Pictures, icons, and brands

Pro football is America's game. It is the most popular sport with fans. It dominates television ratings. Every year the Super Bowl is the most watched show on TV. Until television came along, the NFL was less popular than baseball. Television and the NFL Films changed that.

The NFL mystique transcends any particular season. The league defines its brand through video. The clips are repeated so often that even casual fans recognize them in just a second or two.

Dwight Clark flashing open in the end zone for The Catch.

The Packer sweep grinding through the mud toward the end zone.

Unitas picking apart the Giants in Yankee Stadium.

The Immaculate Reception.

The frozen tundra of Lambeau Field and the Ice Bowl.

John Elway breaking Cleveland's heart with The Drive.

The Chiefs matriculating the ball down the field.

Namath trotting off the field waving his arm with one finger extended.

For many fans, these images have become iconic. They are the NFL.

These brand-defining film clips have several things in common. They mark big moments in big games. But beyond that they are great images. They have a quality that let them stand on their own beyond their role as a historical record.

They have two other traits in common. First, they come from games that were played outdoors in the daytime. Video and photographs have a sharpness, depth and richness that is lost when stadium lights replace sunshine. The game situations might be the same, but the resulting pictures are far different. (The cinematographers and photographers of NFL Films are adamant on this point and can demonstrate their point with hundreds of examples.)

The other trait they share is that most of the clips are old. This is directly related to the previous point. The NFL has chosen to play most of its recent big games at night and/or indoors.

Doing so helps television ratings and increases league revenue. But I wonder what the implications are for the long-term image-brand-of the NFL.

Does the scarcity of new images insinuate that the game is old-fashioned? Does that turn off young fans? Does it imply that (unintentionally) that the modern NFL is inferior to the old school game?

Nostalgia is a dangerous brand attribute for pro football. Baseball has owned it for nearly a half century. Yet it is not so simple as promoting clips from recent games. The game setting automatically yields inferior images, which only adds to the problem.

Three important articles on terrorism

The Suicide Bombers Among Us by Theodore Dalrymple

Accounting for Terror: Debunking the Paradigm of Inexpensive Terrorism by Joshua Prober

Growing Concerns Over Nigerian Crash by Douglas Farrah

MoDo: Sad and embarrassing

Pretty much everything that can be said about her article has been blogged. My two favorites are from the Anchoress and Steve Sailer.

Steve Sailer

One thing I would like to point out is how desperate Maureen is to conform. She wants society to tell her, the Modern Girl, what to do, and is angry that it has given her mixed messages over the years. The notion that she should have figured out for herself how to live her life is not one that naturally occurs to her. But that hasn't stopped her from giving enormous amounts of advice, most of it bad, to other women on how they should live their lives. That's because she wants to lessen the discomfort she feels when she notices that other women have made other choices.


The Anchoress

And now you’re cringing because some women are entering college with the idea of actually having children and part-time careers, instead of careers with part-time children! What a waste, eh? I bet you’re glad you didn’t do that!
But you sound pret-ty teed off at these gals, all the same, which is surprising, because…I thought the feminist movement was all about “respecting women’s life-choices.” Now if YOU, a leading feminist - I guess - can’t respect women’s choices, how in the world will anyone else?

For my money, MoDo went of the rails pretty early in life:

In the universe of Eros, I longed for style and wit. I loved the Art Deco glamour of 30's movies. I wanted to dance the Continental like Fred and Ginger in white hotel suites; drink martinis like Myrna Loy and William Powell; live the life of a screwball heroine like Katharine Hepburn, wearing a gold lamé gown cut on the bias, cavorting with Cary Grant, strolling along Fifth Avenue with my pet leopard.

So basically, in MoDo's world, if life does not turn out like your favorite movies, then you are a victim of the patriarchy.

Putin's Russia

Interesting article in the Spectator (London):

The return of White Russia
Paul Robinson
Issue: 29 October 2005

The most prevalent narrative of Russian affairs in the Western press talks of a return to dictatorship under a former KGB colonel. The Russian President is repeatedly portrayed as a closet communist, eager to suppress freedom of speech and jail any political opponents.

My journalist friend laughs at the suggestion that Putin has suppressed all independent political thought. He should know; he has twice been sacked from newspapers for writing pro-Putin articles. The problem, he tells me, is that Westerners listen too much to the likes of the former oligarch Boris Berezovsky. Incidentally, he adds, Berezovsky still owns a newspaper in Russia — so much for there being no anti-Putin voices. In fact, my friend suggests, there may even be more freedom of expression in Russia than in the West, because there are fewer social and legal constraints on ‘politically incorrect’ and extremist points of view. If you want to be racist, sexist or anything else-ist, you’ll find it easier to get a publisher in Moscow than in London or New York.

This article makes it easy to understand why many Russians hate the Oligarchs. (HT: Steve Sailer)

New Retreat for the Russian Rich: London
Wealthiest Flooding 'Moscow on the Thames' With Cash

I've posted before on the Putin and Russia:

Putin and Khodorkovsky

Putin and the oligarchs

Putin vs. Khodorkovsky

"The Passion of the Putin"

The Truth is also a casualty when the caring professions decide to wage war

XRLQ points to this eye-opening article in the LA Times

McMartin Pre-Schooler: 'I Lied'
A long-delayed apology from one of the accusers in the notorious McMartin Pre-School molestation case

Essential reading

Another edition of Blogworthies is up at Lane Core's place.

If it wasn't for his round-up i would have missed this outrage:

Muslim Students Shut Down Exhibit at Harper College

When Muslim students at a community college in Illinois complained about an art exhibit that criticized the repressive symbol of radical Islam known as the hijab, the school promptly removed the offending artwork.

My favorite reactions to Miers

Scott Chaffin:

The opposition was, from the get-go, some weirdo intersection of the Hearty Republican bloggers, and the egghead lawyers & academics. Subset C was highly populated, given the tendency of eggheads to bloviate endlessly. Bottom line, though — there will be much jackassery, but this one will bite the instant experts in the ass.

AJ Strata:

And that is what is left of the conservative movement. We now have two factions who will never trust each other, and where name calling skirmishes will break out more and more often. It has already started. The genie is out of the bottle and cannot be put back in now.

Hugh Hewitt:

Now, however, a big slice of conservative punditry has decided that the long march back isn't worth the risk that Harriet Miers isn't who the president and her close associates say she is. On the basis of a very thin set of papers --some of them distorted, and all of them cherry-picked-- and with an absolute refusal to entertain any of the many arguments and testimonies on her behalf, this caucus has seized on the very tactics most conservatives have long denounced in order to do what?

To deny Harriet Miers a hearing and an up-or-down vote on the Senate floor.

To accomplish this objective, a group of high profile conservative pundits and activists have gone so far as to raises hundreds of thousands of doallrs from secret sources to run hit ads on the nominee in prime time. George Will has taken to denouncing high profile evangelical leaders as "crude." National Review, the oldest brand on the right, allowed its cyber pages to be used to brand the nominee the worst since Caligula's horse and to suggest the president might send up Barney next.

Pretty average

At least according to this. (I matched 13 of 15)

HT: Absinthe and Cookies

Not sure if this is creepy or funny

BTK Website Developer Arrested for Stalking

Right after Dennis Rader was arrested many people noticed Catch BTK website creator Tom Voight was nowhere to be found. That's because he was serving a jail sentence for stalking.

Plame/Wilson: Loose Ends

A few nagging questions while we wait for Fitzgerald to wrap up.

