Month: July 2002

I decided I’d better cash Salon check this week. It might not be good for much longer.
So if you see Salon suddenly file for bankruptcy this week because of an unexpected expense they thought had already been accounted for….er, sorry about that…

Pigs are flying, cats and dogs are living together, and International has published a report soundly condemning Palestinian violence against civilians.
It’s weak, it’s waffling, but it exists, and that’s something. Think of it as you would a talking dog: it’s not that he quotes Shakespeare, but simply that he speaks at all.

Hmmm. This one is going to take some digesting:
Drops Demand for War Court Immunity
UNITED NATIONS, July 10 — The Bush administration agreed today to drop its demand that the U.N. Security Council grant Americans serving in U.N. peacekeeping missions permanent immunity from the international war crimes tribunal.
U.S. officials said they are seeking a temporary exemption from prosecution that would buy the United States time to negotiate bilateral accords and military agreements barring individual governments from surrendering U.S. nationals to the International Criminal Court.
I’ve heard a lot of good arguments lately about why the ICC is unconstitutional… it’s unclear to me how this compromise changes that. Little help, Stephen?

The Iranian government is attempting to counter Ayatollah Jalaluddin Taheri’s resignation by telling newspapers they aren’t allowed to print anything about it.
isn’t working.
And that’s not even counting the impact all those Farsi weblogs might be having. (I don’t know whether the ‘net is proving an alternate comms channel as yet… but I’m working on finding out).

directs us to this charming tidbit on the IDF’s web site, which is allegedly a transcript from a Hamas chatroom. Guess the subject. No, really, guess.
Porn?
Wrong!
Britney?
Wrong!
How to murder American civilians in cold blood?
Bingo!
Participants in a chat- forum of the official Hamas website have discussed ways and methods to murder American citizens.
What appears below are their comments, as found on the site.
1. Al- Awsad (user number 1): Once a week, a group of American “dogs” come near us on the sea front. I have been following them for a long time and am interested in your suggestions for ways to get rid of them secretly.
2. Salam (user number 2): If they arrive in a private car, put a large amount of sugar in the gas tank of the car. Then, you can ambush them on the way back because the car will get stuck in the way. You will have many options to get rid of them. You can run them over on the road, after they abandon the broken down car. You can put a trap on the beach if they tend do a a lot of walking. If you have people with you and 4 cars, you can stop them at a certain point on the road, at a traffic light for example, block them from all directions and burn them in their cars using a Molotov cocktail.
3. MSKZ (user number 3): Read Koran verses on them and then kill them one by one, after you have made sure they are Israeli American tyrants.
4. Al- Awsad (user number 1): Thank you all very much, but I would like to get rid of them quietly.
Now, this is horrible stuff, assuming its genuine, of course. But am I the only one to note a certain Wile E. Coyote – esque aspect to this discussion? I mean, I half expected the next suggestion to be to drop an anvil on their heads…

Well then. I think we can safely put the final nail in the coffin of the idea that Judicial Watch may still be holding onto its Republican attack machine roots:
Sued for Accounting Fraud
A watchdog group on Wednesday sued Vice President Dick Cheney and Halliburton Co., the oil services company he ran for five years, based on allegations of accounting fraud.
Washington-based Judicial Watch filed a shareholder lawsuit against Cheney and Halliburton, alleging that the accounting fraud led to shareholder losses. The lawsuit claims Halliburton overstated revenues by $445 million from 1999 through the end of 2001.
They really don’t like Cheney much, do they?
Now everybody go dust off their pro- and anti- executive privilege arguments, ’cause here we go again.
Oh, and this sure doesn’t help much either. Somebody sure is having a bad news cycle…

From Beeb:
A senior religious figure in Iran has resigned and issued a bitter condemnation of the way the country is being run.
Ayatollah Jalaluddin Taheri has held the position of Friday prayers speaker in the major city of Isfahan for the past 30 years, but he has increasingly been at odds with Iran’s hard-liners…
A resignation such as Ayatollah Taheri’s, in such a manner, from a post conferred on him by Ayatollah Khomeini himself, is unprecedented in the 23 years of the Islamic republic.
The Iranian theocracy is looking more and more like a regime ready to collapse every day. And good riddance to it.

