UW: "We hate the military"

Only not in so many words.

Things that help you sleep good at night

AP reports that 'Able Danger' ID'd 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta 13 times prior to the terrorist's attack on the World Trade Center.

Disgraceful.

Happy Valentine's Day

When there's nothing to cover up...

Can there be a cover up?

Some people are obsessing over it. Some are just making a bigger deal than it deserves.

Today ran a piece on it first thing out of the gate this morning titled, and I kid you not, "The Smoking Gun." It actually was a fine piece; ominously titled, full of veiled references to potential wrong-doing...making it all sound worthy, almost, of it's own moniker--Quailgate; Shotgun-gate; Fill-in-the-blank-gate. Only problem really, is there's no story to it.

It was a hunting accident. They happen. No one was killed so there's no crime (though it did take a serious turn today when it was learned that Mr. Whittington did suffer a minor heart attack related to the shooting). Aside from the one that the WH press corps is screaming about, namely that the scoop went to the Corpus Christi Caller-Times rather than the estimable David Gregory.

Yet the AP ran a story today that implies there are "unanswered questions" about the incident. Yes, as one buffoon has put it, "He's above the law!"

It's inane. It's insane...it's a double-whammy: inane and insane!

Meanwhile, the Kennedy County Sheriff's office issued a press release revealing the results of their initial investigation. No alcohol, no misconduct (though later it was revealed that Mr. Cheney had not paid the $7 license-fee), no story.

So again I ask you, if there's nothing to cover up...

Tracking Transformation

Two MIT students challenge Rumsfeld's new Quadrennial Defense Review, which sets DOD objectives for the next four years.

When Obsession Attacks.

Yep, the Dick Cheney hunting accident is funny for everyone except Mr. Whittington, his friends and his family. But some folks feel the need to go on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on about it. For the record, that's 13 "and ons" in two days. But maybe it's an upgrade from simply regurgitating the contents of The Washington Post. Or maybe it's a sign that someone's lost it. I mean, realllllly lost it. No wait, better evidence of that can be found here and here.

Increasingly irrelevant.

Why my dad never bought me a gun

As a kid, there was a time when I was between 10 & 13 years of age that I begged my father for a gun--a .22 rifle, even a pellet gun. I'd been playing army for years and was convinced beyond any explanation to the contrary that I could handle the responsibility.

When I never got one I was saddened...for a time. As I got older, I never gave it another thought. I look back now, especially in light of things like this, and thank God that my father possessed some small amount of wisdom in this area:

Vice President Dick Cheney accidentally shot and wounded a companion during a weekend quail hunting trip in Texas, spraying the fellow hunter in the face and chest with shotgun pellets.

Harry Whittington, a millionaire attorney from Austin, was in stable condition in the intensive care unit of a Corpus Christi hospital on Sunday, according to Yvonne Wheeler, spokeswoman for the Christus Spohn Health System.

"You'll shoot your eye out!"

In all seriousness, I am glad to know that Mr. Whittington is in stable condition after this incident and doing fine. It could have been much worse. Instead it's just fodder for every amateur- and professional comedian across the country.

My Dogs are Smarter (Or, our first time)

We took the dogs to the beach this afternoon. Perfect weather for it, and they had a blast.

Labs love water and Lacy didn't disappoint, running and jumping around in the surf at every opportunity. Cassie, ever fearful of everything, would creep as close as she dare but dart away as soon as the water came in.

As jealous as she was watching mommy and big sister play in the water, she couldn't overcome her distaste for getting wet enough to go play.

But we think she had fun anyway.

Now Showing

Fun with marquees.

Pulling a Joe

Paul Pillar, former CIA official, was published yesterday making claims that the Bush Administration "disregarded the expertise of the intelligence community, politicized the intelligence process and used unrepresentative data in making the case for war."