1. Maybe where there’s smoke there is fire. Many conservatives have argued that no crime was committed because Plame’s employment at CIA was widely known in DC before the Novak column. If this is true, why haven’t we seen a flood of on-the-record interviews by people who knew her and knew where she worked.

2. Is Rove that stupid? If you look at the reporters at the center of the storm—Miller, Cooper, Novak—they are odd vessels for a “neocon smear campaign.” Miller is married to an iconic figure of the leftish New York literary scene. Cooper is married to a Democratic operative. Novak opposed the Iraq War. Why would the White House use them for nefarious purposes?

3. The other, other shoe. No matter what Fitzgerald does, Bob Novak still has not told his whole story. He could change our understanding of the matter when he does.

I wish i had said that

Cable drenched in speculation -- and rain, rain, rain

Nancy Grace, the hyperventilating legal commentator and heat-seeking missile for CNN Headline News and Court TV, is best consumed in small doses. But because Grace lately has been all over the Pamela Vitale murder case, she has been all over the TV screen.

No wonder my head is aching, my ears are ringing and my blood is boiling.

See also here and here.

Good, very good

And true:

One could write a big article on how the minicons, particularly Podhoretz, constantly get details like this wrong. But maybe Podhoretz can be excused in this instance since all those western states seem the same to him.

Why the Times is stoning its own reporter

Questions for CIA

Originally posted Monday, July 19, 2004

A. Is it a common practice to use private citizens who are also "international business consultants" as investigators on delicate missions such as the Niger matter?

B. What steps are taken to ensure that there are no potential conflicts of interest when assigning private citizens to such missions?

C. What steps are taken to ensure that those selected for such missions do not have partisan commitments which could politicize their intelligence gathering mission?

D. Why did CIA not take steps to ensure that the Niger mission would remain confidential?

E. Why was Amb. Wilson not required to submit a written report?

E(1). Didn't the reliance on oral briefings risk losing valuable intelligence?

F. Did any officials of CIA discuss the Niger-Iraq question with Amb. Wilson after March 2002?

F(1). Did anyone at CIA discuss the forged Niger documents with Amb. Wilson after they were received in October 2002?

G. In the period May-July 2003 Amb. Wilson provided numerous pieces of misinformation to the press (both openly and on background). What steps did CIA take to correct these dangerous and slanderous assertions?

G(1). Did CIA attempt to correct the false assertion that the forged Niger documents came to CIA from the office of the Vice President?

G(2). Did CIA attempt to correct the false impression that the Niger forgeries were received prior to Feb. 2002?

G(3). Did CIA attempt to correct the false assertion that Amb. Wilson's report went to the office of the Vice President?

H. Why did a "senior intelligence official" tell Newsday that Amb. Wilson's report was "widely disseminated" through the administration when this was not so?

I. CIA officials provided false information to the New York Times about intelligence source codenamed CURVEBALL and his relationship with the INC. What steps are being taken to prevent future cases of such disinformation activities against the American press and the American people?

I(1). Is CIA concerned that those officials harmed intelligence-sharing arrangements with Germany-- the country that provided access to CURVEBALL's intelligence?

BACKGROUND FOR THE QUESTIONS

The Cloak of Anonymity

Joseph Wilson, Liar

Our Man in Niger

The Rise and Decline of Joe Wilson

A Little Literary Flair

Mark Steyn

See also
Mission to Niger and a Cautionary Tale from Vietnam


Conned big time which reminds us that the "Bush lied about nukes" thing has taken some odd twists before. Remember Terrance J. Wilkinson?

Spike Lee is making sense

WaPo piece on the NBA's dress code:

Opinions on the NBA's Dress Code Are Far From Uniform

Lee tells the reporter:

"I think David Stern was right on this issue," Lee said in a telephone interview. "What are all those kids wearing the night they're drafted and they shake David Stern's hand? Suits. In corporate America, you have dress codes. Let's be honest: Image is everything. And they're trying to change the image of the league. Between the fight in Detroit last year and other perceptions, they've realized they have a public relations issue. They've set out to change it."

I've seen more than one sports hack (e.g. the egrgious Kornheiser) blame the dress code on out-of-touch old white men who are in charge of the NBA. The Post reporter confirms Lee's point that the NBA faces some serious issues with fans.

Recent public opinion polls, as well as some of the NBA's own focus groups, ranked basketball players as the least popular athletes among the major professional sports leagues, according to NBA officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. Television ratings for June's NBA Finals plunged 29 percent from the year before.

Joe Wilson's Mission

Macsmind has a post that should finish Wilson's posturing as a truth-teller who tried to warn the president:

Plame Game - What Happened Joe?

I say should. The evidence of Wilson's hedging and lying has been before us for two year. But most of the media just avert their eyes.

See also:

Plame/Wilson

Joe Wilson's carefully calibrated "courage"

Catch up on your blog reading

Lane Core has made it easy with his latest Blogworthies-- a roundup of some of the best blogging this week.

Civil war in the blogosphere

You thought the Miers nomination was divisive? It can't match the passions unleashed by the the issue of barbeque. Scott deserves the last word because, well, he's right.

Now i'm hungry.

I weighed in on the question a couple years ago: BBQ

Plame/Wilson

I have not blogged recently about the Plame/Wilson scandal, but I have been reading the posts at Just One Minute, The Strata-Sphere, and Macsmind. For my money, they have just the right balance of analysis and speculation.

This post by AJ Strata caught my eye because it hearkens back to my firs post on Joe Wilson. Strata quotes Wilson's friends in Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS):

We appeal to those still working inside the Intelligence Community to consider turning state's evidence. Daniel Ellsberg, one who knows, recently noted that truth telling, in time, can stop a misguided march to war. Ellsberg and our former CIA colleague, Sam Adams, spoke out courageously to expose the lies of the Johnson administration and to put the brakes on the war in Vietnam-but, sadly, not in time. Sam is now deceased, but Ellsberg recently appealed to insiders at intelligence agencies "to tell the truth and save many, many lives." We Veterans Intelligence Professionals for Sanity join in that urgent appeal.

Back when I thought Wilson might be an honest whistle-blower, I offered Sam Adams as a cautionary example of what happens when an analyst falls in love with their conclusions and confuses disagreement with a cover-up. You can read the whole thing here.

Mission to Niger and a Cautionary Tale from Vietnam

Bottom line: Sam Adams "exposed" no "lies". On the critical issue of the enemy order-of-battle, Sam Adams got it wrong. The "liars" were right in 1967.

It is somewhat scary that VIPS still thinks the CIA was right on a matter where history has refuted the Agency's analysis. It is disgusting that they think a correct assessment was a pack of lies.

Sidenote: VIPS's citation of Ellsberg-" Daniel Ellsberg, one who knows, recently noted that truth telling, in time, can stop a misguided march to war "-- is interesting in light of Joe Wilson's behavior in 2003. See: Joe Wilson's carefully calibrated '"courage".

UPDATE: Off to OTB's Beltway Traffic Jam.

Luck and Randomness

This week's Tuesday Morning Quarterback makes a provocative point:

Defending champion New England is struggling, having dropped two of three; oxygen-depleted Denver is soaring, having won five straight. Reasons include injuries to Patriots and strong play by the Broncos -- but a central factor is simply luck. We'd like to think sports outcomes are determined by merit, and usually the better team wins. But luck plays far more of a role than is generally acknowledged.

Consider that red-hot Denver hasn't committed a turnover in four consecutive games, while beleaguered New England hasn't gotten a takeaway in three consecutive outings. Skill and tactics are aspects of limiting turnovers and obtaining takeaways -- but luck is a huge aspect too, especially when it comes to fumbles. Skill may protect the ball and hard hits may cause it to pop out; whether a loose ball bounces toward you or the opponent is sheer luck. Lately, New England hasn't had much luck, and lately Denver has had a lot.

