Re: The ongoing national freak-out over the backup band of 'Syria's Wayne Newton'

(No, I'm not giving "Women's Wall Street" any more ill-gotten traffic, and the original breathless article by Annie Jacobsen is too damn long.)

Annie my girl, what took you so long? American aviation, particularly domestic flights, has been insecure for a long, long time. The spate of hijackings, airport attacks and bombings in the 60s & 70s resulted in fairly effective overhauls of airport and airline security in Europe, Asia and the Middle East, but even after Lockerbie, U.S. airlines continued to operate an inefficient, insecure and badly-integrated system with procedures that were applied so inconsistently as to be pointless.

The inconsistency is alive and well post-9/11; despite advanced age, government credentials, an Indian passport and accompaniment by a horrified wife, the Defense Minister of India was subjected to a body search on 2 separate visits to the United States. Ethics aside, racial profiling *could* be an effective security measure, but not when it is inconsistently applied by untrained people. American aviation is plagued by both.

I've been flying since I was a year old, and I've found domestic airline security procedures in small cities in India (such as checking luggage against passengers right on the runway after passenger check-in) to be better those in the United States. El Al locks its pilots into the cockpit, puts *all* its passengers through a rigorous security check, and has an armed marshall (commando is more like it) on every flight. All this is well-known, and by making itself such a notoriously long-shot target, El Al has managed to discourage would-be hijackers.

If implemented in the U.S., all this security will cost airlines a good deal of money, and passengers must also be willing to accept longer check-in time and incursions on their privacy as their luggage and persons are relentlessly examined. In addition, more secure alternatives to paper documents (such as iris scans) need to be fast-tracked under public oversight. Americans may even have to give up quick, no-check commuter flights and think about that high-speed train system we never managed to get built.

And all of the above combined happens to be the real solution to making the skies safe. It's not sexy, and there will be a lot of growing pain for all concerned. Many people prefer a policy of zeroing in on a small group of passengers and making them pay all the price, but that's neither effective nor just. And yes, justice and civil rights matter. Without those, we'd be afraid for our lives all the time, and not just when we're sitting on a plane with people that remind us of Mohammed Atta.

Two dispatches from Bizarro America:

Bush campaign spokesman Steve Schmidt said. ''The American people are already hopeful and optimistic" in response to John Edwards' convention speech.

Sure, if "hopeful" means "terrified" and being optimistic involves purchasing deadbolts and books with titles like "Deliver Us From Evil" for the long days of cowering.

Can't quite hold a candle to the 'party-like-it's-2000' weirdness from March though.

Campaigning in upstate New York during the Republican primaries in March 2004, Bush told voters: ''You can help begin the end of the Clinton era in Washington, D.C."

Yes, Virginia. The last 3 years was all just a bad dream and Bush wasn't running the country [into the ground]. Bill Clinton is still the POTUS, and the nightmarish era of international respect, police-action-only military deployments and economic boom driven by technological and social innovation is still on. That strangely unaccomplished candidate from the family that runs Texas is telling America to kick the incumbent out of office and dismantle his legacy—

Oh.

Bush's "16 Words" on Iraq & Uranium: He May Have Been Wrong But He Wasn't Lying
Two intelligence invesigations show Bush had plenty of reason to believe what he said in his 2003 State of the Union Address.

I'm a big fan of the Annenberg Political Fact Check, but their look at the 16 Words is far too limited. While their conclusion is correct within the smaller context that they've chosen to limit the analysis to, it fails to reflect the damning picture painted by the administration's handling of the matter over the year leading up to the State of the Union speech.

1. He may have said "Iraq is SEEKING uranium", but we were meant to hear "Iraq is ACQUIRING uranium"

Put charitably, the President exaggerated. One could argue that the President was given bad data by British and American intelligence agencies, but even that inaccurate information gave no evidence that Saddam was actually successful in his attempt to acquire uranium. (The only evidence for that were those forged Italian documents.)

Yet the White House took that slim bit of information and spun it for all it was worth in those 16 words. He didn't say “The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa. We checked it out and found that he was completely unsuccessful in getting his hands on the stuff, but we must be vigilant all the same." And because he didn't, the impression left with the American people was that Saddam had in fact gotten hold of uranium.

When a rogue state tries to acquire nuclear capability and fails, it's a good argument for closer scrutiny and sanctions. When a rogue state tries to acquire nuclear capability and succeeds, it's a good argument for invasion. The distance between those two is where the lie of those 16 words comes from.

2) Ignoring stronger evidence contrary to the conclusion one has already formed counts as lying

That the White House could mistakenly believe in the veracity of a Nigerien uranium threat at any point is highly suspect. Ambassador Wilson has been at pains to point out that his report is in agreement with two previous reports on the feasibility of the Niger-Iraq yellowcake transaction.

These two reports, which predate Wilson's, were submitted by Barbro Owens-Kirkpatrick, the American ambassador to Niger at the time, and four-star Marine Corps General Carleton Fulford to the State and Defense Departments respectively. Ambassador Wilson's own report was to the CIA, whose inquiry into the matter was ordered by the office of the Vice President.

That's three reports prepared by a career, active-duty foreign service officer and 2 envoys especially picked to assess this issue, all dismissing the idea that Niger could have sold uranium to Saddam Hussein, sent to three separate major federal agencies. Two of them are Cabinet level agencies, and the other was working under a directive from Vice President Dick Cheney. The content of at least one of the reports cannot have been unknown to senior members of the administration. The reports should have tempered, if not outright laid to rest, any fear of Nigerien uranium sale to Iraq in the immediate future and removed the need for such a high-profile announcement of a nuclear threat.

SO, WAS IT A LIE? 'Lying' is a hell of a charge to level against someone, especially the man that occupies the most powerful office in the world. The careful choice of verbs--'sought'--suggests that the White House was well aware of what it was doing. Exaggerating. Spinning. Wishful thinking. Negligence. We could excuse it as any one of those things, except the 16 words were spoken for a very specific goal: to raise the specter of a nuclear attack in order to soften up an already skittish Congress and people for the invasion of Iraq. That's what makes it a lie, rather than simple inaccuracy.

It is too, too bad that the American press has too few journalists and too many White House surrogates. Otherwise, the startling assortment of damning comments made by members of the Executive Branch might actually have been pursued with the same energy reserved for more important things like whether Eric Bana is the next 007.

Case in point, on Tuesday, the vice president was dispatched to California's Camp Pendleton, where, flanked by two 155mm howitzers and 2,500 camouflaged Marines, he defended the administration's Iraq policy and claimed that "the perception of weakness" -- not aggressive U.S. foreign policy -- causes terrorist attacks.

Hm, terrorist attacks. Like 9/11. According to Dick, there must have been a perception of weakness.

Hanging out in Texas most of that summer, instead of slaving away like a newly-elected president of the world's only superpower, that perhaps wasn't the best show of strength. Appointing a NSC that blew off Richard Clarke on a topic that had been given the highest national security priority by the outgoing administration, that could have sent a message of "The White House—Out to Lunch" variety.

If only the media and the electorate would do their jobs and kick over the chair.