Neat! Mickey’s a blogroll.
Since he’s also got permalinks now — sort of, you can use the daily links all the way down at the bottom of his page — I think we can now declare Microsoft Blog ready to ship as R1.0 — it now has almost as many features as its free competitors, even if the feature implementations are more annoying and less functional. Soon, we’ll all be MSBlogging^TM and wondering how we ever survived using a blog tool that didn’t have the neat little paper-clip help icon that pops up every now and then to cheerfully inform us that we misspelled “idiotarian”, and that wouldn’t “cluefully challenged’ be a more sensitive phrase to use anyway? Sure, MSBlog will be DRM-hardwired to prevent deep-linking (to limit legal liability), but everything interesting is always on the front page anyway, right?
I still think we need a campaign to Free Mickey’s Prose … maybe I should offer to contribute $1 of every purchase from the TTLB Premium Store to a fund to buy his contract back from Bill….
Update: Lair gets it.

Damn. And here I thought the Western U.S. was the place prone to bursting into flames. Seems Quebec has some flamable properties too — check out this satellite photo of the several-hundred-mile wide smoke plume that’s drifted down to the Eastern U.S. from Canada.
Click for the full scoop from NASA and for a full-sized version of the image. According to NASA:
The enormous smoke plume is almost 200 miles wide where it enters the United States over the New York and Vermont state lines. The thick pall is affecting air quality in places well to the south, including New York, Baltimore, and Washington, D.C. The image shows the smoke drifting out over the Atlantic Ocean, and then curling back in over North Carolina (bottom right).

NPR’s the Media did a sort-of abbreviated show last week, but had two pieces of interest I’d recommend.
The first was a bit on a new ad campaign by the Ad Council (of McGruff the Crime Dog and Smokey the Bear fame) which consists of a series of television spots devoted to convincing Americans that freedom is an important idea.
No, really.
I haven’t seen the spots, but they are described (with audio clips) in the OTM RealMedia audio here. And they sounded, well, downright creepy.
The tack of the ads seems to be to posit an alternate America where freedom does not exist; showing the viewer some normal American doing things we take for granted suddenly finding himself in trouble with The Authorities. One example has a young man coming to the library with a list of books, where he is sternly and ominious informed by the librarian that the books “are no longer available.” Soon enough, he’s being approached by mysterious men who wish him to come with them and answer a few questions.
The idea, I guess, is to creep people out enough that they’ll fight for freedom. Or something like that. (The multiple self-referential layers of doublespeak goodthink here are making my head spin).
The problem, particularly about the library book spot, is, well, reality. (Brooke Gladstone, the interviewer, raised this exact point I’m about to demonstrate, so she gets the thought-credit; I just did some legwork to dig up the right sources).
When it comes to libraries, my understanding is that law enforcement has pretty comprehensive powers to obtain (with some court approval involved) records of books that individual patrons check out. Check out the American Library Association’s page on the PATRIOT Act, if you want to attempt to decode the legislation yourself. So the “spooky” scenario that the Ad Council is trying to warn us we must be vigilant to prevent…. has already happened.
Similarly, the Electronic Frontier Foundation says you’d better watch what you search on Google. (And by the way, that means you to the few folks who hit the site by searching on “Christian Porn”. What would Jesus think?). According to EFF:
Be careful what you put in that Google search. The government may now spy on web surfing of innocent Americans, including terms entered into search engines, by merely telling a judge anywhere in the U.S. that the spying could lead to information that is “relevant” to an ongoing criminal investigation. The person spied on does not have to be the target of the investigation. This application must be granted and the government is not obligated to report to the court or tell the person spied up what it has done.
Hmph. Watch what you say, indeed.
The second OTM story, on a lighter note, was about a gentleman who decided to rate the national flags for the world based on a consistent set of asthetic guidelines, and assign each a letter grade.
Japan, for example, gets an A (“A classic. Simple, to the point.” ), while the Stars and Stripes coasts by with a C+, getting docked for too many stars (“If one is good, fifty must be just right.”).
Fun stuff, and perfect to start your morning before you’re ready to think about more weighty matters. Go direct to the web site, or the OTM RealMedia is here

Keep an eye on Iran over the next few days: Tuesday is the anniversary of the student protests / street riots three years ago. The government banned any demonstrations… which of course, increases the possibility that something truly dramatic might occur.
Update 10:30 PDT: As expected, the ban was violated, leading to small-scale skirmishes between protesters and riot police.

