Month: October 2007

What, Me Worry?

by digby

Who’s this:

After my husband quit his job earlier this year (to become a full-time stay-at-home dad), we had a choice. We could either buy health insurance from his former employer through a program called COBRA at a cost of more than $1,000 per month(!) or we could go it alone in Maryland’s individual market. Given our financial circumstances, that “choice” wasn’t much of a choice at all. We had to go on our own.

We discovered that the most generous plans in Maryland’s individual market cost $700 per month yet provide no more than $1,500 per year of prescription drug coverage–a drop in the bucket if someone in our family were to be diagnosed with a serious illness.

With health insurance choices like that, no wonder so many people opt to go uninsured.

That was in 2004, so you can imagine how much more expensive those plans in Maryland are today. Health care costs are rising in double digits each year.

Still wondering?

It’s hard to believe, but it’s none other than our lady of the internment camps herself: Michele Malkin.

As far as “choices” are concerned. Mark Steyn patiently explained once again today that parents of four children earning 45,000 dollars a year should just work harder and sell their house to pay for health insurance:

Mr Frost works “intermittently”. The unemployment rate in the Baltimore metropolitan area is four-percent. Perhaps he chooses to work “intermittently,” just as he chooses to send his children to private school, and chooses to live in a 3,000-square-foot home. That’s what free-born citizens in democratic societies do: choose. Sometimes those choices work out, and sometimes they don’t. And, when they don’t and catastrophe ensues, it’s appropriate that the state should provide a safety net. But it should be a safety net of last resort, and it’s far from clear that it is in this case.

Setting aside the total dishonesty of that — surely Steyn has been informed by now that the Frost kids go to private school on scholarship and the house was bought for 55,000 in 1990 — what has become crystal clear in this debate is one that I think needs to be discussed. The Republicans believe that people should be completely destitute, living in a one room shack and working two jobs before they “deserve” subsidized health insurance. The middle class who are one car accident or one cancer diagnosis away from losing their jobs, being unable to afford either the cadillac COBRA plans from their employers (my last one here in California was $1700.00 a month and I’m healthy) must not be allowed to keep ANY assets.They must be, as Steyn’s pal wrote, “dying on the streets with sores on their bodies” before they qualify for aid.

But, of course, neither will they necessarily even be able to buy private health insurance at any price even if they do live in a one room apartment with their four kids and work two jobs. (I was turned down recently because I had had gum surgery in 1996.)

This is the world in which we live. Insurance companies only want to cover young, healthy or rich people. And even if you manage to pay the expensive premiums with huge deductibles, they will try to find a way to avoid paying for your care anyway. That’s the way it works. If you are lucky enough to have health insurance at your employer you’d better hope you never lose that job. More importantly, you’d better hope you never get sick.

One of the things these snotty critics fail to acknowledge is that even if the Frosts had had private health insurance, after their kids got sick they would very likely have had to go bankrupt. Those kids spent five months in the hospital. The bills came to the millions of dollars and no middle class person, no matter what good “choices” they make, can afford to pick up the 20% or so they’d have to pay under an “affordable” health care policy when something like that happens. Medical bankruptcy happens every day, although our fabulous new bankruptcy laws make it far more difficult to get a fresh start than it used to be, even if you have a special needs kid and can’t work full time.

If the free-wheeling capitalists of the right wing believe that you can keep an economy dynamic, growing and flexible in a twisted system like this, they are even more blindly ideological than I thought. This is not just a moral crisis, it’s an economic crisis and if these people are determined to continue down this path then I suggest the rest of us start buying land in Costa Rica because this country is going to fail. Hugely. The numbers do not add up.

As John Cole pointed out yesterday, the Frosts should be the Republican dream family. Mr Frost is a blue collar entrepreneur; Mrs Frost is a part time worker with four young children, two of whom have serious health problems. They live in a house they’ve fixed up themselves which is their only real asset aside from an “investment” that has gained $500 in value in ten years. (Like many Americans, I doubt these people have Roth IRA’s and 401K plans and stock portfolios, don’t you?) Despite the nosy uninformed discussion of their kitchen counter tops, these people are not living high off the hog. They have virtually no disposable income. They are just average, working Americans trying to do their best.

