No End In Sight

The New York Times uses that expression to end an editorial about Iraq. Yes, there is no end in sight, alright. But not exactly what the NYT wrote.

Pretending things are better than they are will not make them so. America has some very hard strategic choices pressing down on it in Iraq — much more complicated than whether to set an arbitrary target date for troop withdrawal.

Should Washington continue to tolerate the operations of Shiite militias and death squads or should it use American military power to loosen their hold? Should the United States resign itself to slow-motion "ethnic cleansing" in some mixed areas or try to stop it by pouring more American troops into zones around Baghdad and Basra where the threat seems most acute? Is it more urgent to convince Iraq's Arab neighbors that they share a stake in Iraqi stability or to scare them off by proclaiming that America's larger goal in Iraq is to ratchet up the pressure for democratic change in a neighborhood almost universally ruled by authoritarians?

A Congressional leadership doing its job would hold hearings on these critical issues instead of setting partisan bear traps for November's election.

One could argue rather effectively that pretending things as worse than they are will also not make them so. Unlike the pontificators at the NY, I have a son serving in Iraq right now. He told me today, when he called to wish me a happy Father's day, that right now things are pretty hot for him, but that the troops think it will slow down as the terrorists run out of manpower.

In other words, there is no end in sight, alright. No end to the defeatism at the Times.

101st Blog Of The Day

My mission to visit one member of the fighting 101st each day today led me to the father of this whole 101st thing, Captain's Quarters. Captain Ed is out of the hospital and feeling quite a bit better than he was a few days ago. His latest post is asking whether Hamas will bend.

I've been doing this now for 44 days. Not bad. At this rate I'll be done by Christmas. It's only the year that's in question.

Sky (Again)

Oh heck, I started posting pictures of the sky, I might as well keep doing it.

Which Way Are The Rafts Headed?

Bill Whittle at Eject! Eject! Eject! has decided to write a book. And the one line, the one thing that makes it a must read, is the title of this post.

So throughout this book, we will try as best we possibly can to stay honest about what is actual coastline, and what is merely map. Perhaps an example will prove useful:

You can say that Ronald Reagan won the Cold War. I happen to believe that is largely true, although there were many elements at work. But that’s my map talking. Saying Reagan won the cold war is an assertion that I make, based on a very complex set of evidence. But I select that evidence. That’s not coastline. That’s map.

However, if I say that Capitalism defeated Communism economically in the Cold War, then I am talking coastline. Any rational person can look out the window and see that this was indeed what happened. Not only is Capitalism on the rise worldwide, but Communism is shrinking into progressively more awful failed states, and that is saying something. I can say that this is Coastline because if Soviet Communism had won, Ronald Reagan would have ended his days as a prisoner in a Siberian Gulag. That’s not what happened. What happened was that Mikhail Gorbachev appeared in a Pizza Hut commercial. I think most reasonable people would agree that that’s a win for capitalism. Coastline.

But that’s the past. Hindsight is 20/20. We can always look back at our wake and see where we have been; the challenge is to know where we are going. Predictive value would be nice. So here’s a better example of how we can use this kind of mental rigor to cut through competing maps of what is happening out in the real world.

Socialist intellectuals will tell you that Cuba is a model nation: universal free health care, near total literacy, and essentially no gap whatsoever between the rich and the poor. They call it an island paradise where brotherhood and compassion reign in stark contrast to the brutal inequalities of the heartless and racist capitalist monster to the North, ruled by its Imperial Nazi King, who is the devious mastermind of all manner of Conspiratorial Wheels and also a moron.

Capitalist intellectuals -– and there are not many, since most of these people have jobs -– argue that Cuba is a squalid, corrupt, poverty-ridden basket case, a land of oppression and secret police and torture chambers run by a megalomaniac who practices the most idiotic, inhuman and degrading economic system ever invented.

So here we sit in the chartroom, with our competing maps. What to think?

Well, ask yourself what it would take to give up your home, your country, your family and all your friends. Ask yourself how desperate you would have to be to sneak out in the night, and strap your family – your grandmother and infant son – to a collection of inner tubes lashed together and set out in the dark surf across 90 miles of shark-infested water in the dead of night, hoping against hope to make landfall. We can all agree, I think, that that kind of desperation could only be driven by fairly passionate first-person opinion of such things. Surely this goes beyond what you or I would do to win a map argument at Starbucks.