John Barnes put memes at the center of the next world war in his apocalyptic, nihilistic novel Century. In his vision, memes were essentially supersophisticated computer viruses, which over the course of the 21st century, evolved to the point where they jumped from machines to humans. Pretty soon, the memes spread, and practically everyone on the planet was ‘running a meme’. This wasn’t the bad news; the bad news was that, unsurprisingly, each meme was bent on destroying all the other memes. Fast-forward a decade or so, and Europe’s in flames (again), every nation on the planet has joined the failed state club. Real wrath of God type stuff.
So: memes bad, at least in science fiction novels. (Or at least in one, but imho it’s a particularly good, if disturbing one.)
Here in the (allegedly) real world though, it’s a bit more complex. We don’t have viruslike memes that jump from computers to people — or at least, I don’t think we do. (Norton AntiVirus Wetware Edition? Shudder.) But that doesn’t mean we don’t have memes — it just means the little buggers are a bit more subtle, and take a little more work to identify.
Many Palestinians, for example, have been running a meme for decades — and yes, that means some of them have been running it their entire lives. I call it OpposeIsrael. This meme is pretty simple: it says that Israel is evil, and anything they do must be bad and must be combated; violently, if necessary.
The problem is that OpposeIsrael crowded out other memes that Palestinians really should be running; memes that might have led — and could still lead — to a better life for Palestinians. OpposeIsrael is inherently negative — it dictates that its hosts put the goal of destroying Israeli hopes above that of fulfilling Palestinian ones. It’s the meme that far too many Palestinians were running in the wake of the Six Day War, back in ’67, when, according to Michael Oren’s new book, Israel attempted to hand over limited self-governance to pretty much any Palestinian leader who would take it. The problem? None of them would accept it; they were all convinced that anything seen as collaboration with Israel would get them killed by the masses. If the masses had been running PalestinianState, the deal would have been made, and history would be very different. But they weren’t – or at least, their leaders thought they weren’t; potentially a tragic miscalculation. OpposeIsrael was running the show.
Camp David in 2000? Same problem. Arafat didn’t bother to try to combat OpposeIsrael before the summit, and showed no willingness to battle it afterwards. This therefore became a classic example of how, theoretically, two leaders could have signed a peace agreement — but it wouldn’t have necessarily done any good. As long as Arafat let OpposeIsrael run rampant, it didn’t matter whether the deal was signed or not; it would fail, because there would still be far too many Palestinians more interested in killing Israelis than in building a better life for their own families. As it turns out, Arafat wasn’t even willing to fake it and take the deal himself, so the question became irrelevant.
Finally, though, after decades, OpposeIsrael is showing some signs of running out of steam. ‘Intifada Fatigue’ is a phrase we’re starting to hear, and hopefully will hear more of. And as OpposeIsrael declines, hopefully, more constructive memes — PalestinianState, PalestinianFreedom, PalestinianDemocracy — will rise to take its place, paving the way towards a real settlement that can actually lead to lasting peace. But make no mistake: peace won’t happen; can’t happen, while a significant part of the Palestinian population remain dedicated simply to OpposeIsrael. To change the reality, you’ve got to change the meme.
Now take a step back, and think about the current war facing the United States. It’s commonly called the War on Terrorism. And if you look closely, you’ll realize that for perhaps the first time ever, a nation-state has declared war on: a meme.
This is new. Traditionally, you declare war on another specific group of people; whether its an opposing tribe, a neighboring city-state, or another nation. Historically, wars are generally declared and prosecuted against a static enemy: you declare war on Germany, and when you’ve defeated or obtained surrender from all the German people, well, then, you’re done. Our current war, however, is against “terrorism”, which certainly isn’t a nation, and doesn’t inherently define any static group of people to point at as the enemy. It simply identifies that we are fighting a meme; and therefore, we will fight any individual people who happen to be running that meme. This is a confusing concept to many folks; nobody’s used to declaring war on memes; a situation not helped by the rather poor job our leadership has done of explaining it to people.