Apparently, that’s not enough. Malkin and her husband are lucky enough to qualify for wingnut welfare and have healthy children. Bully for them. They got theirs and are now railing against the “choices” made by two working parents who make 45,000 a year. But I think she and her stalker squad are going to be surprised to find that most people don’t see things their way — this smug judgmentalism and rank callousness is not the American way. That’s not what freedom is all about.

And I think they may be even more surprised to find that a lot of American businesses are going to get on board health care reform in a big way. They are beginning to see the writing on the wall if we don’t get a grip on this crisis. Tax cuts will not rein in costs. They will not mitigate the kind of risk required to compete in the global marketplace. They will not ensure a healthy workforce. And without that, we’ve got serious, serious problems. At least some people who want to keep making money in America must see that even if the blind ideologues of the right don’t.

Of course, many of them are Ayn Rand acolytes and consider sick kids to be “parasites,” so I may be too optimistic on that. Hopefully, they can at least see it in terms of pure self-interest. All they have to do is run the numbers.

H/t to Sadly No

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Chasing The Great White Worm

by digby

Atrios mentions “misprison” of a felony today, a term I haven’t heard since the Barbizon School of Former Prosecutors Drill Team blanketed the airwaves with learned commentary about presidential fellatio. (Those were the days, my friends…)

Atrios mentions it in terms of the telcom cover-up but it may also apply to this case, which Scott Horton at No Comment has been covering in depth:

“I’ve never seen anything quite like this,” remarked a nationally known print journalist in a conversation three weeks ago. “Everything I’ve been told by the convicted defendants checks out as the gospel truth. And everything I’m told by federal prosecutors who pushed the case turns out either to be an outrageous lie or at least a very serious distortion. And the local journalists who wrote the most about the case all behave like they’re accessories after the fact in a criminal investigation.”

Welcome to the Siegelman case.

It’s a political thriller that reaches all the way to the White House and features our favorite white worm, Karl Rove in a starring role.

TIME adds to their ongoing investigations as well today with a report on what the Alabama whistleblower told the US Congress last week:

TIME.com has obtained an advanced copy of the sworn statement that Alabama GOP activist Dana Jill Simpson gave to the Senate Judiciary Committee

A Republican lawyer claims she was told that Karl Rove — while serving as President Bush’s top political advisor — had intervened in the Justice Department’s prosecution of Alabama’s most prominent Democrat. Longtime Alabama GOP activist Dana Jill Simpson first made the allegation in June, but has now provided new details in a lengthy sworn statement to the House Judiciary Committee. The Committee is expected to hold public hearings on the Alabama case next week as part of its investigation of possible political interference by the Bush Administration in the activities of the Department of Justice.

Simpson said in June that she heard a close associate of Rove say that the White House political adviser “had spoken with the Department of Justice” about “pursuing” Don Siegelman, a former Democratic governor of Alabama, with help from two of Alabama’s U.S. attorneys. Siegelman was later indicted on 32 counts of corruption, convicted on seven of them, and is currently serving an 88 month sentence in Federal prison.

If Simpson’s version of events is accurate, it would show direct political involvement by the White House in federal prosecutions — a charge leveled by Administration critics in connection with the U.S. attorney scandal that led to the resignation of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

This is purely coincidental, I’m sure

Former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has hired a high-powered Washington lawyer to represent him in investigations of mismanagement of the Justice Department.

George Terwilliger, a white-collar crime defense attorney and the Justice Department’s No. 2 in the early 1990s, last month was on the White House’s short list to replace Gonzales.

Now he’ll be Gonzales’ defender as federal investigators look into allegations that the former attorney general lied to lawmakers and illegally allowed politics to influence hiring and firing at the Justice Department.

Update: Steve Benen has more.