Today brings some interesting news about Pillar in that apparently what he wrote for the Journal of Foreign Affairs isn't quite the same thing he said under oath. As reported at Powerline--home incidentally of former Pillar college-roommate Paul Mirengoff--there are reports that Pillar's testimony to the Robb-Silberman commission was a bit different:

Similarly, Paul Pillar, a senior intelligence officer at CIA who drafted part of the Iraq estimate, told the commission that a certain climate had become pervasive in the intelligence community with respect to permissible judgments about Iraqi weapons. To put it another way, self-censorship prevailed. The commission then concludes—and Charles Robb reiterated this at the press conference marking the release of its report—that no one had come forward to claim they had been forced to change a conclusion due to political pressure. Ergo, "The Commission has found no evidence of 'politicization' of the Intelligence Community's assessments."

Say what you will about John Prados' conclusions in that piece, it is obvious that Pillar has chosen to say one thing publicly and another under oath. Remind you of anyone we know?

The Hillary Special

Purportedly running in NYC these days.

"Economic Miracle"

Interesting stuff on the unemployment rate among the black community:

This drop also undercuts the stereotype that the Democratic party is somehow the party that looks out for minorities: Today’s level of black unemployment is lower than the 9.5 percent average realized between 1995 and 2000, supposedly the height of Clinton’s “economic miracle.”

You remember him, right? The first "black President"...

As originally reported

Yesterday's speech by President Bush, in which he revealed details about a 2002 plot to destroy the Library Tower (as it was then known) in Los Angeles caught a lot of people off guard. Details from this most-usually tight-lipped and uncommunicative Administration is not what people are used to.

Some in fact acted like it was the first time this threat had been revealed. In fact, I thought so initially as well. But it isn't.

The event and the context in which it occurred were discussed more than a year-and-a-half ago in Richard Miniter's excellent Shadow War. Beginning on page 4:

Instead, al Qaeda envisioned a "second wave" of attacks on West Coast cities after September 11*. The targets included the Library Tower in Los Angeles (chosen partly because Mohammed had seen it "blown up" in the hit film Independence Day) and the Sears Tower in Chicago...

These plots were stopped. How?

In sum, aggresive execution of the War on Terror--everything from aerial bombardment and covert operations to relentless counter-intelligence and patient police work--has kept the terrorists at bay. And, yes, luck played a part.

*Interview with Noberto Gonzalez, National Security advisor of the Philippines, Manila, March 2004

Yesterday's "revelations" are the topic of some consternation in the blogosphere this morning.

Better late than never

"Should Dan Rather have been fired?"

Don Hewitt now says "Yes."

Embarrassing all the way around.

Mega-Trade Lands Michaels at NBC

In a deal of historic proportions, Al Michaels has been traded from ABC to NBC.

Good journalism.

Following the "funnel" or "pyramid" style, promoted by every leading journalism professor out there, the AP's Paul Garwood demonstrates the high quality and integrity of today's journalists:

BAGHDAD, Iraq -- Iraq's election chief started the clock Friday on the long-awaited formation of a new government, announcing final certified results for the country's Dec. 15 parliamentary polls.

A car bomb exploded outside a Sunni Muslim mosque in southwestern Baghdad, killing at least four Iraqis and wounding 21. Gunmen wearing Iraqi police uniforms kidnapped a Sunni Arab mosque preacher in Baghdad.

Personal Ban

I have officially banned myself from any more posts about the Plame affair after discerning the disconnect between headlines like these and the actual "revelations." At the end of the day, thinking about it or writing about it just makes me angry. And for what? My position on Joe Wilson, his wife, the "outing" and the Democrats' shameless partisanship are well-known to anyone who's perused this blog over the last year and is best encapsulated by the snearing photo to the left and this bit of hypocrisy from Massachusetts' own version of Robert Byrd, Sen. Edward Kennedy:

On Thursday, Sen. Edward Kennedy (news, bio, voting record), D-Mass., said Cheney should take responsibility if he authorized Libby to share classified information with reporters. "These charges, if true, represent a new low in the already sordid case of partisan interests being placed above national security," Kennedy said. "The vice president's vindictiveness in defending the misguided war in Iraq is obvious. If he used classified information to defend it, he should be prepared to take full responsibility."