Unfortunately, this is made even worse by the fact that it’s the wrong meme. While an argument can be made that we should be making war on the Terrorism meme — which I’ll define quickly here as using violence and the threat of violence against civilians to impose change upon societies or governments — we’re not. Instead, we’re really at war with IslamicFacism, which tends to run side-by-side with Terrorism in many people, but is clearly a distinct meme of its own. The particular variant of IslamicFascism we’re facing today has its roots in Wahabism, hit its stride in the past few decades, and even managed to take over an entire state via the Taliban — for a while. It’s a nasty, nasty meme — nasty for those that oppose it, as it basically leaves zero room for compromise, preferring war without end, and nasty for those who fall under its control, as it drives inexorably towards a kind of stone-age tyranny.
Fighting a war against a meme leads to some interesting concepts in defining combatants. Take for instance the LAX shooter. It’s too early to say definitively whether he was formally connected with al Qaeda or not. But let’s assume for the moment that he was not. Let’s assume additionally that although he has never spoken to a Taliban or al Qaeda operative in his life, he agreed with their cause, and his motive in committing his murders was to show support for their cause.
Once you realize you are at war with a meme, it becomes clear that the LAX shooter, given these assumptions, is exactly as much a combatant in this war as an al Qaeda operative or a Taliban foot soldier. It doesn’t matter that he’s not associated with a declared terrorist group. He’s running the meme.
In addition, by realizing that we are fighting a meme — and equally importantly, correctly identifying which one — we can better consider our options for attacking it. We don’t have to kill or imprison every single person running IslamicFascism — although that is a valid option, and the one that, at the moment, is being pursued most vigorously. But to maximize our success, at the same time we attack on the physical front the individual people running the meme, we should also attack the meme itself directly.
How do you kill a meme? With other memes, of course. ArabProsperity is starting to show promise as a positive meme that we should encourage; after centuries of falling behind the West, there are signs that the Arab world is beginning to get more concerned with its own actual health and welfare, as opposed to simply blaming its troubles on the West. And ArabProsperity is in direct opposition to IslamicFacism; the two can’t coexist. GenderEquality — a meme that has gotten trampled on for a long time in Arab states — also has the potential, over time, to be an IslamicFascism-killer. And the appeal of PersonalFreedom should not be underestimated, nor should its virulent opposition to IslamicFascism.
This is not to say that the war will be won simply by fighting IslamicFascism with other memes; it won’t. But by focusing on the true enemy — that vicious meme — we can best identify a complete strategy to not only ensure that those currently opposing us are defeated, but that IslamicFascism itself is defeated for the long term.
Along the way, however, we should be cautious ourselves, for we are not immune to memes of our own. We must ensure that we each stay focused on the positive memes of our society — PreserveFreedom, DefendInnocents, CreateProsperity. These memes are all in direct opposition to IslamicFascism, and by driving them forward across the globe, we drive it backward.
But we must be careful to avoid the negative memes that might seem most tempting right now — OpposeTerrorism, DefeatAlQaeda, or simply DestroyIslamicFascism. On the face of them, these memes represent exactly what we are trying to achieve.
But in their inherent negativity; their focus on the destruction of others as opposed to the raising up of our own, they pose a corrosive danger that can be just as damaging to our society over the long term as IslamicFacism itself. When we kill an al Qaeda soldier, it is vital that we do so to defend the positive aspects of our own society — not to destroy the negative ones of his.
The distinction is a subtle one, but vital. For it is the distinction that saves us from the twisted fate to which the Palestinians have resigned themselves. In their endless focus on the defeat of their enemy, they have forgotten what true victory for their own people means. Let us not make the same mistake.

