judgment day

Today's Editorials: How to Hack an Election

Buried in this Atlanta Journal-Constitution follow up is an acknowledgement that the unnecessary war with Iraq impeded efforts to stop al-Qaida: "U.S. officials stressed Wednesday that no military operations would be carried out inside Pakistan without Musharraf's approval. At a news conference at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, last week, the Pakistani president ruled out such operations.

'No sir, that is not a possibility at all. It's a very sensitive issue,' Musharraf said, when asked if he would consider allowing U.S. troops to search for bin Laden in Pakistan. 'There is no room for any foreign elements coming and assisting us, we don't need any assistance.'

One U.S. official said Pakistan is by far the most important country in the U.S. effort to find bin Laden and several top aides.

'In our list of the top 10 countries who can help us in this,' one U.S. official said, 'eight of them are Pakistan.'

Pentagon proponents of launching military operations in Pakistan argue that it would be in Musharraf's 'enlightened self-interest' to allow the United States to hunt down remnants of the Taliban and al-Qaida before they assassinate him or launch another attack on the scale of Sept. 11, 2001, said the U.S. official.

Afghanistan, U.S. officials said, is becoming increasingly chaotic as Taliban and al-Qaida fighters ratchet up attacks on U.S. and other Western forces. On Wednesday, a British soldier was killed and four were injured when a suicide car bomber exploded a taxi near British troops in Kabul in the second suicide attack against foreign peacekeepers in two days. The Land Rover was carrying about 200 pounds of explosives, Afghan officials told reporters.

"In the winter, the objective was to kill or capture Taliban and al-Qaida in their hiding places," a senior defense official said, on condition of anonymity. "In the spring, the idea is to kill or capture Taliban and al-Qaida as they emerge from their winter hiding places."

Officials said Thursday that the capture in December of former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein has freed resources to press the hunt for bin Laden and his fighters.

"There's an obvious ability now to refocus human assets on a far grander scale," the U.S. official said. "It's logical that the hunter-killer types would now be turned loose to deal with this more aggressively."

I think you're right, and that is one reason I haven't been particularly troubled about it. I wish he'd gotten up and given a Byrd speech (can you believe he's turned into a model of political courage?!), but the vote was going through and I do think it would put him in a better position come November. And if there are folks out there who are going to stay home or vote for Uncle Joe Nader or some other father substitute they think is perfect, then they would have found some other excuse if Kerry (or whoever the nominee is) had voted against the resolution. My nephew isn't sure he's going to bother getting an absentee ballot, but said maybe and independent would come along to make it worth the trouble. I had a hard time not hittiong him upside the head with a two by four. He figures Bush isn't that big a threat, since we're overextended militarily so they won't invade anyplace else. I'll have to send him the Tribune story. As the K said, "Amazing how short a time it took to prove Sean wrong."

This was the headline story on the front page of Wednesday's leftist Chicago Tribune, and yet, nary a mention shows up in the rest of the so-called liberal media as far as I saw -- not the Times, not the AP headlines, not anywhere else I was on the web. Did you see it anywhere?

And going on the offensive is what they do best. If you parse her argument, Rice is saying (1) even the best intelligence is uncertain, so (2) it's Saddam's fault that we talked as if it weren't, because he coyuld have told us that he had destroyed it all (oh wait, he did) or allowed inspectors unlimited access (oh wait, he did), but (3) it's all besides the point because he's a bad guy.

9/11 Commission Says It Needs More Time to Complete Inquiry and Karl needs to figure out how to make this go away without seeming like crass political concerns are driving decisions about finding out how 9/11 could have happened and how to prevent a repeat. My guess is they drag out the dispute over an extension long enough to make, say, the second week of November seem like a reasonable date. That's about four months of further foot-dragging though, which could be tough to pull off without calling lots of attention to the issue.

I have no idea what the report will say or what went wrong (or if anything went wrong in the sense of it being preventable -- though I'd be surprised if that were true). But you've got to figure, separate from what scum you and I know these guys are, that they must know something is bound to come out that will make them look bad. Otherwise, why fight this commission every step of the way? So I guess the efforts to avoid a commission, followed by the efforts to stack the commission, followed by the efforts to keep the commission from getting information, followed by this convinces me taht they screwed something up and know they did.

Makes you long for the probity of: "It depends on what the meaning of is, is." Of course, the head of the House Intelligence Committee manages to insinuate that this all is Clinton's fault. Whatever happened to the party that decries the victim mentality, that demands that people take personal responsibility rather than look for others to blame for their troubles and failings? (P.S. Miller just assumed that giving W. a free pass was a tenet of the code of journalistic ethics.)

Gen. Wesley K. Clark Remarks on Open Government . . . pretty good stuff, and you get to read his tax returns.

Hendrik Hertzberg goes after the mission to Mars and the SOTU -- I especially like the closing grafs.

After hyping his findings in the SOTU, Bush can't be too happy to read this headline: Kay: U.S. Must Explain Iraq WMD Research