I was delighted to read the Washington Post so piously castigating Republicans for making (thusfar) unproven allegations against Sandy Berger:

Still, it's hard not to be repulsed by the reaction to the affair by President Bush's campaign spokesmen and Republicans in Congress. They have suggested, without foundation, that Mr. Berger took the papers to benefit Mr. Kerry, who says that he knew nothing of the matter; House Majority Leader Tom DeLay has spoken, with gross hyperbole, of a "national security crisis."

However, I got a little bit confused when I read the very next paragraph:

It's worth noting that news of the months-old investigation of Mr. Berger just happened to leak on the week before the Democratic convention, and two days before the release of the Sept. 11 commission's report -- which covers serious lapses by President Bush as well as President Bill Clinton. Officials at the Bush White House had been briefed on the Berger probe. Could that be a coincidence?

Are those the magic words? "Could it be a coincidence?" Is that the preferred incantation for making unsubstantiated allegations?

Okay, Washington Post. How about this:

Sandy Berger stole top-secret documents from the National Archives which are reported to be scathingly critical of the Clinton Administration. Now he says that some of those documents were "inadvertently discarded. Could this be a coincidence?

Posted by: Ace at 08:35 PM | Comments (4)
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Washington Post Headline: Findings Further Erode Claims of Iraq-Al Qaeda Ties.

Key bits:

One week after the terrorist attacks on New York and the Pentagon, White House counterterrorism director Paul Kurtz wrote in a memo to national security adviser Condoleezza Rice that no "compelling case" existed for Iraq's involvement in the attacks and that links between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein's government were weak.

Not only did Osama bin Laden resent the Iraqi government's secularism, Kurtz's classified memo stated, but there was no confirmed information about collaboration between them on weapons of mass destruction.

Yesterday, after a lengthy investigation, the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States laid out a detailed body of evidence supporting Kurtz's view. Although recent polls have shown that more than 40 percent of the American public is still convinced that Iraq collaborated with al Qaeda and had a role in the terrorist attacks, the commission reported finding no evidence of a "collaborative operational relationship" between the two or an Iraqi role in attacking the United States.

It stated that representatives of the two may have been in contact in 1994 or 1995, 1998 and possibly 1999, largely because of what the commission described as a shared hatred of the United States. But the commission found that their interests were largely out of sync, and nothing came of the contacts.

...

The issue of Iraq's relationship with al Qaeda has figured prominently in debate over the wisdom of the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq. Senior administration officials have repeatedly linked the two and said the war eliminated a sanctuary for terrorists. Administration supporters may now interpret the commission's evidence of meetings between the two as a problem that could have become a significant threat.

The commission staff previously cast doubt on such claims regarding Iraq. Yesterday's report -- issued in the name of the commission members, not just its staff -- affirms that skepticism and makes the case in greater detail.

Later on in the piece, the writer slips in this nugget quickly:

A year later, Iraq's position reversed. Impressed by bin Laden's declaration of holy war against the United States, Iraqi intelligence officials reportedly hosted a visit by two al Qaeda members; follow-up meetings took place in 1998 and possibly in 1999, the report states. But bin Laden declined an Iraqi offer of haven.

What was that he just said? Bin Laden declined an Iraqi offer of haven? That seems to merit more than a quick, vague, late-paragraph mention, doesn't it?

The actual report is a little clearer on this point than the Post reporter, R. Jeffrey Smith, would like to be:

There is also evidence that around this time Bin Ladin sent out a number of feelers to the Iraqi regime, offering some cooperation. None are reported to have received a significant response.According to one report, Saddam HusseinÂ’s efforts at this time to rebuild relations with the Saudis and other Middle Eastern regimes led him to stay clear of Bin Ladin.

In mid-1998, the situation reversed; it was Iraq that reportedly took the ini tiative. In March 1998, after Bin LadinÂ’s public fatwa against the United States, two al Qaeda members reportedly went to Iraq to meet with Iraqi intelligence. In July, an Iraqi delegation traveled to Afghanistan to meet first with the Taliban and then with Bin Ladin. Sources reported that one, or perhaps both, of these meetings was apparently arranged through Bin LadinÂ’s Egyptian deputy, Zawahiri, who had ties of his own to the Iraqis. In 1998, Iraq was under intensifying U.S. pressure, which culminated in a series of large air attacks in December.

