Is This Really A Bad Thing?

The New York Times, an ever reliable conduit for leaking details about the US war on terror comes out today with a story that a special unit in the CIA formed under the Clinton Administration to hunt Osama bin Laden has been dismantled.

The unit, known as Alec Station, was disbanded late last year and its analysts reassigned within the C.I.A. Counterterrorist Center, the officials said.

The decision is a milestone for the agency, which formed the unit before Osama bin Laden became a household name and bolstered its ranks after the Sept. 11 attacks, when President Bush pledged to bring Mr. bin Laden to justice "dead or alive."

The realignment reflects a view that Al Qaeda is no longer as hierarchical as it once was, intelligence officials said, and a growing concern about Qaeda-inspired groups that have begun carrying out attacks independent of Mr. bin Laden and his top deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri.

Agency officials said that tracking Mr. bin Laden and his deputies remained a high priority, and that the decision to disband the unit was not a sign that the effort had slackened. Instead, the officials said, it reflects a belief that the agency can better deal with high-level threats by focusing on regional trends rather than on specific organizations or individuals.

"The efforts to find Osama bin Laden are as strong as ever," said Jennifer Millerwise Dyck, a C.I.A. spokeswoman. "This is an agile agency, and the decision was made to ensure greater reach and focus."

The decision to close the unit was first reported Monday by National Public Radio.

Michael Scheuer, a former senior C.I.A. official who was the first head of the unit, said the move reflected a view within the agency that Mr. bin Laden was no longer the threat he once was.

Mr. Scheuer said that view was mistaken.

"This will clearly denigrate our operations against Al Qaeda," he said. "These days at the agency, bin Laden and Al Qaeda appear to be treated merely as first among equals."

The loading of the objections at the front of the story are, of course, typical of the Times reporting of late. Here's the part that caught my eye.

In his book "Ghost Wars," which chronicles the agency's efforts to hunt Mr. bin Laden in the years before the Sept. 11 attacks, Steve Coll wrote that some inside the agency likened Alec Station to a cult that became obsessed with Al Qaeda.

"The bin Laden unit's analysts were so intense about their work that they made some of their C.I.A. colleagues uncomfortable," Mr. Coll wrote. Members of Alec Station "called themselves 'the Manson Family' because they had acquired a reputation for crazed alarmism about the rising Al Qaeda threat."

Intelligence officials said Alec Station was disbanded after Robert Grenier, who until February was in charge of the Counterterrorist Center, decided the agency needed to reorganize to better address constant changes in terrorist organizations.

Now, that sounds like the special unit may have felt themselves to be just a bit too special to me. It makes me wonder if the people might not need to get a little broader focus. Tunnel vision can be a bad thing, too.

Cognitive Dissidents

EJ Dionne writes in the Washington Post a paean to dissidents, patriotism and history of the United States. I think he's got it both right and wrong. Yes, many of our advances as a nation have come about by dissidents pushing the envelope. Martin Luther King is one example Dionne cites, Frederick Douglass is another.

Have you ever noticed a certain hesitant quality to the expressions of patriotism by progressives or left-wingers?

The patriotism of the conservative goes unquestioned. It's assumed that every politician on the right will wear a flag on his lapel and effortlessly hold forth on ours as "the greatest country in the history of the world."

You can be certain that on this, as on every July 4th, patriotic oratory will flow as well from liberals declaring their love of flag, country and the Declaration of Independence. Many will speak of how our constitutional republic is to be revered especially for its guarantees of liberty and justice for all and — hint, hint — limits on the powers of overreaching monarchs.

But the progressive and the reformer have a problem with what passes for unadulterated patriotism. By nature, the reformer is bound to insist that the country, however glorious, is not a perfect place, that it is capable of doing wrong as well as right. The nation that declared "all men are created equal" was, at the time those words were written, the home of an extensive system of slavery.

Most reformers guard their patriotic credentials by moving quickly to the next logical step: that the true genius of America has always been its capacity for self-correction. I'd assert that this is a better argument for patriotism than any effort to pretend that the Almighty has marked us as the world's first flawless nation.

One need only point to the uses that Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr. made of the core ideas of the Declaration of Independence against slavery and racial injustice to show how the intellectual and moral traditions of the United States operate in favor of continuous reform.