This week, the down-to-the-last-snap Falcons-Saints, Giants-Cowboys, Jags-Steelers, Redskins-Chiefs and Panthers-Lions games were so close no victor could have taken the day without benefit of luck. Against St. Louis, the Indianapolis defense looked terrible in the first quarter, surrendering 17 points, then looked great for the rest of game, partly because Lady Luck provided takeaways. Luck was not determinant in every game; the Seahawks simply blew the Texans off the field. But you get my point. A dropped pass, a random bounce, a behind-the-ball penalty -- luck heralds many NFL outcomes, and explains the supposedly "baffling" fact that the same team may win big one week and lose big the next. Luck has more to do with many aspects of life than is commonly admitted: For instance, the rich want to believe they got that way based solely on personal worthiness, but luck is often a leading difference between the well-off and the needy. In the NFL, all teams are stocked with big, fast, strong guys, while luck is distributed randomly week-by-week.

Up to a point, I agree with Easterbrook. But luck is more than random events.

Napoleon liked lucky generals. He explained why in Maxim #95:

War is composed of nothing but accidents, and, although holding to general principles, a general should never lose sight of everything to enable him to profit from these accidents; that is the mark of genius .

In war there is but one favorable moment; the great art is to seize it.

The ability to profit from accidents is a capacity that can be developed. Adm. Chester Nimitz wrote that:

Luck can be attributed to a well-conceived plan carried out by a well-trained and indoctrinated task group.

The old-fashioned, Lombardi virtues can make a team "lucky". Ball carriers who always protect the ball-even in practice-will fumble less than those who are sometimes sloppy. A well-conditioned team makes fewer mistakes. A receiver who hustles downfield to make a block is also going to be nearer the ball if there is a fumble. Fat, lazy d-linemen don't tip many passes late in the game.

More than luck was at play in the most famous "lucky" play in NFL history. On the Immaculate Reception, Franco Harris was held in to block. When the Raiders did not blitz, Harris went downfield to be an outlet receiver. After Bradshaw threw to Fuqua, Harris headed toward the ball to block. That's how he ended up near the deflected pass and broke John Madden's heart.

It was bad luck and bad play calling that put the ball on the ground in the closing seconds at Meadowlands in the Giants-Eagles game. But it was more than an accident that it was Hermann Edwards who was on the spot to make the miracle.


Previously:

Credit Where Due

Luck

Steelers, Maddox and the managerial dilemma

It was a tough loss. Worse than the New England games. They should have won and they would have won if Tommy Maddox had not played horribly. In some ways it was a repeat of the Texan nightmare from 2002.

Steelers fans on the radio are irate and are finished with Maddox. We are a fickle bunch. A few years ago Tommy was The Man and we could not wait to throw Kordell Stewart over the side of the boat. Now it is Maddox’s turn.

In fairness, Maddox never performed as well as Kordell did at his best. Nor was he any more consistent than Slash. The Steelers and their fans had simply lost patience with Stewart after the loss to New England in the AFC title game. They were ready for a change and Maddox represented change.

Cowher now faces a common managerial dilemma. He has a team member whose self-assessment is wildly inflated. Listening to Maddox after the game, it is clear that he does not think he played all that poorly.

It would be easy to resolve this if it was clear that Batch is better than Maddox. But we cannot be certain of that.

I bet most managers can sympathize with Cowher. One of the most delicately difficult problems to deal with is a valuable employee who over-estimates their skills. It is not that you want rid of them or that they lack potential. But they stubbornly insist that they are already good at something that is, in reality, an area where they need improvement. You want them to see that need for improvement, but you do not want to break their spirit or antagonize them.

Perfect example

Here's the sort of thing i discussed here.

Search for Answers

Fox News did not know what they had or what it meant or if it mattered. But by golly they put it on the air immediately. Greta thinks it's something to be proud of.

Carnival

The latest Carnival of the Capitalists is here.

A true iconoclast

Collapsing the Maya

Let’s take Jared Diamond by the horns.

He would like us to believe that the decline and fall of the Maya was a tragic loss, and a sadly overgrown sculpture in the jungle ornaments the cover of his book Collapse.

But I don’t care if the Maya civilization did collapse. I don’t think we should shed a single retrospective tear. It might be interesting to know how or why it fell—whether from war or drought or disease or soil exhaustion—but I don’t much care about that either. Because quite frankly, as civilizations go, the Mayan civilization in Mexico didn’t amount to much.

RTWT.

I mean it. RTWT

(ht: armavirumque )

AJ Strata does some digging

and offers an interesting perspective on the Miers nomination and the revolt of the conservative "intellectuals."

Frum’s Vendetta?

Media's Shifting Business Model

Shoshana Zuboff made an interesting point in this Fast Company article:

I felt as though I had just stumbled upon the clandestine documents of the elders of Davos. Want to know the secret weapon in America's race for productivity and global competitiveness? It's Althea! The much-touted self-service economy is actually a brilliantly concealed strategy to outsource American jobs. Instead of sending them overseas, though, we are sending them after hours to Althea and the other 54 million of us.

Jobless recovery? Hah! The recovery is throwing off jobs aplenty. They're just unpaid -- no salaries or benefits, only overtime. We join together each evening to complete the work our corporations can no longer afford to pay for.

Cable news networks have been eager adopters of this new business model. In conventional journalism, reporters do interviews, assemble, verify, and weigh facts, and then write a story that has some coherence. The story was the public face of the newspaper or news broadcast. On cable, however, the interviews are the public content. The viewers are left with the task of weighing its significance and assessing the credibility of the people on screen.

What was once an unseen activity that was one of the costs of production is now center stage as the product-the content that advertisers pay for.

This is not a matter of left or right. Clinton-defender Greta van Sustren operates this way on Fox but so does Republican Joe Scarborough over on MSNBC. That bastion of journalistic excellence-CNN-has Nancy Grace who is one of the worst offenders.


The profit motive trumps ideology and professional pride.

The new model raises a couple of interesting points. First, this outsourcing to the audience plays into the hands of bloggers and other competitors of the traditional media. If paid media will not weigh and sift, then others will and they will attract readers.

Second, the cable news model undercuts the traditional media's assertion that they engage in a journalism of verification while bloggers and talk radio represent a journalism of assertion. How can NBC News maintain its brand as a serious, verifying news organization when MSNBC has Rita Cosby doing a show that is mostly raw interviews without verification or assessment?

There is a bleed-over for print journalism. Newsweeklies like Time will find it harder to maintain their niche-slower but more knowledgeable-when their reporters show up cheek-by-jowl with pundits and spinners on shows that specialize in raw talk.

Finance geekdom meets football

If you are twisted (like me) this is a great read.

"The Loser’s Curse: Overconfidence vs. Market Efficiency in the
National Football League Draft" by Massey and Thaler

For some reason i can't get the link to work from here, but the one over at Finance Professor works just fine.

This point sort of puts a damper on the web-euphoria we've experienced over the last 10 years.

An interesting and important question is how confidence depends on the amount of information available. When people have more information on which to base their judgments their confidence can rationally be greater, but often information increases confidence more than it increases the actual ability to forecast the future.

FBI Software

Photon Courier is exactly right: the problems with the FBI's Trilogy project deserve more attention. These two articles provide a pretty good look at the basic story.


Who Killed the Virtual Case File?

Why The G-Men Aren't I.T. Men

Two points jumped out of the second article. First, shouldn't this be red meat for investigative journalists.