So. Go up on deck, get out the telescope, and answer one simple question for me and for yourself:

Which way are the rafts headed?

It is well worth your time to read this.

Murtha Flambé

I suspect John Murtha may have finally done a major amount of damage to himself today. I did not watch his appearance on Meet The Press today, but have read the transcript. Now the left wing might want to cherry pick a single quote out and get all excited about it, but the whole thing reads, well, just a bit different than the left would like it to.

MR. RUSSERT: The president says, “stay the course,” that within the next six months, Iraq will be secure under the direction of the new prime minister, and to do anything less now would be irresponsible.

REP. MURTHA: Well, “stay the course” is “stay and pay.” This is the thing that has worried me right along. We’re spending $8 billion dollars a month, $300 million dollars a day. And to give you some perspective of what that means, Gates said, “I’m going to quit the corporation, or I’m going to—less time with the corporation.” Well, you weigh $30 billion dollars. That’s four months of the cost of this war. This port security, if you want to spend more money, it’d would take 47 years the way we’re spending it. Education, the No Child Left Behind, a couple months of the war would pay for that. Whose going to, whose going to pay for this down the road? Our children and grandchildren are paying for this war. And then you have the, the, the emotional strain, the, the, the people who are being hurt.

On the floor the other day, you may have heard this, one fellow says, “We’re fighting this war.” We’re not fighting this war. One percent of the American people, these young men and women are fighting this war, with heavy packs, with 70 pounds of equipment, with helmets on in 130 degrees. That’s who’s fighting this war. And they say “stay the course.” There’s no plan. You open up this plan for victory, there’s no plan there. It’s just “stay the course.” That doesn’t solve any problem.

It’s worse today than it was six months ago when I spoke out initially. When I spoke out, the garbage wasn’t being collected, oil production below pre-war level—all those things indicated to me we weren’t winning this, and it’s the same today, if not worse. Anbar Province. There’s not one project been done in Anbar Province. Two million people live there. They have no water at all, no oil production, they have no electricity at all in that province where is the heartland of the defense. The first six months we went in there, no—there—not a shot was fired, so it shows you how it’s changed.

It’s getting worse. That’s why I feel so strongly. All of us know how important it is internationally to win this war. We know how important. We import 20 million barrels of oil a day—we use 20 million barrels of oil. We know how important, international community. But we’re doing it all ourself, and there’s no plan that makes sense. We need to have more international cooperation. We need to redeploy our troops, the periphery. What happened with Zarqawi could have been done from the out—it was done from the outside. Our planes went in from the outside. So there’s no reason in the world that they can’t redeploy the troops. They’ve become the targets, they’re caught in the civil war, and I feel very strongly about it.

MR. RUSSERT: You sure do, Congressman, but so does the White House. Karl Rove, the principal political adviser to the president, went to New Hampshire on Monday, and he talked about Democrats who voted for the war and who have now changed their opinion. Here’s what he had to say, and I’ll give you a chance to respond.

(Videotape, June 12, 2006):

MR. ROVE: Like too many Democrats, it strikes me they are ready to give the green light to go to war, but when it gets tough and when it gets difficult, they fall back on that party’s old pattern of cutting and running. They may be with you at the first shots, but they are not going to be there for the last tough battles. They are wrong, and profoundly wrong, in their approach.

(End of videotape)

MR. RUSSERT: Cutting and running.

REP. MURTHA: He’s, he’s in New Hampshire. He’s making a political speech. He’s sitting in his air conditioned office with his big, fat backside, saying, “Stay the course.” That’s not a plan. I mean, this guy—I don’t know what his military experience is, but that’s a political statement. This is a policy difference between me and the White House. I disagree completely with what he’s saying.

Now, let’s, let’s—give me, give you an example. When we went to Beirut, I, I said to President Reagan, “Get out.” Now, the other day we were doing a debate, and they said, “Well, Beirut was a different situation. We cut and run.” We didn’t cut and run. President Reagan made the decision to change direction because he knew he couldn’t win it. Even in Somalia, President Clinton made the decision, “We have to, we have to change direction. Even with tax cuts. When we had a tax cut under Reagan, we then had a tax increase because he had to change direction. We need to change direction. We can’t win a war like this.