The Goodness Of The American System

by digby

So the House Judiciary Committee is dealing with the new illegal wiretapping bill today, and you can follow the latest over on FDL and at the ACLU website, here. There’s a lot going on, but I’ve never been convinced that it would be so impossible for the government to get warrants after the fact.The FISA court has virtually never said no to anything the government’s asked for. It was designed that way. Why the administration can’t simply hire and train enough people to fill out the proper paper work within a reasonable amount of time and present it to this secret court for a rubber stamp is beyond me. You can only conclude that they are either too lazy or they are doing something so wrong, that a secret, kangaroo court won’t even go along. Excuse me, but that raises some red flags.

however, they seem to have convinced the congress that the burden fo getting a warrant even after the fact is just not possible so we are going to create some new regime of warrantless wiretapping. (I hate to say it but, you know, that really does mean the terrorists have won…)

Other than the fact that the government has bulldozed this nonsense through the congress, what also interests me in all this is Michael McConnell, the DNI, whom I think is a very strange man. I understand that everyone on the Hill thinks he is some sort of Big Daddy whom we all must trust to keep us safe in our little beddy-byes at night, but everything about him screams “wrong” to me. This interview, you’ll recall, was very disconcerting:

Q. So you’re saying that the reporting and the debate in Congress means that some Americans are going to die?

A. That’s what I mean. Because we have made it so public. We used to do these things very differently, but for whatever reason, you know, it’s a democratic process and sunshine’s a good thing. We need to have the debate. The reason that the FISA law was passed in 1978 was an arrangement was worked out between the Congress and the administration, we did not want to allow this community to conduct surveillance, electronic surveillance, of Americans for foreign intelligence unless you had a warrant, so that was required. So there was no warrant required for a foreign target in a foreign land. And so we are trying to get back to what was the intention of ’78. Now because of the claim, counterclaim, mistrust, suspicion, the only way you could make any progress was to have this debate in an open way.

It’s a very, very bad idea for the nation’s spy chief to go around demagoguing like that. I guess he listens to Rush and O’Reilly. But there’s more to McConnell than just a whiff of Strangelove. There’s this too:

Admiral McConnell is not simply the boss of sixteen separate U.S. intelligence and security agencies. In the netherworld where private security firms and public institutions do business, he was a principal architect of the system that led to the Blackwater USA disaster, with its revelations of trigger-happy hired gunmen shooting innocent civilians in the name of the State Department.

In 1996, when McConnell retired from government service after a 30-year career in the Navy and the National Security Agency (NSA), few critical tasks in intelligence or security were delegated to private companies. The NSA and the Central Intelligence Agency performed most of the former duties, while the military – the Marines, in the case of the State Department – handled the latter.

A decade later, half of an estimated $45 billion in annual U.S. intelligence outlays, along with an unspecified amount of the general security budget, pays for work “outsourced” to the private sector. The Washington Post reported last year that private contractors now make up more than 70 percent of a key Pentagon intelligence unit, as well as 50-60 percent of the workforce in the CIA’s National Clandestine Service.

Up to 30,000 military contractors are currently in Iraq, part of an overall private employment force that is larger than the 160,000-strong conventional U.S. military presence there.

Blackwater, with its $1 billion in government receipts from 2001 to 2006, is the tip of an immense iceberg.

Where was Admiral McConnell in that decade of maxi-privatization?

He was senior vice-president of Booz Allen Hamilton, a private security firm conveniently located near Langley, Virginia, home of the CIA. With an army-for-hire of some 10,000 operatives, it is in the vanguard of contractors that achieved unprecedented power (and profit) as sensitive national objectives were farmed out for cash.

More important, McConnell was also chairman of the board at the 1,500-member Intelligence and National Security Alliance (INSA), an industry association that is the primary voice of private security and intelligence firms in Washington.

The Contractor’s Architect

Admiral McConnell was extraordinarily successful at INSA’s helm. Equipped with a vast network of contacts from his years in the Navy, at the Joint Chiefs of Staff and as director of the NSA, he was instrumental in the massive shift of security duties to private firms.

In 2002, Consulting Magazine named him “one of the top 25 most influential consultants” in the United States.

“When I think of government, military, or intelligence community – whatever – the government doesn’t make things,” Admiral McConnell said in his confirmation hearings before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on February 7. “If you need to buy something like a tank or a satellite or airplane or whatever, that’s done by the private sector.”

The unmistakable implication is that you may also look to the private sector for intelligence or security personnel. In a word, you buy mercenaries, just as you buy tanks, satellites, airplanes or as the admiral put it, “whatever.”

After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, “the government found itself in need of special skills and special talent, and they were not available inside the government,” he continued at the hearings. “So the government turned to the private sector to get some special skills and capabilities. So I think – from the way I think about it, that’s the goodness of the American system…”

Admiral McConnell’s appointment as Director of National Intelligence was unanimously recommended by the Committee, with only cursory attention paid to his contracting experience. The full Senate confirmed the appointment in a voice vote, without debate.