Similar meetings between Iraqi officials and Bin Ladin or his aides may have occurred in 1999 during a period of some reported strains with the Taliban. According to the reporting, Iraqi officials offered Bin Ladin a safe haven in Iraq. Bin Ladin declined, apparently judging that his circumstances in Afghanistan remained more favorable than the Iraqi alternative. The reports describe friendly contacts and indicate some common themes in both sidesÂ’ hatred of the United States. But to date we have seen no evidence that these or the earlier contacts ever developed into a collaborative operational relationship. Nor have we seen evidence indicating that Iraq cooperated with al Qaeda in developing or carrying out any attacks against the United States.

Note that the Washington Post elides over the bombshell finding that Saddam Hussein offered his country as a safe haven for bin Ladin. It is an impossible fact to spin, so the liberal reporters do what they usually do with facts that they can't spin: They simply refuse to report them at all.

Here, R. Jeffrey sort of mentions the offer, but note how he does so: He doesn't write the sentence in an active-verb way, making the actor and the action clear. Such as:

Saddam Hussein offered bin Ladin safe haven.

That's the way the copybook tells you to write sentences, with the actor and action clear and bright and shiny. At least, that's the way you're supposed to write, if your intent is to convey information, instead of suppressing it.

Rather than write the sentence in that natural fashion -- or simply quote the 9-11 report, which writes in that fashion as well-- R. Jeffrey writes a sentence in which Saddam Hussein takes no action at all. All the action is done by bin Ladin, declining an offer which isn't actively made:

But bin Laden declined an Iraqi offer of haven.

Compare the two side-by-side:

9-11 Report: ...Iraqi officials offered Bin Ladin a safe haven in Iraq

R. Jeffrey, Liberal Warrior: But bin Laden declined an Iraqi offer of haven.

One sentence is written to convey information. The other is written deliberately to conceal information.

At any rate.

No "collaborative relationship"? Well, maybe not; but that seems to have been bin Ladin's decision. Saddam was offering. And if ever bin Ladin changed his mind, Al Qaeda could have a new home.

This is getting into Orwellian territory here, folks. When the media chooses to gloss over and paraphrase the finding that Hussein offered a safe haven to bin Ladin and Al Qaeda, and spins the selectively-reported findings as some sort of vindication for the anti-warriors, we have crossed the line from spin into actual lies.

Correction: I initially said that the writer didn't mention the offer of safe haven at all. He did.

Sort of.

I missed the mention, because he worded it in such an evasive way, making it seem benign, and made that mention in a brief sentence without any follow-up or any discussion of the implications of the offer of safe haven.

Congratulations, R. Jeffrey-- your article did what you intended it to do. At least one reader completely missed your lightning-quick, vaguely worded mention of Saddam Hussein's offer of safe haven to bin Ladin's terror network.

Posted by: Ace at 07:48 PM | Comments (4)
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Found here on the searchable 9-11 Report. Thanks to Fred Barnes on Brit Hume for the tip:

Though intelligence gave no clear indication of what might be afoot, some intelligence reports mentioned chemical weapons, pointing toward work at a camp in southern Afghanistan called Derunta. On November 4, 1998, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York unsealed its indictment of Bin Ladin, charging him with conspiracy to attack U.S. defense installations.The indictment also charged that al Qaeda had allied itself with Sudan, Iran, and Hezbollah.The original sealed indictment had added that al Qaeda had “reached an understanding with the government of Iraq that al Qaeda would not work against that government and that on particular projects, specifically including weapons development, al Qaeda would work cooperatively with the Government of Iraq.”109 This passage led Clarke, who for years had read intelligence reports on Iraqi-Sudanese cooperation on chemical weapons, to speculate to Berger that a large Iraqi presence at chemical facilities in Khartoum was “probably a direct result of the Iraq–Al Qaida agreement.” Clarke added that VX precursor traces found near al Shifa were the “exact formula used by Iraq.”110 This language about al Qaeda’s “understanding” with Iraq had been dropped, however, when a superseding indictment was filed in November 1998.

Remember, Dick Clarke is the man who, as part of the promotional blitz for his book, claimed that it was utterly impossible that Iraq and Al Qaeda could be cooperating, and that anyone who suggested that a tie should even be investigated was either stupid or fanatically ideological or insane.

And yet... Gee willickers. He himself made the same suggestion, two years earlier.

Posted by: Ace at 02:50 PM | Comments (1)
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Good lord, I hate Margaret Cho so much...

I mean, just look at her fat face, her dead eyes, her China-doll bob haircut, her...

Oh, wait. That's Linda Ronstadt. Or... is it? They share the same politics and the same lifelong love-affair with Ben & Jerry's Chunky Monkey. How can we be so sure they're not the same useless person?