There is, moreover, a distinguished national tradition in which dissident voices identify with the revolutionary aspirations of the republic's founders. Frederick Douglass, the former slave turned anti-slavery champion, offered the classic text in his 1852 address often published under the title: "What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?"

"To say now that America was right, and England wrong, is exceedingly easy," Douglass declared. "Everybody can say it. . . . But there was a time when, to pronounce against England, and in favor of the cause of the colonies, tried men's souls. They who did so were accounted in their day, plotters of mischief, agitators and rebels, dangerous men. To side with the right, against the wrong, with the weak against the strong, with the oppressed against the oppressor! here lies the merit, and the one which, of all others, seems unfashionable in our day."

Yes, these were great men and considered to be very much dissidents, rebels and, in the end, heroes. But America also has had it's share of dissidents who history has not treated kindly. We have had our Utopians, we have had our homegrown terrorists, we have had our misfits and malcontents. We have even had our outright evil ones.

So yes, we should welcome the discourse and we should not cede authority for declaring what is and is not patriotic to the party in power at the moment.

We should also shy away from glorifying dissent for it's own sake. Ultimately, this country has a genius for figuring out what is right and what is wrong. It sometimes takes years, even generations. But we get there in the end. Our conservative elements help by acting as a brake on the worst excesses of some of the dissenters. Our dissenters sometimes help the conservatives see the right way to go. And this is really where I think Dionne may have hit it right:

Those who reject the idea of national perfection, who insist that the Founders laid out a pathway and not a destination, should thus resist defensiveness. They should embrace the creed offered in a speech to Congress in 1990 by Vaclav Havel, the Eastern European dissident who became president of the Czech Republic.

"As long as people are people, democracy, in the full sense of the word, will always be no more than an ideal," Havel said. "One may approach it as one would the horizon in ways that may be better or worse, but it can never be fully attained. In this sense, you, too, are merely approaching democracy."

That we're still trying, 230 years after we declared independence, is our national glory.

So we need, as a nation to be willing to understand both those who fall on the more conservative side and those who fall on the more dissident side. But we also must not elevate one over the other. (that's where I think Dionne has it wrong).

NASA Greenlights Shuttle Launch

The Washington Post is reporting that NASA administrators have given the green light to a launch attempt for tomorrow. The crack in the foam insulation that has been reported all day appears to have been a bit more than that. A small triangular piece of foam actually fell off the area of the crack.

The 3-inch triangular piece of foam that appeared to come from a 5-inch-long crack late Sunday or early Monday is far smaller than the foam chunk that brought down Columbia, killing seven astronauts in 2003. But NASA managers spent most of Monday pondering whether to go ahead with the launch.

Some outside experts said they were uncomfortable with going ahead, although they didn't have all the information.

Paul Fischbeck, a Carnegie Mellon University risk and engineering professor who has consulted with NASA on the shuttle's delicate heat protection system, noted that NASA said they had never seen foam fall off on the launch pad before.

"The question is why did it happen this time and never before? If it's something you've never seen before, that makes it much more curious," he said. "It's something you might want to understand before you launch."

The patch of foam fell off an area that covers an expandable bracket holding a liquid oxygen fuel line against the huge external tank. NASA engineers believe ice built up in that area from condensation caused by rain Sunday.

The tank expanded when the super-cold fuel was drained after Sunday's launch was canceled because of the weather. The ice that formed "pinched" some of that foam, causing the quarter-inch-wide crack and the piece of foam to drop off, officials said.

It is impossible to judge the situation with the information the media has put out in this article. I can't second guess the experts with considerably more knowledge. But I confess I am a bit disturbed by this new information. At the same time, any time you strap yourself to the top of a really big rocket containing enormous amounts of highly explosive fuel, you are taking a big risk. So I think I have to assume the people who have to bear the responsibility are acting in good faith.

However, I want them to go back to the CFC foam after this mission.

Supreme Court Stays Cross Removal

Justice Kennedy issued a temporary stay against the order by a US District court judge to remove the cross that has stood on Mount Soledad in San Diego since 1954 (and actually replaced crosses that had been there longer than that.) My earlier post on this is here.

A lower court judge had ordered the city of San Diego to remove the cross or be fined $5,000 a day.

Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, acting for the high court, issued a stay while supporters of the cross continue their legal fight.

Lawyers for San Diegans for the Mount Soledad National War Memorial said in an appeal that they wanted to avoid the "destruction of this national treasure." And attorneys for the city said the cross was part of a broader memorial that was important to the community.

Phil Thalheimer, chairman of the war memorial group, said the ruling "borders on divine intervention."

"We were jumping up and down," he said. "For this to happen on July 3 — the day before our Independence Day, which is about freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of expression — it couldn't have happened better."

I maintain the cross should stay. I do not believe that this "establishes" a religion, nor should it be considered offensive.

101st Blog Of The Day

Today, my mission to visit one member of the Fighting 101st took me over to the Blorg. The Maximum Blorg Commander has the most unusual video of a man playing a humongous pipe organ. To play video game music. Plus quite a lot of other stuff including some discussion of the Telegraph's latest poll.

Blorg is my 60th visit to another member's blog. I honestly think the blogroll has at least doubled since I started this project!

Ho, Ho, Fricking Ho

Fat people are not at all jolly according to a state-of-the-art huge waste of time and money psychiatric epidemiology study just completed.

CHICAGO - Fat people are not more jolly, according to a study that instead found obesity is strongly linked with depression and other mood disorders.

Whether obesity might cause these problems or is the result of them is not certain, and the research does not provide an answer, but there are theories to support both arguments.

Depression often causes people to abandon activities, and some medications used to treat mental illness can cause weight gain. On the other hand, obesity is often seen as a stigma and overweight people often are subject to teasing and other hurtful behavior.

The study of more than 9,000 adults found that mood and anxiety disorders including depression were about 25 percent more common in the obese people studied than in the non-obese. Substance abuse was an exception — obese people were about 25 percent less likely to abuse drugs or alcohol than slimmer participants.

The results appear in the July issue of Archives of General Psychiatry, being released Monday. The lead author was Dr. Gregory Simon, a researcher with Group Health Cooperative in Seattle, a large nonprofit health plan in the Pacific Northwest.

So, that guy in the red suit at Christmas time should be kept away from your family at all costs. I'm going out to get a cap for the chimney right now.

Decline And Fall

A federal Judge has issued a restraining order barring the US Navy from using mid-frequency active sonar during a training excercise. Her decision stated that the plantiffs, environmental groups, "have shown a possibility that RIMPAC 2006 will kill, injure, and disturb many marine species, including marine mammals, in waters surrounding the Hawaiian Islands."

U.S. District Judge Florence-Marie Cooper was appointed in 1999 by President Clinton.

Nasa Still Planning Launch

According to the AFP, the launch of the shuttle Discovery is still moving ahead. They are trying to resolve the small crack they found in the insulation of the external fuel tank.

"Right now we have a good shot of launch tomorrow if we can clear this particular issue," shuttle launch director Mike Leinbach said Monday.

NASA announced the discovery of the crack one day before shuttle's planned liftoff with seven astronauts on a crucial mission for US space ambitions.

Inspectors found the crack overnight after the tank was emptied of its liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen fuel, following the second straight launch delay Sunday.

The orange-hued fuel tank's foam insulation has perplexed NASA ever since the 2003 Columbia disaster, which was caused by loose foam that pierced the shuttle's heat shield during liftoff and doomed its return to Earth.

The US space agency spent more than a billion dollars to fix the problem, only to see a piece of foam fall off Discovery's fuel tank in the first post-tragedy launch in July 2005. The debris missed the shuttle, however.

Prior to the current planned launch, NASA Administrator Michael Griffin expressed confidence that no large chunks of foam would shed from Discovery's second mission since Columbia.

The crack was about one-eighth to one-quarter of an inch deep and five inches (12.5 centimeters) long, NASA spokesman George Diller said. It was found in the insulating foam on a bracket that holds an oxygen feed line.

My understanding is that repairs to flaws like this have been accomplished before.

Things Are Getting Ugly In Mexico

According to Mark In Mexico, there have been some serious developments. Election officials in Oaxaca were kidnapped and beaten, although it does look like they have been released at this time. There are a lot of other problems going on as well.

UPDATE: Reuters is reporting that Lopez Obrador may have softened his stance and has said that if the recount shows he lost, he will abide by the decision.