Well, I’ve been threatening it for a while. And now it’s here.
The Store is now open for business. Yes, all those of you whose lives were strangely incomplete; nay, empty without Truth Laid Bear hats, t-shirts, mugs, and yes, the coveted babydoll shirt for the ladies — need suffer in silence no more.
Anyway. CafePress charges zip to set up a store like this, so why not. Check it out, and if you want to fully understand the pricing schemes — and other ways you can support my efforts, if you so choose — check out the TTLB Support FAQ. (In a nutshell, you can get stuff cheap, or you can get the same stuff less cheap — believe it or not, it’ll make sense when you read. Trust me.)
Listen up, Eisner. I’m comin’ for your skinny merchandisin’ little butt. The Mouse is old news — the Bear is in the house.
(Hmmm. Sorry folks. Halfway through watching ‘Training Day‘ and I think Denzel’s a bad influence. )

First run of the Ecosystem on the new host is done, as some eager beavers have already noticed today. No process changes this week, just another crop of new blogs (welcome, folks!), bringing the total up to just under 300.
A tip of the hat must go to Devon, who completely blew everyone else away in the outbound links category, coming in at a whopping 436. Is there anybody you didn’t link to this week, Martin? Er, twice?
As always, I welcome any comments/feedback. If you believe your blog is improperly counted, please, please, take a look at the raw data file — which you can find here in zipped format (but please don’t click unless you really mean it — I’m paying for bandwidth) — and if you want to bring the issue to my attention, please be as specific as possible as to what blogs you think linked to you that weren’t counted. And remember: only links from blogs on the list will be counted!
Speaking of the Ecosystem, Kevin Werbach noted on his blog that Clay Shirky commented on the project in his newsletter. Here’s the full note from Clay, reprinted with his permission:
Weblogs and Power Laws
Good lists (http://www.truthlaidbear.com/ecosystem.shtml) and image (http://www.iwatch.org/Blogosphere.JPG) of the blogosphere from N.Z. Bear, http://www.truthlaidbear.com/
The lists of inbound links are particularly interesting, as the the number of sites with a decreasing amount of inbound links outnumbers those with an increasing amount of links of not quite 2 to 1. However, (as you’d expect) the most linked-to sites have a decreasing-to-increasing ratio 1::2, while the least linked to sites have a decreasing-to-increasing ratio of over 3::1.
This exactly matches Albert-Laszlo Barabasi’s model for networks where preferential connectivity drives topology — the link-rich get richer. With these lists, you can see the blogosphere resolving itself into a power law distribution, which will almost certainly distrupt the egalitarian rhetoric surrounding the blogging enterprise today, by doing things like making the current daypop statistics irrelevant (daypop counts number of blogs linking to a story, rather than traffic-per-blog which, other than daypop statistics, is the bigger determinant of exposure.)
Glenn Reynolds, InstaPundit.com, has another proposal that may also accelerate this process: open hit counters. Rather than making traffic numbers a private matter, Reynolds is proposing that blogs host open, third-party counters. (http://www.instapundit.com/archives/001895.php)
The effect of this, of course, would be to accelerate the existing trend separating the few extremely popular blogs from the moderate number of moderately successful ones and the vast number of very low traffic blogs.
Interestingly, Dr. Barabasi’s work was in fact one inspiration for the Ecosystem project. However, I don’t fully agree with Clay’s interpretation of the results when he suggests that the power-law distribution that’s emerging will necessarily lead to a less egalitarian Blogosphere.
The main argument against this position, I think, is based on the fact that although the Blogosphere as a whole does seem to be following a power-law distribution (although I hesitate to take my never-claimed-to-be-perfect process as hard proof of that), I think it’s too early to conclude that the position of individual blogs on the lists tend to remain static over time. If the overall structure follows a steady power law — but individual blogs skyrocket up and down the listings freely — then I would argue that the social structure of the Blogosphere remains an egalitarian one.
Appropriately, TTLB itself is an interesting example to look at. When I first ran the Ecosystem a mere six weeks ago, TTLB came out way down the list for inbound links. Today’s run, however, has me at #10. Now, obviously, some of that is because many people signing up for the Ecosystem believe (wrongly) that if they want to get listed on the Ecosystem they’d best link to me. (The truth is, it doesn’t matter, and never has — I’ll add anybody who asks).
But while you can make a legitimate argument that I didn’t get those links due to my fine writing skills, I think TTLB’s rise in links is clearly an example arguing against the idea that the power law distribution of the Blogosphere necessarily prevents the little fish from evolving into big fish. And that, I think, argues that hope for an egalitarian Blogosphere — at least in the sense of equality of opportunity — is not necessarily misplaced. Do something that enough people find interesting enough, or do many little things that people find consistently interesting, and a blog can move from the bottom to the top rather quickly.
Now, is TTLB the anomaly or the rule? Hard to say, as I’m not in a position to do serious number crunching to track individual blogs over time. I welcome anybody who has the time and interest to give it a shot themselves, however — I’d be very curious as to the results.
A further question that TTLB will be able to provide some clue to over time is the relation between links and traffic. I clearly am doing splendidly in terms of inbound links (and thanks, by the way, to all those who have linked to me) — but my actual traffic statistics, I believe, lag significantly behind the other blogs you see in the Top 10. Stephen Green, for example, shows on his (open) counter an average of over 1200 unique visitors a day. Despite having only 32 less links than him, I’m only seeing about 40% of the traffic as he does (I’m averaging around 520 visitors a day — and conveniently, we both use SiteMeter, so methodology differences can be ruled out.)
Now, the question will be: over time, will the sheer number of links I’ve received necessarily drive my traffic stats up to a more comparable level with Stephen’s? I certainly hope so, of course, but only time will tell.
Lastly, Clay’s point on open counters — that they may act as further enforcement of the status quo — seems a bit suspect to me. The implication is that blog readers will be influenced by traffic statistics; gravitating to those blogs which show, in their open counters, the highest traffic numbers.
As a reader myself, this doesn’t strike me as a likely behavior. Personally, I most often find new blogs by following links from blogs I already trust; if a blog comes recommended by those whose opinion I value, I don’t particularly care if they are getting zero traffic, I’ll give them a shot. (In fact, being a contrarian, I’m more likely to be interested if they have low traffic, because I enjoy giving visibility to new, good blogs). And ultimately, neither links nor traffic stats matter much to me in deciding whether to keep visiting a blog — the content does. I suspect for most readers it is the same; hence, I’m doubtful that open counter will matter much one way or another.
Enough Ecosystem talk for now — for me, at least. Not for you, though: get thee to the comments section, and tell me exactly where I’ve gone wrong here…