Thanks to Allah for pointing me in the direction of this.

At any rate:

BOSTON (AP) -- Fearing something of a Whoopi effect, edgy comedian Margaret Cho has been uninvited from headlining a gay and lesbian unity event scheduled to coincide with the Democratic National Convention.

Right away, a typo. The word is spelled "PUDGY," not "edgy."

The Human Rights Campaign, one of 10 gay and lesbian organizations hosting the Unity 2004 event in Boston on Monday, rescinded its invitation to Cho after officials there decided her material might take the focus off gay issues.

Errr... have you idiots ever heard her act? Her material is nothing but gay issues.

Another martyr. Cripes. We'll never hear the end of this.

Posted by: Ace at 02:22 PM | Comments (8)
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...unless they can find some way to suggest that George Bush was the interim publisher of the Times in 1999:

At another point, on page 359, it describes how Jordan arrested 16 terrorists planning bombings in that country, including two U.S. citizens, but the news "only made page 13 of The New York Times."

In another brief shot at that paper, the report observes: "It is hard now to recapture the conventional wisdom before 9/11. For example, a New York Times article in April 1999 sought to debunk claims that Bin Laden was a terrorist leader, with the headline 'U.S. Hard Put to Find Proof Bin Laden Directed Attacks.'"

Was the New York Times asleep at the switch?

Did the New York Times take too many vacation days? Apparently they were on vacation, at least as regards terrorism, from 1996-2001.

Was the New York Times reading children's stories while it should have been on top of this issue?

The New York Times lied, people died...?

Posted by: Ace at 01:56 PM | Comments (4)
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Sandy Berger Claims "Mishandling" of Ark of the Covenant "Entirely Inadvertent"

W A S H I N G T O N -- The location of the warehouse is one of the most closely-guarded secrets of the American government. Some say it is a former uranium mine situated somewhere in the Appallachians of West Virginia, 1200 feet beneath the surface of the earth. Others say it was originally a bomb-shelter constructed to house the all 535 Congressmen and their families in case of a nuclear attack on the US.

Wherever the warehouse is actually located, it is closely guarded by an elite team of US Marines deputized to the National Archives service.

And reports say that several of the warehouse's most important objects are missing. Former Clinton National Security Advisor Sandy Berger is being questioned by the FBI in connection with the lost treasures.

"Sandy Berger is cooperating fully with the FBI," his lawyer, Lanny Breuer, informed a credulous Washington press corps on Wednesday. "He is voluntarily answering questions, and he's been completely forthcoming and honest in detailing his actions inside the warehouse. He's very sorry that he made an error in judgment in inadvertently putting the lost Ark of the Covenant into his shorts and then leaving with it."

The Ark of the Covenant is reportedly two cubits high, 2.5 cubits long, and 1.5 cubits in breadth. It is said to weigh approximately 400 pounds.

"I mishandled the lost Ark of the Covenant," Berger himself has admitted to authorities. "I'm a very sloppy guy. If you saw my desk, you'd understand I'm just forever accidentally slipping powerfully-magical lost Israelite relics into my socks and my trousers. One time I accidentally took the Dead Sea Scrolls with me on a vacation in Nantucket. It's an understandable enough mistake, and I hope to resolve this issue quietly and as soon as possible."

While the Washington press corps was more than eager to accept this explanation as plausible, several questions remain. Most importantly: Where, exactly, is the Ark of the Covenant at the moment?

Mr. Berger could offer no satisfactory answers. "I'm not sure where the Ark is right now," he has said through his lawyer. "I think I might have accidentally discarded it somewhere. Again, if you saw how messy my house was, you would understand how very innocent all of this is. On one occasion, I accidentally used the only known true copy of the Egyptian Book of the Dead to light a barbecue fire. I tell you-- sometimes I swear I'd forget my own head if it weren't stuffed so snuggly up my ass."

Democrats and their cheering section in the media were quick to point fingers at Republicans for the "suspicious timing" of the leak about Berger's mishandling of the Ark.

"We've got the Democratic National Convention coming up," liberal strategist Chris Lehane complained. "We've got the 9-11 report. And suddenly, just at this moment, we have all this buzz and bother about what Sandy Berger might or might not have stolen from an ultra-secret warehouse. This is nothing but a well-orchestrated leak intended to distract us away from more important news, and focus us on trivialities, like the legendary repository of the Ten Commandments being missing."

"So they claim it's a Holy Weapon of God Himself. Big deal," Lehane continued. "You know what else are a Holy Weapons of God Himself? Campaign finance reform. Free health care for seniors. Civil unions. But I don't hear anyone talking about those issues."