The New York Times And The Revolution

As in American Revolution. Powerline has the headline as the New York Times would have published it.

Lieberman Opens Petition Drive

Well, I'm a bit surprised, but Joe Lieberman is supposed to announce that he will begin a drive to get the 7,500 signatures needed to go on the ballot even if he loses the primary.

Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman is to announce today he will petition for a place on the November ballot as an "independent Democrat," giving him a chance to stay alive politically should he lose an Aug. 8 primary for the Democratic nomination.

Lieberman, 64, a three-term senator whose outspoken support of the war in Iraq has brought months of grief and inspired a strong primary challenge from Greenwich businessman Ned Lamont, intends to announce his decision this afternoon at the State Capitol.

Even should he lose in August — and the most recent public poll shows him leading Lamont by 15-percentage points among likely primary voters — Lieberman would retain his status as a registered Democrat, but his name would not appear on the ballot line with other Democrats.

And that, effectively, is the end of Ned Lamont, I think.

UPDATE: Others: Riehl World View, Stop The ACLU, The Influence Peddler, Politburo Diktat, The left side of the 'sphere is exploding right now.

UPDATE: Brainster says, "Beep, beep."

UPDATE: Still More: Captain's Quarters, Don Surber, RedState, Centerfield, A Blog For All, Ankle Biting Pundits, Decision '08,  

Ah, More Lovely Polls

I've always been a bit of an Anglophile. I like the Brits in general and have known several over the years. So it distresses me a bit when I see a poll like this from the Telegraph. Especially when it contains words like this:

Most Britons see America as a cruel, vulgar, arrogant society, riven by class and racism, crime-ridden, obsessed with money and led by an incompetent hypocrite.

On the other hand, the accompanying editorial is quite different in tone:

Americans find themselves damned either way. If they remain within their own borders, they are isolationist hicks who are shirking their responsibilities. If they intervene, they are rapacious imperialists.

Indeed, many of their detractors manage to hold these two ideas in their heads simultaneously. Yet a moment's thought should reveal that they are both unfair. In Yugoslavia, America did everything it could to encourage Europe to act.

Only when European passivity was leading to mass slaughter did Washington intervene - benignly and decisively. (Even the most virulent anti-Americans struggle to explain what possible strategic interest there was in Kosovo.) It is a similar story when it comes to Iran.

For a decade, American policy-makers left it to the EU to defuse the nuclear threat from the ayatollahs. Now, with their tactic of constructive engagement in ruins, the Europeans instinctively look to Washington for protection. But you can bet that they will howl with protest if it becomes clear that such protection is best afforded through the deployment of force.

To dislike a country as diverse as America is misanthropic: America, more than any other state, contains the full range of humanity between its coasts. What binds its people together is an ideal encoded in America's DNA.

But really, we also need to keep in mind that the Telegraph has also given us other news of note about British society. This for example.

London: One of the British Army's most senior officers has warned that it is in danger of losing its reputation as a "highly respected British institution" because it is being forced to recruit soldiers from a "morally corrupt and dysfunctional" society, where young men idolise foul-mouthed footballers.

Major-General Graeme Lamb branded many recruits as "cocky and arrogant and brought up on a diet of football brats and binge drinking … who are not educated in and able to recognise self-discipline".

So I really don't have to get too worked up about this poll. Nor does anyone else, I think.

What Does This Tell You?

Thought experiment: A magazine that has a target age group of 9-14 year olds puts out an issue describing careers in teaching. Study guides accompany the magazine and encourage teachers to have students write essays pretending they are going to become a teacher?

Any problems with that?

Substitute fireman for teacher. Substitute lawyer. Substitute banker, doctor, musician figure skater or any other career. Do any provoke your outrage? Would you complain? Would you contact the press and get stories written about how outraged you were?

I wouldn't. So what's different when the career is in the US Army?

PETERBOROUGH, N.H. - Parents and teachers are complaining that the latest issue of a popular magazine for preteens amounts to little more than an early recruitment pitch for the Army.

Cobblestone magazine, which is put out by Carus Publishing in Peterborough, is aimed at children ages 9-14 and is distributed nationwide to schools and libraries. Its latest issue features a cover photo of a soldier in Iraq clutching a machine gun and articles on what it's like to go through boot camp, a rundown of the Army's "awesome arsenal" and a detailed description of Army career opportunities.

