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Friday, June 07, 2002
Things that make you go "hmmmm... A USDA loan officer named Johnell Bryant was on ABC news last night, with a very strange story about Mohammad Atta requesting a loan for a crop duster. Before he left, Atta tried to buy a panoramic photograph of Washington, D.C., that hung on her office wall. He pointed specifically to the White House and Pentagon and called the photo "one of the prettiest" he had ever seen of the capital. "He pulled out a wad of cash," she said. "He wanted that picture really bad." Bryant said when she explained the picture was a gift from her former colleagues, Atta threw more money down. "His look on his face became very bitter at that point," Bryant said. "I believe he said, 'How would America like it if another country destroyed that city and some of the monuments in it' like the cities in his country had been destroyed?" She also remembers Atta mentioning al-Qaida and Osama bin Laden, saying bin Laden "would someday be known as the world's greatest leader." "I didn't know who Osama bin Laden was. He could have been a character on Star Wars for all I knew," Bryant said. Does that sound right to you? That the Mohammad Atta went around ranting about Osama bin Laden and the destruction of monuments and cities everywhere he went?
You're probably too excited about the government's big new reorganization to pay any attention to this By Ray McGovern, a former CIA analyst (via Cursor): No one wants to believe that the attacks of Sept. 11 could have been prevented, but we do a disservice to our country if we stay in denial. No one wants to believe that President Bush had more forewarning than he acknowledges, but there is strong circumstantial evidence that he did. Reviewing that evidence on May 26, The Washington Post's ombudsman, Michael Getler, alluded to one very telling sign from a conversation between CIA Director George Tenet and former U.S. Sen. David Boren over breakfast on Sept. 11. When an aide rushed up to tell Tenet of the attacks, Tenet's immediate reaction was: ``This has bin Laden all over it. . . . I wonder if it has anything to do with this guy taking pilot training?'' Getler notes that the reference is to Zacarias Moussaoui, the ''20th hijacker,'' who had been taken into custody in Minnesota four weeks before, after attracting suspicion at a flight school there. According to The Wall Street Journal, the FBI did not tell the White House about Moussaoui until after Sept. 11. But it is a safe bet that the CIA's Tenet did. Even before learning about Moussaoui, Tenet's President's Daily Brief of Aug. 6 bore the title ''Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.'' When analysts working in Tenet's Counterterrorist Center were warned about Moussaoui a few weeks before Sept. 11, it is inconceivable that they would not have told Tenet. He is, by law, ''the principal advisor to the president for intelligence matters related to national security,'' and is entitled to ``all intelligence related to the national security, which is collected by any department, agency or other entity of the United States.'' * * * As warnings of a major terrorist operation against the United States poured in last summer, we know that George Tenet kept warning everyone who would listen. It seems to me certain that he would have kept the vacationing president up to date, including the fresh information on Moussaoui...
-------------------- Wednesday, June 05, 2002
Do you have blacks too? I mentioned this question, which Bush allegedly asked the president of Brazil, a few posts back. A reader took issue with my assertion that while it may or may not be true, it passes the smell test--pointing out that the professional skeptics at Snopes (who don't seem to have permalinks, at least that I can find) have been unable to verify the quote or find any source other than the single article in Der Spiegel. Well, the Washington Post has found the original source of the quote--my guess is, they called Der Spiegel and asked--and while we may never know the truth behind this one, the sourcing does seem plausible. Upon some checking, it appears that, in March 2001, at the first White House meeting of Bush and Cardoso, there was discussion of the two countries as melting pots, one participant said, but he did not recall Bush's question. The White House last week dismissed the report as "total crap." The Brazilian Embassy didn't return a call. Yesterday, we found that the item actually came from an April 28 column by Fernando Pedreira, former executive editor and now columnist for the Estado Sao Paulo, a respected paper in Brazil. The column is headlined "An Overwhelming Ignorance." Pedreira is very close to Cardoso, who had named him the country's ambassador to UNESCO. Meanwhile, Cardoso is said to have mentioned his chats with Bush while he was on a weekend with some close friends recently in Rio. Update: here's the direct link. Thanks to James Hart for picking up my slack.