Israelite WMD: An artist's conception of the Ark in action.

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman was quick to amplify the charge. "We've constructed numerous copies of the Ark during our seventy years of researching its supernatural powers," Krugman notes in his latest column, Raiders of the Lost Democracy. "So Sandy Berger took the original. We still have duplicates. Now, maybe those duplicates don't possess quote-unquote 'the Holy Might of God Himself' or quote-unquote 'Raw Supernatural Power Equivalent to a Hydrogen Bomb,' but they're still available for inspection by the 9-11 commission."

The national media was quick to accept this interpretation, until another question was raised: Where are the two Sankara stones recovered by the American military from a crocodile-infested river in India in the mid-1950's?

Mr. Berger claimed he had no recollection of taking those mystical relics, but he allowed that sometimes he stuffs large magical rocks into his trousers, "because [he] likes the cooling feel of stone on [his] balls."

"If you've ever seen my hot, sweaty, stinky balls, you'd understand that," Mr. Berger explained.

Chris Lehane personally vouched for the truthfulness of Berger's claim. "Sandy's balls are notoriously hot and fetid," he attested. "You go into his shorts, and it's like you're in rabbit-hutch during a midsummer rutting."

In related news, the FBI is probing a suspicious "gift" given by Sandy Berger to presidential candidate John Kerry in June.

The gift was reportedly a Ron Popeil Showtime Rotisserie Oven, apparently of a limited-edition variety, crafted entirely of gold and lapis-lazuli and with ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics and kneeling golden cherubs/eagles upon its lid.

An FBI sketch of John Kerry's new rotisserie, based on witness descriptions.

Mr. Kerry has promised to present this rotisserie to the FBI for their inspection, but only after he's finished "cleaning" the oven. Mr. Kerry says that if he learned one lesson in Vietnam, "it's to never present the FBI with a dirty rotisserie."

He believes he'll have finished cleaning the insides of the oven sometime after November 2.

Update: SenatorPhilABuster has a scoop of his own on this score. It turns out that former president Clinton said that he was "laughing" about the Twice-Lost Ark:

"I remember the time I stopped by Sandy's office and he had the Holy Grail right there on the end of his desk. The next day, it was gone. I asked him what happened and he said that somewhere between his intensive preparations to capture Osama bin Laden and his crafting of a memo to ensure that our ports would be made more secure he had somehow managed to lose the sacred relic. We just laughed and laughed and laughed. That's just Sandy!"

Indeed.

Posted by: Ace at 12:44 PM | Comments (8)
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Is the Berger theft "distracting" us from the 9-11 report?

Instapundit says that maybe the media are using the 9-11 report to "distract" us from the Berger theft.

More and more, Lawrence O'Donnell seems right. The "timing" of this leak is actually very helpful to liberals -- it's released right before a major report the media has been salivating to cover (that is, when they assumed it would badly damage Bush).

The timing of the leak allowed one day of coverage before the story would get lost in the 9-11 Commission reporting and then the frantic coverage of the Democratic convention.

If Bush-forces had leaked this-- why wouldn't they leak it either closer to the election, or during the famous August downtime known as "the silly season," when it's far, far easier to get "minor" stories covered on the front pages?

Posted by: Ace at 11:25 AM | Comments (4)
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Thank goodness someone out there is on the ball.

Whether this turns out to be a false alarm or not -- Bravo for being alert and cautious, boys. Well done.

Update: And a train is being searched as well.

Thanks to a passenger's tip.

Maybe the only way to defeat the official politically-correct "we don't profile" line is for passengers to alert authorities. The government isn't allowed to profile? Okay, fine. But we citizens are. We should take advantage of that fact.

Posted by: Ace at 10:36 AM | Comments (15)
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Gee, you'd almost think the mainstream media deliberately suppresses stories it doesn't like until forced to notice them or something:

Flight crews and air marshals say Middle Eastern men are staking out airports, probing security measures and conducting test runs aboard airplanes for a terrorist attack.

At least two midflight incidents have involved numerous men of Middle Eastern descent behaving in what one pilot called "stereotypical" behavior of an organized attempt to attack a plane.

"No doubt these are dry runs for a terrorist attack," an air marshal said.

Pilots and air marshals who asked to remain anonymous told The Washington Times that surveillance by terrorists is rampant, using different probing methods.

"It's happening, and it's a sad state of affairs," a pilot said.
...