Gregoire was offered and accepted the CIO job in September 2003. But within days, Lowery called him at his ranch in Austin, Texas, asking him to send a letter declining the offer, according to Gregoire. (Despite persistent requests for an explanation of why the FBI was withdrawing the offer, Gregoire did not receive any reason for the reversal.)

Gregoire was interviewed a few months after the quick departure of Darwin John, the former CIO for the Mormon Church and Scott Paper. John lasted only 10 months as FBI CIO before leaving due to what he would only describe as a disagreement on "a matter of principle" with Mueller.

Second, the turnover in the CIO's office suggests that something structural and cultural is hurting the FBI's attempts to use technology to fight crime and terrorism.

Changing the culture at the FBI will be a gargantuan task, Azmi acknowledges. The job has been so frustrating that many top executives left after only short stints. Between 2002 and 2003 alone, four CIOs came and went. And the $170 million VCF system ground through 10 program managers before it was killed.

Peter Drucker wrote about this problem in Management: Tasks, Responsibility, Practices:

In many companies there are jobs which manage to defeat one good man after another-without any clear reason why. These jobs seem to be logical, seem to be well-constructed, seem to be do-able-yet nobody seems to be able to do them. If a job has defeated, in a row, two men who in their previous assignments have done well, it should be restructured.

Plame/Wilson

Macmind does some interesting reporting and analysis.

The reality of effective information sharing

Some interesting research on how good organizations share knowledge.

Do Talk to Strangers: Encouraging Performative Ties to Create Competitive Advantage


Imagine the following situation: You are a consultant who has just been assigned to a new project at your firm, and your first major presentation is in a week. Unfortunately, your client's problem isn't something you have any expertise in. You know for sure that others at your firm have dealt with this kind of situation before -- in the same industry, even -- but it would take hours to sift through the worldwide knowledge database to find those cases. Besides, you would emerge from that research with only a brief, names-and-numbers-expunged summary of the cases, not the real lowdown you need. What do you do?


Chances are, according to research by Sheen S. Levine, a Singapore Management University professor who recently received his PhD from Wharton, you would pick up the phone and make a call. In a recent study, Levine has found that often, what gives firms competitive advantage isn't just their repository of sheer knowledge, but their use and encouragement of so-called "performative ties" -- those impromptu communications made by colleagues who are strangers in which critical knowledge is transferred with no expectation of a quid pro quo. "Not many managers even understand that this happens, much less why," says Levine. "They think it's just friends helping friends. But it's not. Usually, people will reach out and connect with colleagues whom they have never met or talked to before. It's not dependent on prior or future favors."

This article has an interesting real world example.

Who Killed the Virtual Case File?


In the early 1990s, Russian mobsters partnered with Italian Mafia families in Newark, N.J., to skim millions of dollars in federal and New Jersey state gasoline and diesel taxes. Special Agent Larry Depew set up an undercover sting operation under the direction of Robert J. Chiaradio, a supervisor at the Federal Bureau of Investigation's Washington, D.C., headquarters.

Depew collected reams of evidence from wiretaps, interviews, and financial transactions over the course of two and a half years. Unfortunately, the FBI couldn't provide him with a database program that would help organize the information, so Depew wrote one himself. He used it to trace relationships between telephone calls, meetings, surveillance, and interviews, but he could not import information from other investigations that might shed light on his own. So it wasn't until Depew mentioned the name of a suspect to a colleague that he obtained a briefcase that his friend had been holding since 1989.

"When I opened it up, it was a treasure trove of information about who's involved in the conspiracy, including the Gambino family, the Genovese family, and the Russian components. It listed percentages of who got what, when people were supposed to pay, the number of gallons. It became a central piece of evidence," Depew recalled during an interview at the FBI's New Jersey Regional Computer Forensic Laboratory, in Hamilton, where he is the director. "Had I not just picked up the phone and called that agent, I never would have gotten it."

Another reason to like the guy

I think the six happiest words in English are "Justice Scalia writing for the majority." This article just gave me another reason to admire the guy:

On another issue, Justice Scalia said he is adamantly opposed to televising Supreme Court sessions.
"We don't want to become entertainment," he said. "I think there's something sick about making entertainment out of real people's legal problems. I don't like it in the lower courts, and I don't particularly like it in the Supreme Court."

Since OJ whole cable networks have based their entire business model on manufacturing cheap content out of human tragedy. Nice to see someone willing to call it sick.

Congratulation

The Carnival of the Capitalists is two years old. This weeks edition is back where it first started: Business Pundit.

A new book on an important subject

Phyllis Schlafly's career is one of the most remarkable in post-war America. He campaign against the Equal Right Amendment was a model of successful grassroots activism. Schlafly was remaking the GOP into a populist, majority party while the neoconservatives were still trying to reinvigorate the Democrats. She deserves a serious book like this.

Quote

Intellect without will is useless, whereas will without intellect is dangerous.

Han von Seekt

Good question

Not to take anything away from The Greatest Generation, but the behavior of our soldiers today will stand scrutiny when compared to the performance of those in any past war. The focus of the press on abuse is not due to any relaxation in military discipline or social mores. Why was valor considered front-page news in 1945 and abuse considered front-page news in 2005?

Slighting This Greatest Generation

Press Speak: "Charging for Columnists"

Jay Rosen analyzes the NY Times decision to charge for access to their columnists. He makes several good points about the wisdom of the move in light of the new media realities.

He cuts to the heart of the issue when he puts himself in the shoes of the NYT editors and executives:

one of my worries would be over-estimating the marketplace value, and misstating the unique selling proposition of a Herbert, a Maureen Dowd, a David Brooks. When I read Dave Anderson in sports he sounds like every other sports columnist, even when he's on target.

From inside the journalistic pyramid, space on the Times op-ed page looks like the pinnacle of the profession. For readers, in Thomas Friedman's flat world, the Times's opinion-mongers compete with dozens of others. How many readers will agree that the NYT scribblers are worth the premium price?

Some readers will pay, but the Times risks long-term brand erosion even while it reaps short-term revenue.

Rosen address that issue here:

If everyone is reading a columnist, that makes the columnist more of a must have. If "everyone" isn't, less of a must. "Exclusive online access" attacks the perception of ubiquity that is part and parcel of a great columnist's power. In his prime Walter Lippmann was called "the name that opened every door." Nick Kristof's brand of human rights journalism, which depends on the mobilization of outrage, is simply less potent if it can't reach widely around the world, and pass by every door.

Two years ago David Warsh wrote that newspapers compete in "explanation space":

the lofty region where short-term causal explanations of events are forged.

Clearly, the two most powerful weapons any newspaper has in this competition are its front page and its op-ed pages. The Times has decided to assign their big guns to garrison duty.

In an interview with Hugh Hewitt, Instapundit said:

The New York Times thinks it's going to make money selling op-eds, but hard news reporting is the killer ap for news media organizations. If they want to come up with opinion, they're competing with guys like me, and we can kick Paul Krugman's butt any day. If they do hard news gathering, and they actually report what's happening, and they report it straight and fast, they can go toe to toe with blogs pretty darn well.

Rosen is somewhat skeptical of this bit of blogger triumphalism, but makes his case obliquely:

I assure you, they are chuckling in newsrooms about just possibly being able to compete "toe to toe" with bloggers in reporting a big moving story. Maybe they shouldn't be chuckling, but they are.

It may seem funny today, but the MSM might want to skip the laughter. Japanese cars seemed like a joke to Detroit in 1970, but GM is not smiling now. A disruptive innovation usually looks like a joke when it first appears: that is part of the reason that the incumbent firms are slow to respond to it. Journalists should read Clayton Christensen before they write off the threat from the new media.