This guy’s sitting back there criticizing—political criticism, getting paid by the public taxpayer, and he’s saying to us, “We’re, we’re winning this war, and they’re running.” We got to change direction, that’s what we have to do. You can’t, you can’t sit there in the air conditioned office and tell these troops they’re carrying 70 pounds on their back inside these armored vessels and hit with IEDs every day, seeing their friends blown up, their buddies blown up, and he says “stay the course.” Yeah, it’s easy to say that from Washington, D.C.

Murtha is quite incoherent if you read the whole transcript (here). He is also quite wrong. That is not my opinion, that is the opinion of my son who, unlike John Murtha, is not sitting on his big, fat ass in a studio pontificating about what my son is experiencing.

Keep talking, Murtha. Irey is gaining on you every time you open your mouth.

UPDATE: Others who are really impressed with Murtha. Protein Wisdom, Sundries Shack, Blackfive, Just One Minute. Worst thing is, I missed the Okinawa reference when trying to speed read through the transcript. Doh. Murtha is worse than clueless. He's actually able to suck intelligence out of a room.

Running Right

Well, Senator Joe Biden is making no bones about his intention to try to secure the nomination for President. He's also trying very hard to stake out the territory on the right side of the Democratic party. While it's refreshing to not hear someone in the Democratic party trying to pander to the far left, a la John "Hey, look! I have a hat!" Kerry, Biden still appears to have a tin ear about some things.

"The next Democrat, whether it's me or Sen. Clinton or John Kerry, whomever — the Democratic nominee — they'd better be able to ante up right in front of the American people two things: security and faith," he said.

President Bush beat Kerry in 2004 because people wanted to believe he would keep them safe, Biden said. The mothers who voted for him still want one thing primarily: "Security for their families, physical security," he said.

Biden also criticized Democrats for their sometimes patronizing approach to religion, saying believers of different faiths don't expect everyone to join them.

"They just want to know we respect them," he said. "If we can't negotiate the faith issue, forget it, we won't win."

Biden argued in favor of more money for homeland security, saying in his conversations with the nation's wealthy, he found them willing to forgo their Bush tax cuts for the cause.

He also spoke about a bill he is backing that would require all automobiles to be "flex-fuel," by 2008, able to run on more than just gasoline.

The tax cut verbiage is just silly, class warfare rhetoric. Biden knows it and is foolish to try that card. The flex fuel bill is also a way to hit consumers with an additional cost, which amounts to a tax. The impact on the lower income people will be disproportionately heavy, defeating his class warfare strategy. What's really needed here is a Democrat who understands that the Sale of Two Cities approach is a loser. Most people don't buy it any longer. Too bad the "elite" in the party don't get it. Instead of trying to paint a picture of two classes, try to appeal to everyone, all of us, getting ahead.

Bombs

An article in the Washington Post describes how US forces in Afghanistan are using more air strikes than are being used in Iraq. This is a surprise? There are 22,000 troops in Afghanistan. There are 130,000 in Iraq. One would expect the US forces would call more air support.

"I think the Taliban realize they have a window to act," Army Maj. Gen. Benjamin Freakley, commander of the 22,000 U.S. troops in the country, said in a recent interview. "The enemy is working against a window that he knows is closing."

But some experts believe that the Taliban, the fundamentalist Muslim rulers ousted by the U.S. invasion in 2001, have sensed an opening in the south as the central government in Kabul has failed to gain much influence there and as the United States prepares to transfer command to NATO.

"I think it is an attempt by the Taliban to preempt the changeover from coalition to NATO command," said Barnett R. Rubin, a political scientist at New York University. "They are trying to show that there is a war in the south and that the British, Dutch, Canadian or any other forces will have to take casualties and fight, not just patrol and build schools. They hope that this will have an impact on internal politics in these countries."

The arrival of late spring, historically the beginning of Afghanistan's fighting season, usually brings an increase in combat. Since early May, a resurgent Taliban militia has launched numerous attacks in southern Afghanistan in which more than 300 insurgents, soldiers and civilians have died. It has attacked in larger numbers and more frequently, burning 200 schools in the south and driving out foreign aid groups. Suicide bombings, a tactic relatively new to Afghanistan, have also increased.

Commanders say the combat is more intense than in the past three springs, both on the ground and from the air. The offensive has coincided with an effort to wipe out opium poppy crops in the south, resulting in an alliance between wealthy drug traders and anti-government Taliban forces. Anti-government fighters are moving in where the government has left a vacuum, especially where there is money to be made from drug trafficking and extortion.

