Annie
Diamond Member
- Nov 22, 2003
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while I don't like to give credit, it's due: You'll have to scroll:
http://slate.msn.com/id/2104926/
http://slate.msn.com/id/2104926/
lotsa links. Not So Fast, Senor Schumer!
Did a Pakistani blow our double-agent's cover?
By Mickey Kaus
Updated Tuesday, Aug. 10, 2004, at 5:51 PM PT
Not so fast, Senor Schumer! I've been asking myself: Why isn't the mainstream press making a bigger fuss about the possibility that by leaking the news of Muhammad Naeem Noor Khan's capture, someone in the Bush administration did incalculable damage to the effort to roll up Al Qaeda? Khan had apparently been "turned" and was acting as a double agent. The Brits and the Pakistani's seem to be mad at the leak-- and certainly the leak of Khan's name seems vastly more important than the outing of the CIA's Valerie Plame, who was not endangered because she was not operating as a covert agent, or Sen. Richard Shelby's possible 2002 leak of a six month old al Qaeda message. .... If the administration did give out the name for political reasons (i.e., to justify its terror alerts)--something that many suggest--that would and should be a huge, potentially election-tipping scandal.
But ... maybe we (and especially Reuters) are getting carried away here. Take a closer look at the sourcing in the original New York Times piece disclosing Khan's name, which was written by Douglas Jehl and David Rohde. They cite a "senior United States official" for details on the documentary evidence found after the capture of a suspect, but this "United States official" is pointedly not cited as having given the name of the suspect. Instead, a few paragraphs further down, the Times reporters tell us:
The American officials would say only that the Qaeda figure whose capture had led to the discovery of the documentary evidence had been captured with the help of the C.I.A. Though Pakistan announced the arrest last week of a Qaeda member, Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, a Tanzanian wanted in connection with the bombings of American embassies in East Africa in 1998, the American officials suggested that he had not been the source of the new threat information.
An account provided by a Pakistani intelligence official made clear that the crucial capture in recent weeks had been that of Mr. Khan, who is also known as Abu Talha. The intelligence official provided information describing Mr. Khan as having assisted in evaluating potential American and Western targets for terrorist attacks, and as being representative of a ''new Al Qaeda.'' [Emphasis added]
The story seems to be almost explicitly pointing to Pakistani sources--not American officials--as the ones who first gave out Khan's name. (The American source is then cited as neither confirming nor denying the name the reporters ask him about.)
As both the Globe and Juan Cole note, the transcript of the background briefing given by U.S. officials on August 1 does not contain Khan's name. What evidence is there, then, that Bush administration officials, as opposed to Pakistanis, were the negligent parties here? Well, there's Condi Rice's oafish interview with Wolf Blitzer, in which she seems to be saying that the Administration gave out Khan's name on background. But her office now denies this is what she meant, and it's possible she was just being exceptionally clumsy. There's also the Reuters report, cited earlier, which says that "Pakistani sources" blame U.S. officials. But couldn't the Pakistanis could be trying to divert the blame to the Americans? More important, note that even these Pakistanis sources, according to Reuters, say that the Bush administration "confirmed" Khan's name, not that the Bushies are the ones who leaked it in the first place. It seems entirely possible that once Khan's name was out in Monday's NYT-- and Khan had been moved to a safe house--Bush administration officials felt there was no point in sticking with their refusal to confirm his name.
It's also possible that even confirming the name after it was out was a horrible mistake that gave the al Qaeda suspects an unnecessary head start. And it's possible that the Bushies gave out so many details about the captive that he was easy to identify. Maybe Jehl and Rhode were disguising their sources, deflecting blame from the U.S. administration. I'll be quite willing to condemn the Bushies if in fact they outed Khan--even if it wasn't intentional, it would at least be grossly negligent, and someone (maybe Bush) would deserve to be fired for it. But the surface evidence from the original source--the Times' piece--points to a Pakistani official, not a Bush official, as the culprit. ... Paranoid kicker: It's not as if there aren't officials who sympathize with radical Islamic fundamentalism in the Pakistani intelligence service. ...
[Note: If someone was smart enough to preserve a free, permanent "Userland" link to the original August 2 Jehl/Rohde piece, I'd love to have it so I can post it. Thanks.] 5:07 P.M.
Gourevitch-Skipper: I've punished myself for lax posting by forcing myself to read Philip Gourevitch's rambling, tedious 8,000-worder on Kerry's foreign policy. It's disappointingly credulous on one of two levels--either Gourevitch thinks the contradictory voting history he describes, and the familiar, false-bold exclusive Kerry quotes he displays ("I think we can do better. I know we can do better. I absolutely know we can do better"), amount to a coherent foreign policy, or else he thinks his readers will. ... Except when discussing Kerry's vote against the $87 billion Iraq funding bill, Gourevitch fails to consider the possibility that Kerry's erratic positions (against Gulf War I, for military action in Kosovo, Haiti, and Liberia) are almost purely tactical--designed to help him run for President--rather than sincerely thought-out. ...