It’s pretty clear why McConnell is so hellbent on immunity for telcoms isn’t it? This man is one of the architects of a new shadowy, privatized defense industry that’s sprung up over the past few years, an industry that’s paid for by you and me, but over which we don’t have any say, either as individuals or through our representatives in congress. It makes Ike’s military industrial complex look positively benign by comparison.

His insistence on this telcom liability and, considering his job, rather bizarre willingness to engage in demagogic public relations makes you wonder: Who is Michael McConnell working for?

And what’s the purpose of all this “privatizing anyway?

The logic for hiring such men, according to Admiral McConnell and other advocates of private contracting, revolves around the related issues of necessary skills and costs.

Their arguments on both counts don’t stand up well to close scrutiny. There is no good reason why professionals of any sort cannot be trained and employed directly by our national intelligence agencies and military institutions, as they were for most of the 20th century.

There’s one good reason: profits. The “goodness of America.”

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Whoa

by tristero

Whenever anyone tells me Manhattan is decadent, I’m telling them they ain’t seen nothing ’til they’ve mingled amongst some of the religious in Montgomery, Alabama. Hoo, boy…

PZ gives the sanitized version of the death of Reverend Gary Aldridge, a graduate of Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University, home to some of this country’s greatest master debaters. Oh, the Rev. Aldridge also worked for Falwell:

Clothing: The decedent was received wearing two (2) wet suits, one scuba diving mask, one pair of diving gloves, one pair of slippers, one pair of rubber underwear, two (2) ties, five (5) belts, eleven (11) straps.

Personal Effects: One yellow metal ring intact on left ring finger, one dildo.

The Smoking Gun has the details but I would strongly suggest you think twice about clicking there if you are in the least bit squeamish.

If you go on over to the website of the Rev. Aldridge’s Church (he was there for 15 years), you will find an elablorate site with links to Focus on the Family and other groups. You will also find, on the front page of the site, a notice for a new Bible Study Group:

Words fail me.

And Now The Turks

by tristero

[UPDATED]

Literally buried in an obscure corner of an obscure page in this morning’s New York Times was this ominous headline: Turkey Authorizes Troops to Enter Iraq to Fight Rebels. This has been, since 2002, one of those things that worried deeply unserious people like myself who irrationally opposed Roger Cohen’s efforts to make his mama proud and work for a good cause for a change:

Turkey took a step toward a military operation in Iraq on Tuesday, as its top political and military leaders issued a statement authorizing troops to cross the Iraq border to eliminate separatist Kurdish rebel camps in the northern region.

Turkey moved toward military action in the face of strong opposition by the United States, which is anxious to maintain peace in the region, one of the rare areas of stability in conflict-torn Iraq. But more than two dozen Turkish soldiers have been killed in recent days, and the government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan seemed far more determined than before to act decisively…

A Turkish military offensive into northern Iraq, while unlikely, would have far-reaching consequences for the United States. Turkey is a NATO member and has the region’s most powerful army. Turkey’s support of the United States in the Iraq war is crucial. The United States’ Incirlik Air Base in southern Turkey supplies the military in central Iraq…

But Iraq’s government has little authority in the region, which is controlled exclusively by Kurds, and an accord reached by Iraq’s interior minister and senior Turkish officials last month did not include permission for military operations, a formulation that frustrated Turkey.

As far as I can tell, this article contains no information to support the assertion that “a Turkish military offensive into northern Iraq” is unlikely and plenty of reasons to worry about the opposite. Anyone familiar with the situation care to explain? Juan Cole mentions it, with a slightly less optimistic take on the situation than the Times provides, but does not offer an opinion as to how likely it or unlikely a military incursion by Turkey could be.

A personal note: Once, I had a long private talk with an American deputy ambassador who had been stationed in Iraq during 2004. I brought up my concerns about Turkey and the Kurds and, with the kind of flattery ambassadors learn to dispense on a moment’s notice, he expressed surprise that I, a mere musician, knew enough to ask questions about it. I, too, was surprised, but I was surprised that he thought the questions were that esoteric.