That smug chuckling is symptomatic of the first problem conventional media faces. Reynolds spoke of "hard news-gathering" and "straight and fast" reporting. This is a valuable commodity. But too many reporters do not do this kind of journalism. They are tripped up by "knowingness". They are on the scene but they do not see clearly because of ignorance and their ideological blinders. (See here and here.)

Like all new disruptive technologies, the blogosphere's weaknesses are more apparent than its strengths. A newspaper editor can assign reporters to an important story. The blogosphere depends on chance and individual initiative for on-the-scene reporting. This should be a clear and decisive advantage for legacy media. Two factors, however, are eroding this edge.

The first is identified by this ex-newspaperman.

To produce newspapers in this manner requires efficient, repetitive action - papers are scripted in advance, before the news happens; reporters are told how long to write, before they cover the stories; photographers are given dimensions of an illustration, before they take the pictures. This way of working discourages innovation and encourages rote behavior.

The mechanics of conventional deadline journalism reduce the flexibility and responsiveness of traditional media. So does their technology.

Second, blogs are cheap and easy to start., As a consequence, the number of blogs is exploding. As the network grows, the density of reportorial coverage thickens both geographically and in expertise.

When news happens in the future, there will be multiple bloggers on the scene with local knowledge that no network anchor can match. The more complicated the story, the better for the blogosphere because there will be bloggers who are experts in the subject and can, therefore, run rings around the average reporter.

We saw this happens in New Orleans. The posts from Interdictor were special because they live in NOLA. Moreover, it was not just commentary about what happened- they gave us an inside view of the struggle to keep a business running while the city flooded and its government collapsed. Today, they do the same as the city tries to recover.

Similarly, Anderson Cooper looked at the devastation and reacted like a spoiled little rich boy. He stamped his feet and demanded that some one do something. Molten Thoughts, OTOH, explained what the responders were facing and why what is desirable is not always feasible in an emergency.

It is worth noting that the new media challenge encompasses more than just 10 million bloggers blogging. Traditionally, only a few beat reporters covered press conferences, congressional hearings, and think-tank roundtables. Thanks to CSPAN these are now available to all of us. As broadband connections increase, video archives of these events will be even more widely used. Network news programs make their transcripts available on the web within a few hours of their broadcast. We used to depend on press photographers to grab the picture that defined an event. Now, the ubiquity of digital cameras and camera phones means that the photo record of big events is extensive, immediate, and out of the control of any media entity.

All of this undercuts the current production model of traditional media.

As the blogosphere develops, one of its cardinal virtues-its flexibility-will prove to be a crushing advantage in the competition with traditional media. Those bloggers on the spot when news breaks will get attention. For a brief moment, they will be the big dogs. So will those bloggers with specialized expertise. In contrast, a newspaper or cable network will have to send some one in from the outside. They will be locked into their current stock of expertise. It does not matter that most bloggers are sitting at home committing punditry. There are so many bloggers that there will always be a handful whose proximity and particular knowledge give them a decisive advantage in real reporting.

In the evolving battle for explanation space, Instapundit, Michelle Malkin, and Hit and Run act like the editors of a newspaper putting together the front page. The professionals at the LA Time are stuck with their in-house talent and the AP. The big blogs can choose form the whole wide, flat world.

Newspapers face one more problem in this competition. In the internal hierarchy of journalism, pundits outrank reporters. Being a columnist is the glamour job. The best and the brightest aspire to be Krugman and Dowd. In essence, the brand of a newspaper emphasizes the area where it is weakest vis-à-vis the blogosphere (punditry) and ignores those that it claims are it greatest strength (reporting).

New information on the cause of the NOLA flood

As usual, the early headlines did not get all of the story. Hence, the danger of hair-trigger punditry.

Floodwall Overtopping May Not Be to Blame

The system of levees and concrete walls that was supposed to protect the New Orleans area from flooding was breached in dozens of places, investigators said Friday, a finding that indicates that the failures were far more widespread than originally thought.

Engineers probing the failures said they are increasingly convinced that floodwaters did not overtop two key floodwalls that collapsed on Aug. 29, swamping large portions of the city.

Sounds like an urban legend

But it's true.

Weis grants little boy's dying wish

I'm no fan of Notre Dame. And i know all about their well-oiled publicity and myth-making machines. Still, it's hard to imagine this sort of thing coming out of the University of Miami (FL).

We'll always have newsprint

The indispensable David Warsh looks at the future of newspapers:

Fast Forward

Here, here

The first thing I've learned from this controversy is that if I were in a foxhole with someone from the National Review crowd, I'd be alone in that foxhole after the first shot was fired. When the going gets tough, they head for the hills, with a few snarky comments.

Jack Kelly at Irish Pennants.

Oklahoma suicide bombing

Gates of Vienna (love that name) is paying attention to the suicide bombing at the University of Oklahoma football game. He has a really good question here.

Here's another one: Why is Foxnews devoting so much time to a couple of missing teenagers and ignoring an important story like this?

FBI software

Photon Courier has not forgotten about the failure of the FBI's "VCF" software system. The disturbing news is that the Bureau is trying to bury the bad news about the project and to avoid public scrutiny of the problems that plagued its most important information-sharing initiative in the post-9/11 period.

I blogged about this here and here.

A dirty bait and switch

If K-mart or Merck tried something like this, Nightline and 20/20 would be all over the story. I guess they feel somewhat constrained by the fact that the victimizer was ABC television and their "Extreme Makeover" program.

A perfect football weekend


Pittsburgh 34, Tennessee 7

Ohio 16, Pittsburgh 10

Penn St. 42, Cincinnati 24

Double standard

Patterico touches on one of my pet peeves here :

I would have liked to have seen some reference to Padilla’s adopted name, Abdullah al Muhajir.

Why is it wrong to use Cassius Clay or Lew Alcindor but OK to use Jose Padilla or call Suleyman al-Faris by his old name John Walker Lindh?

This is just wrong.

Very wrong. I think Captain Ed hit the nail on the head:

Can you imagine the outcry from the multiculturalists and the ACLU had the design incorporated a cross or a Star of David in honor of the victims? Why should we tolerate the Crescent that, inadvertently or deliberately, honors the terrorists?

Michelle Malkin has a round-up.

Two real news stories on Katrina

This one from the Baltimore Sun shows what a resolute few can do even in the face of the worst adversity:

A do-it-ourselves shelter shines

In the week after Katrina pummeled the Gulf Coast, Anthion and others created a society that defied the local gangs, the National Guard and even the flood.

Inside the school, it was quiet, cool and clean. They converted a classroom into a dining room and, when a reporter arrived Monday, were serving a lunch of spicy red beans and rice. A table nearby overflowed with supplies: canned spaghetti, paper towels, water and Gatorade, salt, hot sauce, pepper.

At its peak last Wednesday, 40 people called the second and third floors home. The bottom floor was under water. Most of those taking up residence at the school were family, friends and neighbors of the poor, forgotten niches of this community.

This story from the New York Times has some facts that, if true, changes the whole picture on the federal response:

"While the situation in the Superdome was nightmarish and not satisfactory to anyone involved," Mr. Knocke said, "it was not a life-and-death situation, and we had to focus our priorities where we could."

Even so, he said relief crews delivered seven trailers filled with water and ready-to-eat meals to the Superdome before the storm hit on Aug. 29, along with another seven trailers on Aug. 30.

So the feds did deliver relief supplies to the Superdome early in the process. How did the media miss that?