Excellent!
Thanks to for a link to this site : which claims to be the first Iranian village on the Internet.
Unfortutately, I don’t read Farsi. But some of the content is available in English as well — takes a bit of hunting, but its there….

Ah, the plot thickens! Now we have editorial as further fodder to our speculations as to whether the leak was real, and equally interestingly (to this bear, at least): whether the Times thinks it was real. Harken:
President Bush has made no secret of his desire to drive Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq. What has been unclear is how Mr. Bush expects to strike. Partial answers to that question come now in the form of a preliminary Pentagon planning document described in The Times yesterday by Eric Schmitt. It suggests that the military brass is considering a large-scale air and ground assault involving as many as 250,000 American troops.
At this early stage in planning — long before actual operational details are set — there ought to be some discussion in Congress and around the nation about the manner of American intervention in Iraq. At the moment, the White House seems to be moving toward a military offensive early next year.
Aha! This to me argues strongly to the position that the Times does indeed believe they have a genuine leak on their hands. Because now they have shown their motive: to bully / humiliate the administration into greater openness (common complaint of late) and greater consultation with Congress and the peepul.
This is starting to make much more sense, if you apply New York Timesy logic.
And the award for Times Kremlinology for the day goes to TTLB reader “etc.” , who noted in the comments section his/her (its?) belief that the leaker was General Wayne Downing. Observe the Times:
The willingness of officials to outline Pentagon thinking in recent days suggests unhappiness in some quarters with the current drift of strategizing. One option that has apparently now been discarded is an Afghanistan-style campaign to be built around airstrikes and the use of Special Operations forces in alliance with Iraqi opposition groups. Wayne Downing, the retired general who resigned last week as the chief White House adviser on counterterrorism, had favored such an approach.
Perhaps it’s too much of a leap to connect the first sentence in that paragraph with the last sentence in that paragraph… but my, sure does seem to fit well, doesn’t it?
OK, so I’m convinced: real leak. Probably from General Downing, or one of his associates.
Now: I agree with those who’ve argued in the comments section that the information revealed was not of huge direct military value. But: I would argue that you can make a case that it was of significant diplomatic value. It named the countries we want to use as our bases. Isn’t that something that, perhaps, we might have legitimate reason to want to keep quiet either to smooth negotiations with those nations?
You know, if you had told me when I was back at my college paper that years later, I’d be beating up the New York Times for revealing classified information leaked from a Republican administration, I think I would have told you to pound sand. A strange world, this is, truly…
PS: Urgle. I seem to have goofed and somehow managed to overwrite my second post on the Times story with this update. I’ll see if I can get it back, but at least the comments are still preserved here…

Welcome back,
Glad you enjoyed the downtime — and thanks for that unprecented hangtime on the link to the new TTLB design!