The unpredictable effects – except that I knew they would be the bad kind of unpredictable – of destabilizing Iraq on its neighbors were among the many reasons I thought the Bush/Iraq invasion was major league cuckoo. By 2004, however, I had come to the genuinely terrifying conclusion that I, a mere musician, and my colleagues for the past year, a bunch of loudmouth bloggers who refused to accord any respect to those who believed in “the triumph of hope over experience,” understood the world far better than America’s political and media leaders. That may sound like a boast but really it’s not. It highlights how profoundly incompetent, claustrophobic, and twisted American political discourse had become, and still is.

It chills me to the bone to realize that Walter Russell Mead, an old friend who has since gone on to acquire an enormous reputation in international affairs, got Bush/Iraq wrong and I got it right. There is something profoundly out of whack in this country for something like that to be true. But it is. And it wasn’t just a lucky guess on my part; I wasn’t guessing. Nor was it an excusable mistake on Walter’s part, not only because it wasn’t simply one mistake, but because it was an inexcusable cluster of serious mistakes for anyone to make who claims expertise in foreign policy.

[UPDATE: Here’s some more info on the situation in Turkey, via AP courtesy TPM. Despite the unattributed assurances of the Times, it sounds like a military incursion is indeed likely:

Turks are furious that PKK rebels carry out attacks on Turkish soil and then slip across the border to sanctuaries in northern Iraq. Turkey has accused Iraqi Kurds of tolerating their ethnic brethren in the PKK.

Under intense pressure from leaders of Iraqi Kurds, Iraq’s national government refused to allow Turkey to send troops across the border to chase the rebels under a counterterrorism pact the two countries signed in September.

Turkey does have potential nonmilitary weapons. It could close its border crossings with northern Iraq, which are major source of business for the Iraqi Kurd economy.

But the latest string of attacks by the PKK ramped up public pressure on Erdogan, who has been accused by the opposition of lacking determination to act.”]

Dummy Watch

by digby

Kevin Drum notices the president being incredibly stupid again:

Of course, these concerns are all on top of the fact that the spraying program won’t work anyway. So what’s the point? If it’s bad for the Karzai government, good for the Taliban, and won’t reduce heroin production anyway, why is President Bush so gung ho about it?

This is a mystery, of course. But the most likely answer is that he’s enthusiastic about it for the same reason that he was enthusiastic about sending Heritage Foundation activists to Baghdad in 2003 and believed that instituting a flat tax would kick Iraq’s economy into high gear and allow democracy to bloom. As with so many things, it comes down to the fact that he has an everyman’s disdain for pointy-headed policy development and a fifth-grader’s appreciation for how the world works outside our borders.

[…]

That’s about it. Too bad there isn’t someone in the White House to tell him that the stability of Afghanistan and the resurgence of the Taliban are a wee bit more important than continuing to play to his base’s hatred of 60s counterculture. In a development that would be comical if it weren’t so genuinely appalling, I guess we now have to rely on the CIA for that.

It wouldn’t make any difference:

There’s a lot of action in Washington, D.C., believe me, and I’ve got a lot of decisions to make. And so I delegate to good people. I always tell Condi Rice, I want to remind you, Madam Secretary, who has the Ph.D. and who was the C student. (Laughter.) And I want to remind you who the advisor is and who the President is. (Laughter.)

I got a lot of Ph.D.-types and smart people around me who come into the Oval Office and say, Mr. President, here’s what’s on my mind. And I listen carefully to their advice. But having gathered the device [sic], I decide, you know, I say, this is what we’re going to do. And it’s “yes, sir, Mr. President.” And then we get after it, implement policy.

There you have it.

Update: Oh jesus:

Rudy Giuliani on whether or not it’s a problem that China owns so much of our federal debt: “the way to balance to books is to sell more overseas — sell energy independence, sell health care.”

John McCain on monetary policy: “I’m glad whenever they cut interest rates, I wish interest rates were zero.”

Matt’s title says it all

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Word To The Wise

by digby

Golly, I sure hope the kids who did this video actually are all virgins, because the Republicans are so upset about politicians using kids to send political messages (about kids) that they are digging around in their personal lives and stalking their families to turn up evidence that they are lying.

(They call it “fair game.”)