Jay Rosen gets it

You have to be able to think, and if you can it doesn’t matter (for your journalism) if you break down and emote. If you can’t think, and draw conclusions that inform your reporting, then bringing passion to the table isn’t going to change a damn thing. Finally, I don’t think the challenge for American journalism is to recover its reason for being, but to find a better one. The world has changed. It’s not enough to be tough.

RTWT

Return of another Vietnam syndrome

Most of the better histories of Vietnam highlight the fact that the brass micro-managed the war and robbed small unit commanders of their initiative. A captain in a firefight soon found his radio crackling with messages, advice, and questions. Battalion and brigade headquarters wanted updates. On a bad day, his division commander would soon be circling the battlefield in a chopper. Saigon might join in. Instead of leading, the hapless company commander was briefing his chain of command while the bullets were flying.

Later, everyone seemed to agree that it was no way to run a war.

Today the media, with its instant global reach, forces the military to repeat those mistakes.

Al Jazeera reports that Marines fired on a mosque. CNN has pictures of a car shot at a checkpoint. Reporters clamor of answers at the White House, Pentagon, and CENTCOM HQ. Investigations are promised; information is gathered.

What does that mean for the men at the tip of the spear?

The same thing is happening in Louisiana. The cameras capture sickening images, the reporters profess outrage, the whole world sees and hears. Politicians pontificate and pundits lay blame. Answers are demanded.

There is no context nor is there any understanding of the vast logistical obstacles that the responders face. At the heart of the outrage is a collective confusion. Everybody on TV seems to think that everything that is desirable is always feasible. If it is feasible then every delay must be evidence of misfeasance or malfeasance. While we search for the guilty parties, we add to the friction that those on the ground face as they try to bring order out of chaos. Yes, lives are at stake, but all the yapping and faultfinding is not saving anyone.

Von Moltke said that no plan survives contact with the enemy. This is as true for disaster response as for a military campaign. Von Moltke's solution was to create an army whose officers could improvise when faced with the unexpected. But improvisation is career suicide when the media is second guessing every step of the process.

Responding to the Monday morning quarterbacks sucks up time, attention, and critical resources. At the tip of the spear, all of these are scarce and should not be squandered humoring the likes of Scarborough, Grace, or Greenfield.

UPDATE: This is a great discussion of the real world logistics involved in a seemingly inexplicable delay.

Pets

Two starkly divergent views here and here. Count me on the side of the big Texan.

The best

These two posts may be the best thing i've read on Katrina and her aftermath.

ABLE DANGER: Filling in the blank spaces

Two interesting articles that provide some useful background for ABLE DANGER.

The Houston Chronicle profiles Fran Townsend. Clearly, she has become a major player in the Bush administration.

But by all accounts, Townsend has impressed Bush with a tough efficiency and a bit of a swagger that resembles his own. Her influence has grown to the point that Cabinet secretaries and agency directors who do not normally return media calls about White House staff members rush to phone with lavish praise for a profile.

She is also not shy about using her clout:

Asa Hutchinson, then an undersecretary at the Department of Homeland Security, recalled that he deferred to his absent boss. But Townsend, the top White House adviser on counterterrorism and homeland security, had a higher authority to invoke. "You don't understand," she said. "The president will be calling momentarily. We need your position."
From a basement office in the West Wing, Townsend runs President Bush's far-flung campaign against terrorism. Her two predecessors were four-star generals who brought decades of experience to the fight. Townsend, 43, a former mob prosecutor, has a different credential - the president's ear.

Townsend may be Bush's Gorelick. ABLE DANGER raises serious questions about her leadership of OIPR. Yet her powerful role in the White House may hinder our ability to discover the whole story.

This is especially true if Donald Sensing is correct that Chertoff is in trouble as head of the Department of Homeland Security. What if Bush replaces Chertoff with Townsend as head of HS?

The other article is a 2001 piece that gives a flavor of how domestic counter-terrorist efforts by the military were viewed pre- 9/11.

Military role grows on home front

A couple of representative quotes:

Some argue that the role makes sense in light of the threat posed by modern terrorist groups. But a diverse coalition of civilian law enforcement agencies, civil rights advocates and libertarian groups worry about allowing the military to play so prominent a role on U.S. soil.
"There used to be a bright line separating the military from involvement in civilian affairs," says Steve Aftergood, who directs the Project on Government Secrecy at the American Federation of Scientists. "The pernicious aspect of terrorism is that it threatens to erode what is a clear distinction. We are seeing them on all these 'fronts.'"

And this:

Officials at several key civilian agencies - from the FBI to the Public Health Service and the Federal Emergency Management Agency - say the military's growing role in preparing for a domestic terrorist attack is disconcerting.
"We used to be the main people involved in this," said a domestic preparedness official with the Public Health Service who spoke only on condition of anonymity. "Now, there are fewer of us and more of them."

See also:

The Wall and Fran Townsend

Time to check the plans

Captain Ed and Hugh Hewitt are right-- let's hold off on the political debate for a few days. There is more important work to be done and in any case, we do not have enough facts yet. There is no point in adding yards of commentary to a handful of rumors.

The military has a saying: "amateurs talk about strategy; professionals talk about logistics." I think that second part applies to disaster relief. CNN sits in a hotel in the city and wonders why the trucks have not arrived with water. Behind that question lies a host of others. Cable news is oblivious to the importance of those other questions and this ignorance confirms their amateur status.

Irish Pennants is very good on this point.

Journalists who are long on opinions and short on knowledge have no idea what is entailed in moving hundreds of tons of relief supplies into an area the size of England in which power lines are down, no gasoline is available, and roads and airports were covered with water or debris. Yet this was done within four days of Katrina dissipating. The most monumental and successful disaster relief operation in world history is being libeled as a national disgrace.

Katrina has revealed weaknesses in our emergency response. In the coming weeks we can learn how to do better. But the key to that learning is asking the right questions and understanding what the real problems were.

All disaster recovery begins at the local level. The next disaster will happen some place other than New Orleans. Now is a great time for local media and bloggers to question our local agencies to make sure that the obvious mistakes of New Orleans are avoided. In particular, what happens on day 2 and 3? How solid are the steps to ensure that those people who evacuate will have food, water, and medical attention? Can those steps withstand an unexpected jolt?

The Harrisburg area has a well-publicized, well-defined evacuation plan because of Three Mile Island. I am confident that state and local government can get people out of harms way if that should be necessary. The potential problem, however, is that those people will be moved into rural areas. I'd like to know how the TMI plan addresses the need for food and water. I plan to ask many questions this week.

The Boy Scouts understand life's realities better than most journalists do. "Be prepared". (I think the Texas translation is even better.) A couple of small inexpensive items can do wonders in an emergency.

A tough flashlight and batteries. I'm partial to this one because the LEDs give outstanding battery life. (Up to 160 hours.)

Hand sanitizers, peroxide, and chlorine bleach.

A space blanket and disposable hand warmers can keep you comfortable if you have to spend the night in your vehicle or outdoors.

A multi-tool or Swiss Army knife is always a good thing to have at hand.

A water purifier. These are for campers, but they can save your life. They kill bacteria, parasites, and viruses. A nice thing to have if your water supply is compromised.

I keep my kit in a small bag in my truck. I've never had to use all of it at once, but I have used almost everything in it at one time or another. It has never been a life-threatening situation, but I was glad to have them anyway.

Jack Shafer speaks for me

Why cable news does a bad job with crisis coverage:

News you can lose

Good sense on disaster relief

Over at Macsmind

For example:

Getting help in isn't as easy as CNN or CBS would have you believe. Simply put you just don't drop a "pallet of food and water" into a crowd wating below. Unless you want to see little old people and the infirmed mauled by the "stronger".