I suspect there are several factors driving this push by the Taliban. One of those is very likely the disarray they perceive due to disarray on the part of the US at home. They are really hoping for that last helicopter moment. We have to be sure not to give it to them.

Oh, Bull

You know, I probably read more news than is really good for me sometimes. I've always been a news junkie, and frankly, the internet hasn't been helpful in curbing that particular passion. But for all the news I read, this is the first - and I mean the very first - time I ave seen this particular meme. It's in Newsday, which is not one of the more, shall we say, conservative news out lets. But even for them, this is, I think, over the top. They say speculation is growing that Scooter Libbey will be pardoned.

And the entire article, from start to finish, is complete and utter smoke. There is no there there. At all.

WASHINGTON — Now that top White House aide Karl Rove is off the hook in the CIA leak probe, President George W. Bush must weigh whether to pardon former vice presidential aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, the only one indicted in the three-year investigation.

Speculation about a pardon began in late October, soon after Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald unsealed the perjury indictment of Libby, and it continued last week after Fitzgerald chose not to charge Rove.

The author goes on, at some length but this is the most blatantly speculative piece of writing masquerading as news I have read recently.

Frankly, I don't like, and never have, Fitzgerald's charges. Saying someone lied about a "crime" when the underlying "crime" itself has never been proved to exist at all, is a real problem. A charge such as this a bigger threat to liberty than the supposed "crime" that is alleged to have occurred.

UPDATE: A few others really impressed with Newsday's coverage: A Blog For All, Sundries Shack, Outside The Beltway,

And Now A Word From An Alternate Universe

Bill Clinton addressed a gathering of Alternative Newsweeklies the other day. It was an alternative alright. A completely alternate universe in which Clinton decried "divisive politics" with a perfectly straight face.

LITTLE ROCK (AP) — Former President Bill Clinton said Saturday that, if he returns to the White House in 2008 because his wife becomes president, his role would be to "do whatever she wants" because that's what a good citizen would do.

Clinton said he didn't know if U.S. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, a Democrat from New York seeking re-election this year, would run for president in two years as some have speculated, but he predicted a woman could win the most powerful office in the world.

Asked at an Association of Alternative Newsweeklies convention what his role would be if his wife were elected, the former two-term president said, "I'll do whatever she wants, and I have no idea what that is. I honestly don't know whether she's going to run."

Clinton said he believes his wife would make a good president and has been a better senator than he expected she would be, becoming knowledgeable about national security, commerce, political relationships, and other issues.

"The idea of her being polarizing is a lot of baloney," he said, referring to a popular image that also was tagged onto his presidency.

I have mentioned this before, I noticed political discourse slide into nastiness faster and further while Clinton was in office than at any other time since I have been paying attention to politics. While it's real popular on the left to blame that on conservatives, it was Hillary that started the "Vast Right Wing Conspiracy" meme shortly after Clinton took office. Things went downhill from there.

The other howler in his speech, incidentally is this line:

"You have to make a world with more partners and fewer terrorists," he said. "And we know how to do that."

Considering Clinton's appalling record on combating terrorism, I frankly would have been rolling on the floor laughing had I been present at that little soirée.

Star For A Day

A six year old girl from Boise Idaho became a superhero named Star for a day:

When she donned her blue and metallic superhero costume, Star took on the super-powers of X-ray vision, superhuman strength, speed and blowing power — and a mission: To capture the villain who had stolen a golden star from the Idaho Historical Museum.

After Star was alerted by authorities, she hopped on a Life Flight helicopter to reach the crime scene, where she found a clue linking the crime to a known evildoer.

The chase was on, with plenty of opportunities for Star to use her superpowers along the way.

Before catching the bad guy, she rescued people from a "smoke"-filled building, saved a citizen from drowning in ParkCenter Pond, and vindicated ferrets at Zoo Boise who had been framed for stealing the golden star.

It was a busy day for Aubrey, a little girl with an incredible imagination whose biggest foe is the inoperable optic glioma tumor growing in the center of her brain. The tumor was diagnosed when Aubrey was 6 months old.

The Idaho Make-A-Wish foundation made the day happen for the little girl. Read it all, but have the tissues handy.

Turkey In The News

In a move to set a world record, a young Turkish man studied extremely hard for months to prepare for the notoriously difficult centralized college entrance exam. We're talking really burning the midnight oil here, too, since the man is already in a college studying construction engineering. But he has a very special world's record in mind and he needed to study to be sure he knew the right answers.