Looks like the York Times has a scoop today, and is looking to do a sequel to its famous Pentagon Papers dustup. (free registration required):
WASHINGTON, July 4 — An American military planning document calls for air, land and sea-based forces to attack Iraq from three directions — the north, south and west — in a campaign to topple President Saddam Hussein, according to a person familiar with the document.
The document envisions tens of thousands of marines and soldiers probably invading from Kuwait. Hundreds of warplanes based in as many as eight countries, possibly including Turkey and Qatar, would unleash a huge air assault against thousands of targets, including airfields, roadways and fiber-optics communications sites.
If I’m reading this Times piece correctly, they’ve got a single source who described the document to them — and apparently, didn’t even let them see it themselves. And he’s got a beef against it, too:
The source familiar with the document described its contents to The New York Times on the condition of anonymity, expressing frustration that the planning reflected at least in this set of briefing slides was insufficiently creative, and failed to incorporate fully the advances in tactics and technology that the military has made since the Persian Gulf war in 1991.
This seems like really dicey stuff, from my not-so-professional journalistic ethics perspective. At least in the Pentagon Papers, the Times had the documents in hand — they knew for sure what they said, and weren’t relying on a single source with a grudge. And even worse, this is classified information about a future military operation — not a retrospective on past mistakes as the Pentagon papers were.
Could someone help me understand how a crime wasn’t committed here? Or perhaps, several?

I haven’t been able to find an answer to this question, so I’ll throw it out to the class.
In yesterday’s LAX shooting incident, the attacker was himself shot not by LAX security, nor by the LAPD — but by an El Al security officer, who we later found out is the head of security for El Al at LAX.
The question is this: Are most airline security personnel armed? Or is El Al unusual in having its own personnel carry weapons?
Stated another way: Would the outcome of this incident have been different if the shooter decided to open fire at United’s ticket counter?
Also: Martin Devon, in between his deeply impressive efforts to take up the slack in Glenn’s absence, points to a (possibly unreliable) report from Debka indicating that the shooter is indeed a Muslim extremist.

To celebrate the Fourth, the Blogosphere had dueling Founding Fathers history lessons — both of which are well worth reading.
First, provides an interesting story of the failed efforts of Ben Frankllin to bring prayer into the first Constitutional Convention. Contrasting this with President Bush’s recent attempt to invoke the Founding Fathers to justify prayer in governmetn life, Tim sayeth:
… the historical fact, which no amount of wishing and hoping can change, is that the record is mixed at best regarding prayer by The Founders. And at the time of the drafting of the document by which we conduct our political lives, the Constitution, the choice was not to pray each and every day.
In contrast, Howard Owens at Global News Watch, reminds us that the Declaration of Independence did put God very much at the center of American life, and sees in that fact valuable context in which to frame the current Pledge debate (along the way asking some pointed questions about the future of democracy in Afghanistan and other recovering nations):
In the aftermath of the Pledge ruling, we’ve heard in various commentaries that The Declaration of Independence, which makes several references to God, is not “a legal document.”
This is a true statement. The Declaration is not law. It is more than that. It is an encapsulation of the founding principles of this nation. It is sacred text. We should not look on it for legal precepts, but we should use it in guiding all of our legal decisions. Any legal ruling that contradicts the Declaration shakes the very foundation of our land and subverts the intentions of our Founders.
The Declaration does not establish religion, but it acknowledges divinity. This tradition, so much a part of this country throughout its growth from colonial backwater to world superpower, is very much an explanation for “under God” in the Pledge. Regardless of the history of the Pledge, and when “under God” was added, the addition was very much in keeping with the Declaration’s proposition, we are protected by Divine providence.
Great stuff from both sides, and there’s more than just my little quotes. Go read the rest.