Rush and George kiss and make up Those who are saddened when true love fails to run its course will be relieved to know that all is better between el Rushbo and the man he was calling "George W. Algore" just a few short days ago. Quote below via abcnews.com's the Note (which has a needlessly intrusive login procedure, so consider yourself warned). "One thing that we know for sure, my friends, is that in most cases the attempt to do the right thing is always there with this administration. I know that actions are more important than intentions, but couple that with the fact that we're talking about somebody here, George W. Bush, who has a profound level of integrity and decency. People want to believe and trust the president. That's why his approval numbers are so high. What he has done today is one of the reasons why his approval rating is understandable, and greatly deserved."
More recommended reading (NOTE: Today's blog is getting top-heavy. Don't miss the Taliban pipeline story a few posts down.) I try to avoid the usual blogosphere "what he said" links, because I'm wary of being drawn too deeply into that particular echo chamber, and because, frankly, I suspect that a significant percentage of this site's readership gives not a rat's ass about blogging. But sometimes I run across something that really encapsulates my own thoughts on a subject, such as this piece by the Poor Man (via Ted Barlow) on the ideological skirmishing which any mention of global warming invariably inspires. Why do people persist in thinking that global warming is fantasy when there is such strong agreement in the scientific community that it is real? The problem is, I think, a problem that crops up pretty much anytime a scientific problem, particularly one as brutally complex as global climate change, is released into the political environment - that is, people feel free to treat scientific results like political opinions, and argue them as if they were. Of course, Instapundit et. al. never argue with the scientists, because that is not merely an argument they would lose, but one they probably couldn't even follow. Neither could I, and neither could 99.999% of the world's population. That's the reason people get PhDs - so they can contribute to a highly technical discussion. So, as a stand-in for actual climatologists, we get straw man arguments against apocryphal 23-year-old stoned bearded Greenpeace canvassers, uninformed, unintelligent, unsober, and of no possible threat to press one for actual data. Which is the only currency acceptable in a scientific debate - not editorials, not popular science books, not articles from the Atlantic, but data. It's unrealistic to expect laymen to set up their own climate labs, or even to stay up-to-date on the peer-reviewed literature - no one has that kind of time. So we need to rely on the opinions of people who do run labs, and who do read the literature, and attend the conferences, and know what carbon dioxide is. If we choose not to listen to those opinions when they are uncomfortable, we probably shouldn't be congratulating ourselves on how modern and clear-headed we are in our thinking. If we don't want to listen to experts, we shouldn't have them. We should let Fred Barnes run NAS.
Running government like a bidness The story has a familiar ring. A Texas energy company plummets in the stock market. The CEO appeals to Washington for financial help. A federal securities probe is launched. Reports focus on a merger that may have backfired, 10,000 laid-off employees, and a former chief executive who walked away with millions of dollars in compensation. But this is not Enron; it is the Halliburton Corp., and the former executive is Vice President Dick Cheney. It has been nearly three years since Cheney left the helm of Halliburton to become George W. Bush's running mate, and the company's fortunes have not worked out the way Cheney or the company might hope. Just three weeks ago, the company's current chief executive, David Lesar, bluntly urged shareholders to descend upon Washington to win federal protection from asbestos-related lawsuits. The vast majority of those 290,000 claims stem from a merger overseen by Cheney that could make the company liable for billions of dollars. * * * According to stock analysts, the company's stock valuation today might be as high as $18 billion - instead of the current $8 billion - were it not for the potential liability shouldered after the Cheney-engineered 1998 merger between Halliburton and Dresser Industries. The asbestos liability is not the only concern. Last week, the company revealed that the Securities and Exchange Commission has launched a preliminary investigation into an accounting practice - adopted when Cheney was CEO - in which unapproved billings were counted as revenue. * * * In merging with Dresser, Cheney picked a firm with long ties to the Bush family. Prescott Bush, the father of the former President Bush, was the banking representative who helped finance the deal that established Dresser and served on the company's board. The former president wrote in his autobiography that Neil Mallon, the former president of Dresser Industries, ''was a mentor second only to my father.'' It was Mallon who helped former President Bush get into the oil business, and Bush worked for Dresser for 21/2 years. The brother of the current President Bush, Neil, is named after Mallon.