So he could answer them incorrectly.

"I'm confident. It's a very high possibility that I will end up with zero correct answers," he told Anatolia news agency.

Boyar has been the focus of media attention since he announced last month he would attempt to give wrong answers to all 180 questions in protest against the country's notoriously complicated university entrance exam, an ordeal for students and families.

Boyar, who is already studying construction engineering at a leading Ankara university, explained that he studied hard ahead of the exam because he still had to find the right answers before marking a wrong one.

Since four wrong answers eliminate one correct one, Boyar is aiming at a total of minus 45 points.

For Turkish youths, the centralized exam is a culmination of years of study, both at schools and on costly private courses. Only about a quarter succeed.

And you thought the SATs were tough. Well, best of luck to Mr. Boyar. Or should that be worst of luck? One is unsure of the proper phrasing in a case like this.

Elsewhere in Turkey, The Turkish public broadcasting company is busily defending it's decision to ban Disney's Winnie The Pooh  and other western cartoons that feature characters who happen to be pigs. Like Piglet.

Turkish Radio and Television (TRT) said late Saturday media reports that "Winnie the Pooh" and other cartoons featuring pigs had been barred "are untrue and aim to discredit the institution".

In a statement carried by the Anatolia news agency, TRT said it had acquired the exclusive right to broadcast Walt Disney's cartoons and movies in Turkey but added, "the Walt Disney materials have not been acquired yet… (and) therefore the cartoon 'Winnie the Pooh' does not exist in TRT records and archives".

Islam regards pigs as unclean and prohibits the consumption of pork.

TRT is controlled by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's Islamist-rooted government, which is under fire for seeking to raise the profile of Islam in mainly Muslim but strictly secular Turkey.

Nice of them to be so careful about licensing, isn't it? I mean they get exclusive rights, then fail to actually, you know, acquire the material for broadcast. But it's not about Piglet. Really. Honest. Trust us.

And finally, here's a really well written portrait of a Turkish café and the people who work from it daily.

Time passes. The man nestled in the corner, a dentist playing hooky with a hookah, slips an X-ray back into a teal folder labeled "Confi-Dent," pulls out a toothpick and polices his teeth. Two girls and three boys pass a comic book between them. Tea is ordered.

"I wish I'd left," says a teenager, smiling nervously. His fingertips pull the ends of his sweater into his palms. "If I'd left, it wouldn't have happened."

Someone, it seems, had jumped out a window at a party. "The cops came," his friend says. But he's smiling. Everyone is.

One set of beanbags over, a man takes a sheaf of currency from a business associate. Big bills. He holds a 100-lira note to the pale sunlight. The watermark emerges: the ghost image of Kemal Ataturk, founder of Turkey, arching an eyebrow at the bearer. "You have to be careful," the man says. "They even make fake coins. I'm serious."

The approach of 4 p.m. finds the man with the scarf, named Ahmet, bent over a crossword puzzle. In Turkish newspapers they take up a whole page, the boxes an inch square, as if the whole nation were nearsighted.

" Buyrun!" a waiter calls to a clutch of three young men in black. "If you please!" They keep walking.

The sycamore branches riffle, the breeze slackening like the afternoon. A customer approaches the cashier to settle up. Ahmet hovers.

Read the whole thing. You can hear the wind in the sycamore branches.

And Some People Will Still Make Excuses

The Baltimore Sun:

Paul Schrum wanted to see X-Men: The Last Stand, but his wife wasn't interested in the film. So on Thursday evening- which is her night for mah-jongg with friends - he hugged her, kissed her on the cheek, and headed off to a multiplex up the road in Owings Mills.

When hours passed without his return, Rona Schrum went looking for her husband. It was after 1 in the morning when she pulled into the movie theater parking lot and saw his car - and many police officers.

In what police described as a random attack, Paul Schrum, a 62-year-old medical supplies salesman from Pikesville, was shot dead while watching a movie at Loews Valley Center 9 in Owings Mills. About 20 minutes into the film, police said, the gunman stood, told everyone to get on the floor and fired four shots.

The man then walked to the lobby, placed a handgun containing one unspent round on a counter and told theater management that he had shot someone. He waited for police to arrive.

Yesterday, as friends tried to comfort her, Rona Schrum said, "I will probably never understand why God has chosen to do that to me."