Recent incidents at the Minneapolis-St. Paul international airport have also alarmed flight crews. Earlier this month, a passenger from Syria was taken into custody while carrying anti-American materials and a note suggesting he intended to commit a public suicide.
A third pilot reported watching a man of Middle Eastern descent at the same airport using binoculars to get airplane tail numbers and writing the numbers in a notebook to correspond with flight numbers.
"It's a probe. They are probing us," said a second air marshal, who confirmed that Middle Eastern men try to flush out marshals by rushing the cockpit and stopping suddenly.

They seem to be profiling us.

I'm curious, by the way. Is this story a "well-orchestrated leak" designed to "distract" us from Abu Ghraib, or was it the Plame investigation?

Maybe the media could just do us all a solid by giving us one day a week where they print nothing but such "distracting" stories. That is, so we can read about trivial news like Sandy Berger stealing top-secret documents and Arab men "probing" airline security without feeling guilty about ignoring "real news," like how youthful and handsome John Edwards is.

Update: MeTooThen makes a point I wanted to:

Remember that just a mere few days ago, this story was first ignored by the MSM (save, of course, the WSJ), then it was dismissed, then it was vetted, and at each step it was the blogosphere that gave this story "legs."

As it turns out, Ms. Jacobsen's story was true, i.e., 14 Syrian men who were flying together, en route from Detroit to LA, were acting strangely, or at least suspiciously, and that the appropriate authorities both onboard and on the ground, "scrubbed" those involved.

...

If anything, this event has been a victory of sorts for the blogosphere and the campaign to end the tyranny of political correctness.

Or at least one can hope.

The blogosphere has thusfar only injected a small number of stories into the national consciousness, and several of them (Plame, AWOL, Trent Lott) were the sorts of stories that liberal reporters want to report anyhow; it just took a tiny nudging from conspiracy theorists like Joshua Michah Cougar Mellancamp Marshall to get the ball rolling. (The NYT/Blair story cuts against a liberal institution, but I don't count that, because the story was just too big to ignore; plus, while every liberal reporter loves the NYT and wants to work there, they're also madly jealous of everyone who does work there. So they had a big personal interest in pummelling the Times over Blair.)

This story is a muddle. The liberal media can write it up as an indictment of the Bush Administration, but to do so, they'd have to report that Al Qaeda is still planning to kill Americans and that, thusfar, whether due to luck or vigilance, we've been able to thwart them. They'd also have to at least implicate the whole idea of ethnic profiling, and they sure as hell don't want to go there.

Muddle or not, this is the first big story, pushed almost exclusively by conservative bloggers, that's been moved from the Internet to the mainstream.

Posted by: Ace at 02:13 AM | Comments (10)
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Thanks to NRO for this must-read piece. Bear in mind: Marty Peretz is a Democratic loyalist, and perhaps wanted Al Gore to be President more than Al Gore himself did.

He's brutal on The Fabulist and The Thief. Just a taste:

The tale spun by former Ambassador Joseph Wilson that Iraq did not ever try to buy uranium yellowcake from Niger is now in the process of unraveling. And, of course, the phalanx of anti-war journalists is desperately trying to stop the bust-up. But it can't be done.

...

He has long denied that [his wife] had anything to do with his going to Niger and that, alas, was a lie. It appears, in fact, that this is the sole reason he was sent. Still, in a lot of dining rooms where I am a guest here, there is outrage that someone in the vice president's office "outed" Ms. Plame, as though everybody in Georgetown hadn't already known she was under cover, so to speak. Under cover, but not really. One guest even asserted that someone in the vice president's office is surely guilty of treason, no less--an offense this person certainly wouldn't have attributed to the Rosenbergs or Alger Hiss, Daniel Ellsberg or Philip Agee. But for the person who confirmed for Robert Novak what he already knew, nothing but high crimes would do.

I confess: I do not like Sandy Berger; and I have not liked him since the first time we met, long ago during the McGovern campaign, not because of his politics since I more or less shared them then, but for his hauteur. He clearly still has McGovernite politics, which means, in my mind, at least, that he believes there is no international dispute that can't be solved by the U.S. walking away from it. No matter.

...

A more important question, of course, is: What was contained in the papers that Berger snatched? The answer to that question might answer another. Maybe Clinton's top national security aide didn't want others to see what they documented.

If The New Republic's top editor doesn't shy from mentioning the obvious possible motive for the theft (that is, to, like, steal them), then I think it's fair to say this isn't an outrageous suggestion.

Speculative at this point? Yes. Outrageous? No.

Might even be true.

Posted by: Ace at 01:37 AM | Comments (6)
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