According to my brother’s latest column, the blue-ribbon panel that is supposed to study intelligence prior to the Iraq war (albeit without subpoena power…) is not breaking any land speed records: “Five weeks after being appointed, the group has not met, and it is unclear when it will.”
How very convenient for the Administration. No meetings, no fuss about the committee’s authority. And no leaks.
My increasingly famous brother—people keep stopping me to ask if we are related—will host another session of washingtonpost.com – Live Online this afternoon at 1 p.m.
For what little it's worth, almost all the early US commentary on the Spanish elections seem about 98% mistaken to me. As far as I can tell, the moral of the story has nothing to do with strength or weakness, appeasement or terror, and relatively little to do with the costs of being GW Bush's (or the US's) friend and ally. It even has relatively little to do, alas, with the political costs of entering precipitously into wars of choice.
No, the moral of the story is this: voters don't like to be lied to, and in politics the coverup often costs more than the crime. The Spanish voters decided, apparently correctly, that their government had lied to them when it blamed ETA, local terrorists, for an act of barbarism committed by al Qaeda, foreign terrorists.
Which means that the 2% of recent commentary I agree with is the part that says this is bad for Bush: as the Bush lies like a rug meme gathers steam (the latest outrage about muzzling Richard S. Foster, Medicare's favorite actuary — only reinforces it), the idea that the US voters will punish Bush for lying, like the Spanish voters punished José María Aznar will begin to take hold.
Update: Seems like someone agrees.
Update (2): More agreement.
INTEL DUMP reports on a survey of army soldiers on when/whether they think Osam bin Laden will be captured. The majority says soon, but not real soon. Of course, if there really were a Secret Plot to capture him in October — an article of faith in conspiracy-minded circles — then presumably almost no one would know about it…
For a good roundup of the current state of play on crypto tech & politics, see The Importance of…: A Race the FBI Can't Win: The Increasingly Asymmetric Costs of Wiretap Surveillance vs. Wiretap Avoidance. I'd write more on this — I used to write very long articles about it, but I have to run off ot the airport to catch my plane back to Miami….
Both the UK's Observer newspaper, Revealed: the full story of the Guantanamo Britons, and the UK's tabloid Daily Mirror, My Hell in Camp X-Ray describe charges of torture and inhuman treatment at Guantanamo levvied by UK citizens returned to England after two years of detention in Guantanmo.
Outside independent review — ideally judicial review — is essential either to rebut these claims convincingly or to root out and punish those responsbile if the uglier charges are at all true.
Jotwell Blenderlaw