The suspect is a 24-year-old man, a 2000 graduate of Mount Hebron High School in Howard County and a 2005 graduate of Loyola College, where he majored in biology. Mujtaba Rabbani Jabbar's family home is a house valued at more than $1 million in one of Baltimore County's most affluent neighborhoods.

Random target, random Jihad. Affluent family. Houston we have a problem.

And some people wonder why I carry a gun.

Stupidity Repeating Itself

Sweetness and Light has a great post up about John Murtha and his cut and run track record. It also details the consequences of following Murtha's prescription. Murtha has been showing his true colors for many years and S&L has the details.

By the way, that color would be yellow.

Support Diana Irey for Congress and send Murtha into retirement before his policies kill more Americans.

UPDATE: Hot Air. Enough said.

A Helpful Guide

From Time magazine comes a handy little guide on how to kill lots of people. Oh, and a signed death warrant for an informant. They explain what ingredients are needed and give a hint on the device you need to make it work. Gee, thanks, Time. Then they announce:

Conventional wisdom has long held that the U.S. has no human intelligence assets inside al Qaeda. "That is not true," writes Suskind. Over the previous six months, U.S. agents had been receiving accurate tips from a man the writer identifies simply as "Ali," a management-level al-Qaeda operative who believed his leaders had erred in attacking the U.S. directly. "The group was now dispersed," writes Suskind. "A few of its leaders and many foot soldiers were captured or dead. As with any organization, time passed and second-guessing began."

And when asked about the Mubtakkar and the names of the men arrested in Saudi Arabia, Ali was aware of the plot. He identified the key man as Bin Laden's top operative on the Arabian Peninsula, Yusuf al Ayeri, a.k.a. "Swift Sword," who had been released days earlier by Saudi authorities, unaware that al-Ayeri was bin Laden's point man in the kingdom.

Now, I realize Time is getting all this from Ron Suskind's new book that they are excerpting, but what in the heck possesses Suskind or Time to publish this kind of stuff? Will Suskind or Time take any heat when someone follows their handy little how-to guide? Will they be accountable when "Ali" is beheaded? Even if Ali is never detected, do you think anyone else is going to cooperate with US intelligence knowing that people like Suskind and Time magazine are going to do their level best to out them?

Who's best interests are you working for, again? I don't see how you have served any public interest, except maybe the terrorist's.

UPDATE: Others: Protein Wisdom, Outside the Beltway, Ann Althouse, The Sundries Shack, Classical Values, Blogs of War, Mac's Mind, Security Watchtower, Patterico, Powerline, Hot Air, Srata-Sphere,

Smackdown

Joe Lauria writes in today's Washington Post about Jason Leopold and some very shady dealings. It seems that Leopold may have pretended to be Lauria when trying to bully a story out of Mark Corallo. It is definite that someone using Lauria's name and his cell phone number, altered by a single digit, did contact Corallo repeatedly. Lauria had met with Leopold several days before Truthout's flame-out story about Rove's indictment. That meeting had been about Leopold's book, not Rove.

Three days later, Leopold's Rove story appeared. I wrote him a congratulatory e-mail, wondering how long it would be before the establishment media caught up.

But by Monday there was no announcement. No one else published the story. The blogosphere went wild. Leopold said on the radio that he would out his unnamed sources if it turned out that they were wrong or had misled him. I trawled the Internet looking for a clue to the truth. I found a blog called Talk Left, run by Jeralyn Merritt, a Colorado defense lawyer.

Merritt had called Mark Corallo, a former Justice Department spokesman who is now privately employed by Rove. She reported that Corallo said he had "never spoken with someone identifying himself as 'Jason Leopold.' He did have conversations Saturday and Sunday . . . but the caller identified himself as Joel something or other from the Londay [sic] Sunday Times. . . . At one point . . . he offered to call Joel back, and was given a cell phone number that began with 917. When he called the number back, it turned out not to be a number for Joel."

A chill went down my back. I freelance for the Sunday Times. My first name is often mistaken for Joel. My cellphone number starts with area code 917.

I called Corallo. He confirmed that my name was the one the caller had used. Moreover, the return number the caller had given him was off from mine by one digit. Corallo had never been able to reach me to find out it wasn't I who had called. He said he knew who Leopold was but had never talked to him.

Lauria has every reason to be quite angry about this. Truthout has a major problem on it's hands if they continue to stand by Leopold. If you obtain a story by lying, are you really any better than your subject?