The piece contains a couple of nuggets, though. One is the section on Kerry's father's views, which were highly hostile to claims of American exceptionalism. Another is the excellent, now-famous blind quote from a Kerry "adviser" about Kerry's $87-billion vote:
"Off the record, he did it because of Howard Dean. On the record, he has an elaborate explanation."
And there is also this passage:
No other Vietnam War hero has ever been nominated for President, nor has any other former antiwar leader, and, while Kerry presents himself as a unifying figure, he embodies a conflict that is still surprisingly raw. "He'll often thrash around in the night," the filmmaker George Butler, who is one of Kerry's oldest friends, told me. "He smashed up a lamp in my house in New Hampshire, in the bedroom where he was staying. Most Vietnam veterans go through this." [Emph. added]
Yikes! And are the flashbacks worse at night or in the day, Senator? ... P.S.: Gourevitch also highlights a mystery, namely: Kerry's notes from Vietnam were well-written. So why doesn't he compose similarly well-written speeches? ... You say others write his addresses for him? Don't be silly. Kerry stays up late night after night "crafting" his own speeches.* It says so right here in Gourevitch's piece. ...
*In longhand, on yellow pads, of course, though Gourevitch omits those details. ...12:41. A.M.
Monday, August 9, 2004
Matt Welch rightly directs attention to Tom Tomorrow's comprehensive Dem convention analysis. ... 11:39 A.M.
Alert reader T.G. emails with another plausible reason for the steady rise in jobs in the government's "household" survey (which includes the self-employed) but not the "establishment" survey (which doesn't).
t isn't just that we have so many more free-lancers in our economy, it is also that during the internet bubble, big bucks offers for most any warm body were drawing down the "normal" pool of self employed [as they were hired by establishments]; now we are merely returning to the norm.
The first graph in this paper certainly suggests that something unusual happened at the height of the internet bubble in 1999. ... P.S.: I think T.G.'s point is not that there is some huge boom now going on in the self-employment sector (which doesn't feel like what is happening). It's that the payroll job growth of the late '90s was not quite as good as it seemed: The payrolls weren't always adding new net jobs. They were also sucking people from the self-employment sector (in which they weren't counted in the payroll survey even if they were working) into the corporate sector (in which they were counted). For the past few years those people have been moving back from (counted) payrolls into (uncounted) self-employment. Even though they may still be working, this has had the effect of lowering the payroll number and making it look worse than it actually is. ... 12:28 P.M.
Journalist Murray Sayle reputedly said there were only three kinds of pieces: 1) 'We name the guilty man'; 2) 'Arrow points to defective part'; and 3) 'Everything you knew about X is wrong.' Jim Pinkerton hits at least two of the three in this op-ed on the distressing lack of progress in fighting AIDs. Pinkerton says drug companies have cut back on AIDS research
because they no longer see profits ahead. The drug companies are being pressured into basically giving away their existing anti-AIDS meds in Third World countries ... [snip] If a pharmaceutical company were to come up with an AIDS-smiting "silver bullet," Magic Johnson would gladly pay the sticker price, while everyone else would demand it free. If you're Pfizer, it's hard to make money that way.
Meanwhile,
there's a new twist: The creation of a permanent, self-perpetuating AIDS bureaucracy that has a vested interest in maintaining the disease but little interest in curing it. [Emph. added]
Does John Kerry's published AIDS plan address either of these problems? You make the call--but it looks to me as if it would exacerbate both of them. ... 11:48 A.M
Shorter Terror-Alert Story Line:
Old Anti-Bush Spin: Why are you warning us about these threats now?
New Anti-Bush Spin: Why are you telling us why you are warning us about these threats now?
Old Anti-Bush Spin: Why did you wait three weeks before issuing the alert?
New Anti-Bush Spin: Why didn't you wait longer?
If Bush did blow part of the Al Qaeda investigation by prematurely revealing the name of a Pakistani computer engineer who'd been "turned" and was operating as a double agent, that's a serious screw-up. (Juan Cole is all over this angle.) But how many of those who will jump on Bush for any misguided revelation are the same people (e.g. Howard Dean, WaPo) who a week ago were the very ones pressuring him to reveal more about why he'd issued an "alert" about a three year old plot to blow up financial institutions--insinuating he was doing it for political reasons? ... Even shorter spin sum-up: How dare you be cowed by us! ... 11:53 P.M.