Update: Ezra brings up the “Ashley Story” ad (that I mentioned last week when Fox first started flogging this story) and writes this:

And here’s another question: Does anyone remember DailyKos launching a feeding frenzy trying to smear or discredit Ashley? Anyone hear of Markos Moulitsas camping out outside her house to see if Ashley was really grieving? His readers interviewing her teachers to see if her academic performance had actually improved as a result of the President’s hug? Did any of that happen? Or did the Left raise some questions about the political appropriateness of the ad without trying to destroy the family’s name and reputation?

For all I know there were some lefties out there trying to discredit that family. But there was no concerted smear led by Kos or Jane Hamsher or Atrios driving by Ashley’s home and talking to her neighbors and questioning her family’s integrity on the front pages of their highly trafficked, much-ballyhood-by-Howie-Kurtz’s blogs. I wouldn’t have even thought of it. And I doubt seriously that if we had done something like that that the Democratic leadership in the congress would have passed around our posts to the press, begging them to get on board the swiftboat.

Update II: Also be sure to read this by John Cole and this by Joe Gandelman, neither of whom are bleeding heart liberals. But they both have beating hearts, which seems to be something these right wingers are missing.

Cole runs down some of the apalling self-righteousness that’s pouring out of the right today and says:

I simply can not believe this is what the Republican party has become. I just can’t. It just makes me sick to think all those years of supporting this party, and this is what it has become. Even if you don’t like the S-Chip expansion, it is hard to deny what Republicans are- a bunch of bitter, nasty, petty, snarling, sneering, vicious thugs, peering through people’s windows so they can make fun of their misfortune.

And I’m sure many of them call themselves Christians too.

I do hope that Howard Kurtz is being apprised of his favorite blogger’s (“charming one moment and pugnacious the next”) activities these past couple of days. I’m sure he’d hate to be left out of the loop on all the great work she’s doing for America: kurtzh@washpost.com

Update III: Don’t miss this piece on Sadly No called “Let Them Eat Ayn Rand Novels” about the latest noxious muse of the santimonious right. She’s the one who memorably said:

Are there even a thousand really poor people in all of America? Really poor. Dying-on-the-sidewalks-with-open-sores poor?

You aren’t poor unless you’re dying on the sidewalks with open sores. I wonder if this qualifies?

Update Again: or as someone mentioned in the comments, does this?

Or this?

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Outsourcing The Dirt Gathering

by digby

I mentioned this earlier, but didn’t really hit it hard enough. I wonder why Mitch McConnell’s office didn’t outright deny that his office had been pimping this smear to any journalist who’d listen?

Manley cited an e-mail sent to reporters by a Senate Republican leadership aide, summing up recent blog traffic about the boy’s family. A spokesman for Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., declined to comment on Manley’s charge that GOP aides were complicit in spreading disparaging information about Frosts.

I would assume they’d deny it if they hadn’t done it, wouldn’t you?

Does the Majority leader usually use his office to disseminate the work of Freepers and stalkers? Do reporters often find that kind of information useful?

I knew the the White House was inviting the Freepers to come and speak with the Secretary of State and the Vice President these days, but I hadn’t realized that the majority leader of the senate depended on them for their crack research skills on anything but fonts and kerning. Good to know.

Update: Apparently the Republicans are going to let the shrieking harpies online and on talk radio run with this.

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Tangled Web

by digby

White House denies leaking info that hurt Al-Qaeda spying

The White House on Tuesday denied being the source of a leak involving an Osama bin Laden video that a private intelligence firm said had sabotaged its secret ability to intercept Al-Qaeda messages.

Asked if the White House was the source of the leak, spokeswoman Dana Perino said: “No, we were not … We were very concerned to learn about it.”

The SITE Intelligence Group said it lost access that it had covertly acquired to Al-Qaeda’s communications network when the administration of President George W. Bush let out that the company had obtained a bin Laden video early last month ahead of its official release, the Washington Post said.

“Techniques that took years to develop are now ineffective and worthless,” SITE founder Rita Katz told the newspaper.

SITE monitors websites and public communications linked to radical Islamist groups and organizations deemed terrorist by US authorities and provides the information to clients, including news media companies.

It got hold of the bin Laden video before its release and provided it for free to the White House on the morning of September 7 but insisted that the video’s existence remain secret until it spotted the official release, in order to protect its own work.

“Within 20 minutes, a range of intelligence agencies had begun downloading it from the company’s website,” the Post said.