And with that folks, I'm done. You'll have to enjoy the roundy-round on your own.

The question of stockpiles

For must of us, the days of exerting hours upon hours worth of brainpower on the question of WMD in Iraq have long since come and gone. Not so for David Gaubatz, a former member of the Air Force's Office of Special Investigations.

Gaubatz feels strongly that at least a portion of the stockpile remains hidden in southern Iraq:

A former special investigator for the Pentagon during the Iraq war said he found four sealed underground bunkers in southern Iraq that he is sure contain stocks of chemical and biological weapons. But when he asked American weapons inspectors to check out the sites, he was rebuffed.

Between March and July 2003, Mr. Gaubatz was taken by these sources to four locations - three in and around Nasiriyah and one near the port of Umm Qasr, where he was shown underground concrete bunkers with the tunnels leading to them deliberately flooded. In each case, he was told the facilities contained stocks of biological and chemical weapons, along with missiles whose range exceeded that mandated under U.N. sanctions. But because the facilities were sealed off with concrete walls, in some cases up to 5 feet thick, he did not get inside. He filed reports with photographs, exact grid coordinates, and testimony from multiple sources. And then he waited for the Iraq Survey Group to come to the sites. But in all but one case, they never arrived.

Mr. Gaubatz's new disclosures shed doubt on the thoroughness of the Iraq Survey Group's search for the weapons of mass destruction that were one of the Bush administration's main reasons for the war. Two chief inspectors from the group, David Kay and Charles Duelfer, concluded that they could not find evidence of the promised stockpiles. Mr. Kay refused to be interviewed for this story and Mr. Duelfer did not return email. The CIA referred these questions to Mr. Duelfer.

The new information from the former investigator could also end up helping the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, which recently reopened the question of what happened to the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Like many current and former American and Israeli officials, the chairman of the House intelligence committee, Peter Hoekstra, says is not convinced Saddam either destroyed or never had the stockpiles of illicit weapons he was said to be concealing between 1991 and 2003.

Interesting thought.

Mr. Gaubatz claims that the ISG was more interested in northern Iraq and never gave his claims the attention they seemed to deserve. The assets were never assigned and the sites remain un-checked.

Meanwhile, his sources he says were highly reputable: Mr. Gaubatz would not disclose the names of his Iraqi sources, but he said they were "highly credible" by his supervisors. He said some of them were members of the new government and others are now in America. "The four sites were corroborated with more than one source. The sources were deemed highly credible due to access and knowledge of the sites. Many of these sources and ourselves put their lives on the line to assist in identifying WMD. The sources would continuously ask us when the inspectors were going to come to the sites with heavy equipment to uncover the WMD," he said.

Gaubatz's claims are seen as lending help to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence's--chaired by Michigan Republican Peter Hoekstra--new investigation into the matter:

...the chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence has reopened the question, launching an inquiry and asking the director of national intelligence to re-examine the issue.

Chairman Peter Hoekstra, a Republican from Michigan, is said by his staff to believe that it is too soon to conclude that Saddam Hussein either destroyed or never had the stockpiles and programs to produce biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons that Western intelligence agencies insisted he had before the war.

The argument that Sadaam never had WMD's holds no water in my mind while the claims that they all disappeared into Syria behind a cloud of dust seems a bit far-fetched. Meanwhile, they were there in 1998, yet they were nowhere to be seen in 2003.

With no proof of what happened to them inbetween, is it crazy to think they were hidden somewhere in the interim?

D + (-I) + O + R = M

This is part of a math lesson I taught back in April of '05. Seems apropos in light of some of the finger-pointing going on in Democrat circles these days.

Driving down property values

The Village's one and--please God!--only 4 x 4 Ford Econoline Van.