The most important story you will read today, and possibly even tomorrow as well By Jean-Charles Brisard, co-author of "Bin Laden, the Forbidden Truth," in today's Salon (in the Premium section, I'm afraid). June 5, 2002 | A 1998 memo written by al-Qaida military chief Mohammed Atef reveals that Osama bin Laden's group had detailed knowledge of negotiations that were taking place between Afghanistan's ruling Taliban and American government and business leaders over plans for a U.S. oil and gas pipeline across that Central Asian country... Atef's memo shines new light on what al-Qaida knew about U.S. efforts to normalize relations with the Taliban in exchange for the fundamentalist government's supporting the construction of an oil and gas pipeline across Afghanistan... the Clinton and Bush administrations negotiated with the Taliban, both to get the repressive regime to widen its government as well as look favorably on U.S. companies' attempts to construct an oil pipeline. The Bush White House stepped up negotiations with the Taliban in 2001. When those talks stalled in July, a Bush administration representative threatened the Taliban with military reprisals if the government did not go along with American demands. * * * Until the 1998 al-Qaida embassy bombings, the Clinton administration's approach toward the Taliban was much the same as Unocal's: All parties agreed that the political stabilization of Afghanistan was crucial to the region, and was also a way to gain access to oil reserves of the Caspian Sea region. Though bin Laden had been in the country since 1996, the U.S. had not pressured the Taliban to hand him over. The embassy bombings in August 1998 changed everything. The Clinton administration denounced the regime and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright turned up the heat on Taliban human rights abuses. The United Nations imposed sanctions, freezing Afghanistan's foreign assets and limiting its citizens' travel. The U.S. continued to talk to the Taliban, but the emphasis was on extraditing bin Laden in exchange for international recognition; the pipeline was off the table. Unocal, which had been close to finalizing its pipeline deal before the embassy bombings, cancelled it. * * * When George W. Bush took office in 2001, his administration made new overtures to the Taliban, and the pipeline deal gained renewed support, as an incentive to get the Taliban to make political concessions and form a broader government. U.S. representatives met with Afghanistan's former King Shah, to see if he might be included in a new government. And American companies began exploring the failed 1998 pipeline project. A report by an Afghan-born Enron manager in July 2001, for instance, illustrates that company's deep interest in some sort of pipeline deal. Enron had begun funding the same sorts of humanitarian projects as Unocal had three years earlier.
Global warming redux Rush, as it turns out, has hardly conceded the issue (and this space regrets suggesting otherwise). Indeed, he ranted on at length yesterday about (a) how global warming is probably due to the sun getting hotter (I shit you not); (b) how this is all a political ploy on the part of big government liberals yadda yadda yadda; and (c) how the report is undoubtedly the work of career EPA bureaucrats with their own agenda. So does the President of the United States side with his own EPA and with the vast majority of scientific opinion, or does he side with Rush Limbaugh? Well, gosh, what do you think? I read the report put out by the bureaucracy," Bush said dismissively Tuesday when asked about the EPA report, adding that he still opposes the Kyoto treaty. Story here. -------------------- Monday, June 03, 2002
Proof, as if it were needed, that when the RNC says "Jump," Rush asks, "How high?" Alert reader John Davis informs me that Rush Limbaugh has admitted today that global warming actually exists. UPDATE: According to Drudge, Rush hasn't conceded defeat on this one quite yet. Though it does appear to have been, as this space predicted, a bad day for Rush Limbaugh: Limbaugh explained: "I have not jumped across this divide, my friends. I thought about this last night when I became aware [of the NEW YORK TIMES story], and I thought what am I going to have to do? Am I going to have to go on the radio tomorrow and say , 'folks, guess what? I have been wrong about global warming. I've been wrong about it, the president says it is happening, human beings are causing it. I've been wrong.' I just can't because I don't think I am. I -- too many scientists out there whom I implicitly trust who have proven to me that these predictions are basically apocalyptic doom and gloom based on raw emotion. Even the global warming advocates to this day will not tell you it is definitively happening." Then again, several readers have indicated that he made some sort of grudging admission today. Lord, I guess this means I'll have to listen to the Bellicose One tomorrow--a nasty habit I've mostly given up, except during road trips...