Leadership

The slow disaster down in Louisiana makes one thing crystal clear. Crisis leadership is a rare thing and enormously valuable. The governor of Louisiana and the Mayor of New Orleans may be fine human beings. They may even be able administrators. But neither one of them is Rudolph Giuliani.

Katrina

The most important thing i have to say is contribute to the Salvation Army. Words are useless, political wrangling is almost obscene. No amount of blogging is going to get water to the people in dire need.

Post-modern war

Must reads from the Junk Yard Blog and Steven Den Beste (in the comments here)

The Wall and Fran Townsend

Captain's Quarters (which seems to be down) had a good post up that traced the development of the FISA "Wall" that goes beyond mere Gorelick-bashing. Of all the players he discusses, I think Fran Townsend is the most interesting. For one thing, she was Reno's most trusted advisor while still enjoying a good working relationship with Louis Freeh. For another, she is still in government.

This US News profile raises several other points.

1. It changes the context of the Rowley memo:

in November 2000, the FISA court held a rare meeting of the full court to discuss "wall" -related issues. "The chief judge was so annoyed with me," says Townsend, "that he wouldn't permit me personally to attend, because I had pushed so hard against the restrictions they had imposed." Others say the real root of Lamberth's anger at Townsend was the false information given by the FBI in dozens of wiretap applications to the FISA court. Lamberth declined to comment. But he told Reno's successor, Ashcroft, that he had lost faith in Townsend.

So it just was not obtuse bureaucrats at FBI headquarters who were scrutinizing FISA requests more carefully. Why? What was the FBI lying about?

2. What groups were being investigated when the FISA court approved those warrants based on "false information given by the FBI"? Was it al Qaeda? Or did the FBI have other high priority terrorism investigations going on?

3. Some of her critics suggest that Townsend kept the Wall high for reasons having nothing to do with Reno's wishes.

But others suspect an ulterior motive. Some Justice Department prosecutors felt Townsend wanted to keep the wall up because it kept prosecutors out of national security investigations, leaving more authority in the hands of Townsend and friendly bureau agents.

If Townsend used OIPR to keep prosecutors away from FBI national security investigations, did she do the same when it came to other agencies? Did the DOD lawyers fear that Townsend would resent SOCOM for encroaching on the turf of her beloved Bureau? The FBI has a well-established reputation for demanding to be the lead dog on every investigation it touches. Did Townsend restrain that impulse on counterterrorism matters? Or did she use her position at OIPR to encourage it?

ABLE DANGER: Catch-up time


Terry McDermott makes a good point about retrospective memories and high profile events in this LA Times column. It not quite the strong rebuttal to ABLE DANGER that some think. First, he weakens his case by dismissing something he does not understand:

Data mining is a technique in which huge databases are fed into powerful computers that sift them looking for links. It's a technology that holds vast promise, but its main usefulness to date seems to be giving mortgage lenders the ability to find out how much you still owe on your house.

Financial institutions have been doing more than that with data mining for more than 10 years. McDermott should know that if he is going "refute" the ABLE DANGER story. Maybe he should try googling "Capital One" and "strategy" just for a start. Or maybe "data mining" and "banking".

The even bigger problem is in McDermott's assertion that

Atta's academic, immigration, credit, transit and telephone records provide a fairly complete account from the time he left his native Egypt in autumn 1992 to his death. This includes the period during which Able Danger is said to have identified him as a terrorist in the United States. The story those records, and corroborating interviews, tell is that Atta was not in the United States and made almost no contact with the U.S. until June 2000.

Of course, he has to say that. He just invested years of his life writing a book based on the sources who thought they knew all about Atta and his movements based on cell phone records and credit card statements. The whole picture changes if al Qaeda knew how to defeat FBI surveillance and investigations. That is why Hanssen is important; why other security lapses in the FBI are of vital interest.

In my Tailhook post I wrote:

Pretend that you are one of the officers in charge or involved. Your program has promise but it has not caught any terrorists or prevented any attacks. The lawyers think you should shut it down. They are "concerned" that word will get out and ignite a media firestorm over civil liberties, high-tech invasions of privacy, and racial profiling. You suspect that they are right and you also are not confident that one of the lawyers will not leak the details to some obliging reporter.

If the story is leaked, who can you depend on? The brass? Congress? George H. W. Bush's son?

This NY Post story suggests that that mindset was at work when ABLE DANGER was shut down:

The private contractors working for the counter-terrorism unit Able Danger lost their jobs in May 2000. The firings following a series of analyses that Pentagon lawyers feared were dangerously close to violating laws banning the military from spying on Americans, sources said.

Captain Ed is right to suggest that pre-9/11 there would have been a bi-partisan frenzy if word of the Rice/China chart had leaked.

I am deeply skeptical of most of what I read about ABLE DANGER. It is not that I think anyone is lying. But the stories we read are coming to us at the end of a game of telephone where each succeeding listener has less knowledge of data mining, statistics, modeling, and probability. Too many journalists are functional innumerates. That is clear, for example, when the NY Post reporter writes that the data-mining group "pinpointed" Rice. Data mining tools do not usually "pinpoint" individuals. The do not have to in order to be successful. Maybe the report's source overstated the accuracy of their work. But I think it is more likely that the reporter used Perry Mason language to describe a probabilistic outcome.

I worry that information is getting lost in transmission. That might explain why Lt. Col. Shaffer has had a hard time making himself understood to non-technical listeners.

More on Hanssen and al Qaeda

A follow-up on Robert Hanssen's spying and the FBI's ability to track al Qaeda before and after 9-11.

This article repeats Vise's allegation that Hanssen indirectly helped AQ:

From 1982 until 2001, Hanssen gave away secrets including outlines of America's contingency plans for nuclear attack, the identities of Russian double agents, US intelligence plans, the existence of a spying tunnel under the Russian embassy in Washington and a software program that was later sold by a Russian individual to the al-Qaeda network, enabling Osama bin Laden to evade detection for two years before the September 11 attacks. The extent of Hanssen's spying led former CIA director William Webster to liken his actions to ''a 500-hundred-year flood".

This Fox News report makes the same point but is based on William Webster's investigation in the wake of Hanssen's arrest:

Hanssen sold the COIN applications to the Russians, and U.S. intelligence believes that the software was in turn provided to Al Qaeda leader Usama bin Laden by Russian organized-crime figures.

Government officials say the software may enable bin Laden to track the international investigation of terror assets and keep his money from being seized.

The United States is not the only nation to use the COIN software.

Another key quote from the Autrailian story:

"The Hanssen case was a wake-up call. The belief that serious spying ended with the Cold War couldn't be more wrong," Vise said. ''At the time of Hanssen's arrest [just over a year ago], there were more Russian spies in America than there were at the height of the Cold War. The intelligence community thinks they number in the thousands.

''The information and intelligence they gather is of tremendous value, not only to the person who steals it but to the person he sells it to, as we've seen in the al-Qaeda's purchase of intelligence software that Hanssen stole.

Here is Hanssen himself as reported by the Webster Commission:

"Any clerk in the bureau could come up with stuff on that system (FBI's Automated Case Support program). It was pathetic. It's criminal what's laid out. What I did was criminal, but it's criminal negligence what they've done on that system."

I think this information in important in light of Terry McDermott's blithe assertion that:

Atta's academic, immigration, credit, transit and telephone records provide a fairly complete account from the time he left his native Egypt in autumn 1992 to his death. This includes the period during which Able Danger is said to have identified him as a terrorist in the United States. The story those records, and corroborating interviews, tell is that Atta was not in the United States and made almost no contact with the U.S. until June 2000.