By that afternoon the video and a transcript from it had been leaked to a cable television news network and broadcast worldwide, the Post reported.

According to Katz, this tipped off Al-Qaeda that its communications security had been breached by SITE.

White House officials said the matter would be referred to the Director of National Intelligence, and that the White House was not planning any internal investigation.

“When the White House receives information from an individual or a company, we refer that appropriately to the intelligence community. That’s what happened here,” Perino said.

“And I’ll have to refer you to the Director on National Intelligence for any process problem they had in that regard.”

Homeland security adviser Fran Townsend echoed Perino’s “concern” and referred the matter to the nation’s spy chief.

“This is going to be an issue for the DNI to look at so that we can understand what, if anything, happened, and how to deal with it to ensure that we fully protect those who cooperate with us,” Townsend said.

“I haven’t looked at the internal White House emails, so what I can tell you is the DNI and the Intelligence Committee will need to look at who had access to it.

She added: “We are only going to be successful in the war on terror with the help of the American people.”

There is something very, very odd about this story. Particularly in light of this:

Osama Bin Laden’s widely publicized video address to the American people has a peculiarity that casts serious doubt on its authenticity: the video freezes at about 1 minute and 36 58 seconds, and motion only resumes again at 12:30. The video then freezes again at 14:02 remains frozen until the end. All references to current events, such as the 62nd anniversary of the U.S. atomic bombing of Japan, and Sarkozy and Brown being the leaders of France and the UK, respectively, occur when the video is frozen! The words spoken when the video is in motion contain no references to contemporary events and could have been (and likely were) made before the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

The audio track does appear to be in the voice of a single speaker. What I suspect was done is that an older, unreleased video was dubbed over for this release, with the video frozen when the audio track departed from that of the original video.

More here from C-Net news blog.

There was something wrong with this vid from the beginning. And now this strange story today.

Any thoughts on what might have happened here?

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Don’t Go There

by digby

I’m hearing from wingnuts snorting and chortling that the Democrats used 12 year old Graeme Frost as a “human shield.” They think it’s very clever.

I would suggest that they be very, very careful about saying such things. It might bring to mind something quite unpleasant:

We all know what was going on that day, don’t we? And we also know that the president just sat there in a room full of children for many minutes after he was told that the country was under attack. Apparently it didn’t occur to him that being with the president of the United States at that moment might pose a danger to those kids. Indeed, he didn’t leave the school until much later.

BagNews made an interesting observation about that recently:

Although everyone in the world, it seems, is familiar with the “My Pet Goat” photos, I think this one — though far lesser known — is as much, if not even more scandalous.

Given the detailed timelines available from that morning, we know well how George Bush spent 10 very long minutes reading a story to a group of second graders. He entered the classroom room at 9:03, and he was informed at 9:06 by Andy Card that a second plane had crashed into the World Trade Towers, but he didn’t finish up with the kids until 9:16.

What is much less familiar, however, is how Bush spent the next fifteen or twenty minutes. After taking another minute or two to speak with the teacher and principal after the reading exercise, Bush and company made their way into this adjoining classroom. Once there, Bush spoke with Condi Rice (check), then Dick Cheney (double check), then New York Governor Pataki (check again). What is most remarkable — both about the photo, and Dubya’s subsequent decision making — however, are those pages in front of him.

According to his original pre-“attack on America” schedule, Bush was slated to give a speech to the Booker Elementary student body at approximately 9:30. So, thirty-nine minutes after the first crash (which Bush was aware of by approximately 8:55); and nineteen minutes after hearing about the second crash; and with the fate of America supposedly hanging in the balance, what do you suppose Bush had in front of him and was working on?

Yep, it’s the speech he ended up writing, then delivering, four minutes later to 200 elementary school students, along with some teachers and a handful of reporters.

The president of the United States sat in an elementary school reading and giving speeches to schoolkids for nearly an hour after planes started flying into buildings all over the east coast. He sat there like a stunned rodent and then wasted even more time putting together a speech which he gave in front of those same kids. Remember that speech?

He had no idea at that moment where the next wave of attacks were coming from or where. But he decided that it was a good idea to stick close to those second graders anyway.

Human shields? You be the judge.

More human shield action here, from Watertiger.

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