A Bad Day for Rush Limbaugh: Part Three Study Shows Building Prisons Did Not Prevent Repeat Crimes The rate at which inmates released from state prisons commit new crimes rose from 1983 to 1994, a time when the number of people behind bars doubled, according to a Justice Department study released yesterday. The report found that 67 percent of inmates released from state prisons in 1994 committed at least one serious new crime within three years. That is 5 percent higher than among inmates released in 1983... "The main thing this report shows is that our experiment with building lots more prisons as a deterrent to crime has not worked," said Joan Petersilia, a professor of criminology at the University of California at Irvine and an expert on parole. A likely reason for the increase in recidivism, Professor Petersilia said, is that state governments, to save money and to be seen as tough on crime, cut back on rehabilitation programs, like drug treatment, vocational education and classes to prepare prisoners for life at home. Story here (login, you guessed it, required).
A Bad Day for Rush Limbaugh: Part Two Strict Limits on Welfare Benefits Discourage Marriage, Studies Say For years, work and marriage have been seen as twin pillars of welfare reform. But just as President Bush is seeking welfare legislation with more stringent work requirements and more support for marriage, an unexpected contradiction is emerging. New research findings in two states show that the stricter work requirements of contemporary welfare policy significantly reduce the chances that a single mother will wed. Story here (login required).
A Bad Day for Rush Limbaugh: Part One U.S. Sees Problems in Climate Change In a stark shift for the Bush administration, the United States has sent a climate report to the United Nations detailing specific and far-reaching effects that it says global warming will inflict on the American environment. In the report, the administration for the first time mostly blames human actions for recent global warming. It says the main culprit is the burning of fossil fuels that send heat-trapping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Not that they're planning to do anything about it, of course. Complete story here (login required).
A few words from that notorious America-hating Chomskyite, Pat Buchanan But when Americans ask, "Why do they hate us?" and "Why do these Islamic radicals on the other side of the earth want to come over here and commit hara-kiri killing us?" we get responses that ought not to satisfy a second-grader. They hate us, we are told, because we are democratic and free and good, and we have low tax rates. Well that is no longer enough. Before, not after, the next terror attack on this country, America's leaders should start telling the truth: Evil though they may be, Islamic killers are over here because we are over there. They are not trying to kill us because they dislike our domestic politics, but because they detest our foreign policy. Complete column here. -------------------- Sunday, June 02, 2002
I always seem to live in cities that wait to die I was reading an article in the Times this morning about the ways in which New York City slogs on despite the warnings that further attacks are inevitable and will probably be even more terrible, and it suddenly hit me--terrorist attacks are the shifting tectonic plates of New York City. I lived in San Francisco for nearly twelve years, a city which the aptly-named improv comedy group Faultline once termed "the city that waits to die." You know that there will be a major earthquake, and yet you still want to live there. So you learn to live with the knowledge that at any moment, the ground beneath your feet can shift and everything you know can change...and you go on about the business of your life. Of course, that's true for anyone, anywhere, in one way or another--it's just that the circumstances of geography drive the lesson home so much more strongly in the Bay Area. The Midwest has tornadoes and the East has hurricanes--but you have warnings of these things. You have no warning of an earthquake--sure, some people say that animals can sense them coming, but I myself was always reluctant to evacuate the city every time my cat started running up and down the hall for no apparent reason--and when the very ground beneath your feet is shifting, there is no sanctuary anywhere, unless maybe you happen to own a jetpack and can hover midair safely above the crisis. Imminent disaster becomes a constant presence in your life, familiar if not exactly comforting. (And by the way, I'm two-for-two now. I lived in San Francisco during the "little big one" in 1989, was up in a skyscraper on a temp office job when it hit and watched the skyline sway as if the buildings were made of rubber, and felt relatively confident that I was about to die. And obviously, I lived here on Sept. 11. You better watch out, I might move to your town next.) When I moved East, I thought I could let my guard down just a little bit, that at least I probably didn't have to worry about the possibility of sudden and complete devastation now that I was out of earthquake country. Yes. Well. But as I say, you learn to live with it. I have not "gone to sleep," as the terrorism experts put it, when they warn of a complacent public--I've just accepted the reality of present-day life in New York. Catastrophe is inevitable. I just hope it doesn't happen anytime soon, and when it hits, I hope it's not the Big One. And I get on with my life. It's just like living in San Francisco, except with more people and lousier weather. --------------------
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