Good news but you would never know it from watching cable TV

Despite high-profile cases, sex-offense crimes decline

Government figures show the rate of sexual assaults against adolescents ages 12 to 17 plunged 79% from 1993 through 2003, and the number of substantiated sex-abuse cases involving kids of all ages fell 39% in the same time period.

This about sums it up

When the Able Danger saga is done, Curt Weldon will deserve one of two things: a Congressional Medal of Freedom for his courage, or a straight jacket for his lunacy. There really isn't a middle ground.

Over at the Junk Yad Blog.

Not all whistle-blowers are created equal

I cannot help but note that not all whistle-blowers are equal in the in the eyes of the MSM and the blogosphere. The blockbuster charges of Lt. Col. Shaffer are treated cautiously with a lot of watchful waiting for more evidence. That is as it should be. However, this go slow approach differs sharply from the reception given to three other famous whistle-blowers.

Colleen Rowley ended up on the cover of Time and is trying to parlay that celebrity into a congressional seat. The basis for her fame? A memo she wrote six months after 9-11 castigating FBI headquarters for slowing down the investigation of Zacarias Moussaoui in August 2001.

Her indictment of FBI headquarters was accepted as she presented it. There were few demands for corroboration, contemporary accounts, or concrete evidence that the dropped ball mattered. (An exception was Mark Levin whose article makes interesting reading.) Moussaoui's laptop has become part of the conventional wisdom as an unconnected dot that could have prevented 9-11.

The same is true with the Phoenix memo. (See here to gauge the gap between the reality and the myth.)

Finally, we have Joe Wilson. His charges that the President lied in the State of the Union were widely trumpeted in 2003 and still echo more than two years later. If ever a "whistle-blower" deserved some skepticism and demands for corroboration, it was Joe Wilson. (See this from Powerline). For some reason, he was considered a more trustworthy source than Lt. Col. Shaffer.

I'm at a loss to explain why Rowley and the Phoenix memo were deemed creditable but the ABLE DANGER material is considered suspect. To me, they all fall into the "interesting but verify" category. There is one key difference. We know now that Rowley and the Phoenix agents raised vague warnings too late to be actionable. ABLE DANGER is still an open question.

Politics, surely, worked to Joe Wilson's benefit. That best explains why his remaining wild, unsubstantiated charges ("my wife was outed as payback") are accepted even though so many of his statements have been shown to be false, misleading, and self-serving.

As others see us


If the rest of the world watches our cable news channels, they must really hate us now. Every evening on three channels the stereotype of the Ugly American is on display: bullying, ignorant, arrogant, shallow, emotional, crass, fake, and sentimental.

Thanks Big Media.

This Blogcritics post is terrific.

The view from Aruba

"From paradise to paradox in Aruba", by David Adams

A couple of choice pieces you won't hear from Nancy Grace:

A Texas search group of mostly middle-aged men with large waistlines held a press conference to announce they would appreciate some free food.
*************
"We feed them (the media) chum to keep them happy," said Jim Knox, a West Palm Beach businessman who is sponsoring a two-dog search team on the island. "We don't like doing it. We do it to keep the story alive."

Is a new Tet looming?

Check out this post over at the Junk Yard Blog:

IRAQI TET OFFENSIVE RUMOR

I never cared much for Bob Costas

but this week he is my journalistic hero.

Bob Costas Says No to Hour on Aruba

For Bob Costas, the issue was not complicated.

The longtime NBC sports and talk show host, who signed on this year to be an occasional substitute for Larry King on CNN, resisted a request last Thursday to be the host of a King program devoted to interviewing guests about the already widely covered Natalee Holloway missing-person case in Aruba.

Exactly right

"NRO has exceeded its weenie quotient"

ABLE DANGER: Who you ask determines the answer you get

When the 9-11 Commission set out on their task the first decision they had to make to make was "where to start?" which had within it the implied question "who to believe?" They needed to establish a basic framework about the timeline of the attacks themselves, who the perpetrators were, what the activities of the killers were before 9-11. That framework shaped the questions they asked, the problems they identified, and helped screen out information of dubious reliability.

Captain Ed noted how oddly the screening worked on the Able Danger material when it was presented to the Commission staff:

Having heard this from two separate sources, one would expect that the Commission would insist on getting the data from the Pentagon themselves. When people call in tips to investigators on criminal cases, do police refuse to follow up because they didn't provide video and fingerprint evidence when they called? Kean says that the Commission requested the data three times from the Pentagon and didn't get the documentation they wanted.

If the original framework is solid, then the staff was doing the smart thing. They cannot chase down every outrageous claim, so they ask the witnesses to provide some evidence.

But that is a big if. What if the initial framework is weak? This post by Douglas Farah at the Counter-terrorism Blog points to an inherent problem:

It was this type of thinking that led Commission staff to ignore the overwhelming evidence of al Qaeda's involvement in the diamond trade as well. They received information from the prosecutor and investigators for the Special Court for Sierra Leone that they deemed unlikely because it was not fitting with what the Community, either out or ignorance or malice, was telling them. They requested information in writing from me, and said they had read the book. But they did not find me, the Special Court, Belgian police reports or other investigations to fit the conventional wisdom. Worse yet, they specifically declined to interview eye witnesses that the Special Court offered to make available to them, with no conditions or restrictions.

These are serious omissions, as is the omission of the Able Danger information. Not everything could be run down or every lead chased in the time allotted to the Commission for its work. The Bush administration compounded the problem by slowing the release of information and fighting the Commission on many unnecessary issues. But these were not issues where it would have been hard to gather more information and at least weigh in that such information exists.

At the same time, the Commission noted in its Monograph on Terror Financing that "Terrorist financing was not a priority for either domestic or foreign intelligence collection. As a result, intelligence reporting on the issue was episodic, insufficient and often inaccurate" (p. 4). The Monograph added that both the CIA and FBI failed to "comprehend al Qaeda's methods of raising, moving or storing money" (pp. 5-6). Yet the Commission staff chose to use only the information of institutions singled out for failure to understand terror finance in its report.

That is a real kick in the gut: "Yet the Commission staff chose to use only the information of institutions singled out for failure to understand terror finance in its report."

I think there is a long list of issues where the Commission anchored its framework on suspect sources. They used the FBI timeline for Atta's movements, they relied on the CIA for questions of terror financing, they talked to Clarke and Berger about the thwarting of the LAX bombing but never talked to the woman who arrested the guy with the explosives at the border.

UPDATE: Captain's Quarters has another example i should have mentioned-- the reliance on KSM for many of the details about the inner workings of the plot and al Qaeda. For example:

How good was the data for the Atta timeline, and how solid did the Commission nail down his movements? Looking at the data on pages 167 and 168 of the report, it appears that all of the information that the Commission used to establish travel timelines for the Atta cell came from interrogations of Ramzi Binalshibh and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. These two AQ officers later also discounted Atta's travel to Prague in April 2001, despite the insistence of Czech intelligence that he met with the Iraqi envoy and an IIS agent at that time.

These guys might be the only game in town, but they are not fully cooperating with their interrogators. From the Commission report, p.514 note 4:

In an assessment of KSM’s reporting, the CIA concluded that protecting operatives in the United States appeared to be a “major part” of KSM’s resistance efforts. For example, in response to questions about U.S. zip codes found in his notebooks, KSM provided the less than satisfactory explanation that he was planning to use the zip codes to open new email accounts.