funniest, and the most intelligent speculation from comments made below will be highlighted.

SUMMARY

Per Granny Hayes warning, Chloe is frantically getting her gear together so that she can escape before CTU agents swarm Bill’s house. Sneaking out the back door just in time, Chloe makes her way to a motel bar where, because of the curfew, the Karaoke contest has been cancelled but it still appears to be happy hour.

Back at Bill’s, the agents knock on the door demanding entrance. Bill tries his best to muss himself up to make it look like he had been sleeping but the best he could do is move one hair out of place. The CTU agents politely violate Buchanan’s constitutional rights and search his house looking for Chloe. Finding evidence that Bill’s desktop was used to hack into CTU, Bill refuses to talk to the Homeland Security flunkies and demands to speak to Granny. And when Granny agrees, Miles bureaucratic antennae emerges from his head like Ray Walston’s feelers in My Favorite Martian. You can almost see the wheels turning in the lickspittle’s head as his suspicions are heightened about Hayes.

At the bar, Chloe gets Granny to download the passenger manifest from Flight #520. After calling Jack (who is still in the luggage compartment) with the good news, she cross references the info and discovers one passenger who has a possible connection to Henderson. Passing along that information as well as where the Air Marshall is located, Jack makes his way into the cabin, sits next to the Air Marshall, and dispatches him quite nicely with a vicious elbow to the face. Ever the gentleman, Jack gives the unconscious Marshall a pillow to rest his head on.

Jack uses subterfuge in luring his suspect back into the galley so that he can interrogate him. Subduing the businessman with ease, Jack crawls back into the luggage compartment with the German as easily as a spider retreats to a corner of his web.

At the ranch, Martha is beginning to fall of the edge of the sanity cliff. She demands that Agent Stone Face get her some drugs to assuage the psychic pain of her discovery about Logan’s treachery. Stymied there, she calls Mike who obediently comes to her side only to become perplexed when Martha almost lets the cat out of the bag about The Plot. Confused, Mike sees the President and once again, Jellyfish weaves a tissue of convincing lies - well, mostly convincing. Mike is starting to put two and two together and is becoming very concerned.

Logan calls Mr. Big who informs his underling that Jack Bauer must be found and caught. Duh. For all the conversations between Logan and Mr. Big, we have precious little information about him and perhaps the ultimate and unrevealed part of the plot.

In the belly of the plane, Jack interrogates the German as the truth begins to dawn on him; just because someone worked for Omicron doesn’t make them a bad guy. Jack’s fruitless search for the tape takes on a tinge of desperation as the plane makes a slow turn and heads for home.

Chloe, who is in the process of double checking her info on the German businessman with customs, is hit on by the drunk Travelling Salesman. You will recall the Chloe has already had her self-allotted sex for the month having bedded down CTU analyst Spencer during the show’s first hour so she appears not to be interested in the slobbering drunk’s advances. One would think that offers like this don’t come along very often so perhaps she’ll change her mind at some point.

On the plane, things have taken a turn for the worse as the crew discovers the unconscious Air Marshall which causes the Captain to make the dash for home. Realizing there is only one place that Jack could be hiding, the Air Marshall gets the Captain to de-pressurize the luggage compartment. As air begins to hiss out of the compartment, Jack asks Chloe to put him through to the cockpit.

At the ranch, Mike brings Martha her pills and after re-interrogating her, appears to have reached some kind of decision…almost. Either he can’t quite believe his suspicions or is waiting for more evidence before jumping off the Logan team.

Meanwhile, Chloe calls Jack and tells him that the German is not the guy he’s looking for since the timeline for Meyer’s boarding the aircraft doesn’t add up if he indeed met up with Henderson to take the tape. Back at square one, Jack now concentrates on getting air into the luggage hold. Chloe gets Granny to use her CTU pull and is able to put Jack through to the Captain.

The Captain is, to say the least, skeptical. He can’t get past the fact that Jack attacked the Air Marshall and took his gun. Good for him. I wouldn’t let Jack out if I were him either. He hangs up on Jack as the air continues to hiss out of the compartment.