Most controversial has been a set of classroom guides that accompany the magazine, which suggest teachers invite a soldier, Army recruiter or veteran to speak to their classes and ask students whether they might want to join the Army someday.

One of the teaching guides — written by Mary Lawson, a teacher in Saint Cloud., Fla. — suggests having students write essays pretending they are going to join the Army: "Have them decide which career they feel they would qualify for and write a paper to persuade a recruiter why that should be the career."

"Some of the teachers were like, 'Holy cow, look at this,'" said Francis Lunney, a sixth-grade English teacher in Hudson, Mass., who quickly called the publishing company to complain. He told The Boston Globe that the guides looked exactly like the official recruiting material distributed at high schools.

The dozen or so similar complaints come at a time when the military, struggling to meet recruitment goals, has become more aggressive in trying to attract young people. But Cobblestone's editors insist the idea for the special issue was theirs alone, though they received permission to use Army photos.

I'd say this says a great deal more about the people complaining than it does about the magazine.

We Demand The Truth

Get Truthout on the phone at once! Send in Jason Leopold! Get Bill Keller on this at once. We must get to the truth about what is really going on in Yellowstone Park! This nefarious scheme is almost certainly tied to the Rovian Bushitler-Halliburton Axis of Real Evil™ and the people have a right to know. All these excuses they are making are just too convenient. In this day and age of the internet, they can't keep suppressing the truth.

What have they done with Old Faithful?

CHEYENNE, Wyo. - Anyone looking recently at the Internet webcam showing Old Faithful in Yellowstone National Park might think the geyser had lost its world-renowned reliability.

But Old Faithful's faithful worldwide can rest assured that the geyser is working — spouting off as usual about every 60-90 minutes.

It's the webcam that's not working.

The webcam shut down in May because the Old Faithful visitors center, where the camera was stationed, is being torn down and replaced.

Since then, the park has received phone calls from as far away as Germany from people who noticed an image dated Aug. 6, 2005, on the webcam, wondering when the site would be operational again.

"We get inquiries from all around the world about the Old Faithful webcam," said Al Nash, a National Park Service spokesman in Yellowstone.

The Park Service is working to restore the webcam, Nash said.

They're up to something I tell you!

North Korea Rattles Sabers

All those suddenly hawkish Democrats like Walter Mondale who were calling for a preemptive strike on the North Korean missile got the attention of the North Koreans. They threaten nuclear retaliation if the US makes such an attack.

The Korean Central News Agency, citing an unidentified Rodong Sinmun newspaper "analyst," accused the United States of increasing military pressure on the isolated communist state and basing new spy planes on the Korean Peninsula.

The North Korean threat of retaliation, which is often voiced by its state-controlled media, comes amid U.S. official reports that Pyongyang has shown signs of preparing for a test of a long-range missile. North Korea claims it has the right to such a launch.

On Friday, Pyongyang accused the United States of driving the situation on the Korean Peninsula "to the brink of war," and said it is fully prepared to counter any U.S. aggression.

….

"This is a grave military provocation and blackmail to the DPRK, being an indication that the U.S. is rapidly pushing ahead in various fields with the extremely dangerous war moves," the dispatch said.

"The army and people of the DPRK are now in full preparedness to answer a pre-emptive attack with a relentless annihilating strike and a nuclear war with a mighty nuclear deterrent," the report said.

Meanwhile, it appears as if China may have finally acted to rein in their ally a bit and are offering new plans to break the deadlock in talks.

Speculation that Pyongyang could fire the missile has waned in recent days since the country's top ally and a major source of its energy supplies, China, reportedly urged North Korea not to go ahead with the test.

A news report said Monday that China has offered a new proposal over the stalled six-party talks on North Korea's nuclear program.

Chinese State Councilor Tang Jiaxuan told Ichiro Ozawa, the head of Japan's main opposition party, that China had relayed the proposal to Japan, the two Koreas, the United States and Russia, Kyodo News agency reported, citing party officials.

The report did not elaborate on the proposal. An opposition party spokesman in Tokyo could not be reached for comment.

Thanks a bunch for the help, Wally.