But Jack doesn’t give up easily. Going to the aileron panel in the luggage compartment (No. Do not ask how he knew where it was. That way lies madness), Jack removes the Styrofoam ceiling, takes his belt, wraps it around the control lines, and pulls down very hard.

Immediately, the plane noses over and begins to dive. Jack tells the Captain he will bring the plane down unless he opens the door to the cabin. In what has to be the greatest kneecapping of Jack’s career, the Captain complies.

Chloe, puts the Travelling Salesman on ice, saving him perhaps for later, by tasering the poor guy. One wonders what other toys Chloe uses when engaging in foreplay.

At the ranch, Logan informs Mr. Big that Jack is indeed on Flight #520 and that he’s hijacked it in order to get his hands on the tape. Mr. Big orders Logan to have the plane land and take Jack into custody. Another useless phone call except to give Mr. Big face time.

Meanwhile, at CTU, Bill does the perp walk much to the delight of Miles whose insufferablility quotient rises by the hour. Bill chops him down to size in one of the more satisfying exchanges of the year:

MILES: What is Bauer doing on Flight #520?

BILL: You have no idea what you’re doing, you little ass-kisser.

Give that man a standing ovation.

But Miles’ deviousness will not be denied. After he finds out that Granny is going to do a “soft” interrogation of Bill (questioning why she brought Buchanan back to CTU in the first place rather than have the agents on site do the questioning), Miles does what bureaucrats are most adept at; he stabs Granny in the back by running to Mike Novik and tries to undermine her authority. Mike listens impatiently to the twerp, dismissing his concerns out of hand by, in effect, saying “I don’t have time for this crap now.” I would say the chances that Miles gets in direct contact with the President are as close to 100% as you can get on this show.

In holding room #1, Granny tells Bill that she’s out on a limb now and that Jack has got to get that evidence of Logan’s complicity or she will abandon the cause. And when Logan calls to get an update on Flight 520, Granny is barely able to cover up her suspicions that the President of the United States is a murdering crook. But she hasn’t jumped completely - not yet.

At the bar, Chloe zaps the Travelling Salesman again (he appears to like it) and discovers who Henderson’s true accomplice is; the copilot, who was a last minute replacement. The Captain, hearing about the switch from Jack and confirming it with the clueless copilot, tries to pull the old “I’ve got a cramp in my leg” trick in order to open the door and let Jack in but his cockpit mate doesn’t fall for it. He cold cocks the Captain but not before he succeeds in opening the cockpit door.

Jack rushes in and corners the man he has just broken every civil aviation rule in the book to capture. Realizing he is the only one who can fly the plane (We think. Do not put it past Jack to have 1000 hours of sim time on a 737.) Jack holds off on adding the copilot to his body count. And, as the music swells triumphantly, Jack takes the incriminating tape from Henderson’s accomplice. He calls Chloe who is almost moved to tears with relief. Bauer tells the copilot “You’re going to land this plane or I’m going to put a bullet in your head,” which makes one think that Jack can indeed, fly a commercial jetliner.

Martha, now in a drug induced stupor, calls Jellyfish and whines about how far apart they’ve gotten. Logan tells her that she’s been “one click away from a nervous breakdown for the last three years” and that he can’t count on her anymore. As Martha descends into her own personal hell, Mr. Big calls.

He informs Logan that Jack has the tape and that now he has no option: The plane carrying Jack, the tape, and more than 50 innocent people must be shot down. Otherwise, says Mr. Big, “You go to prison for treason and murder.”

BODY COUNT

The Grim Reaper took the night off, resting up for next week as Jack may have to wade through a lot of blood in order to reach his ultimate objective; Henderson.

JACK: 30

SHOW: 184

Don’t forget to leave you best speculation about upcoming episodes in the comments. The best, the funniest, and the most outrageous will be included in my Sunday post “24 Till 24.”