I was going to turn a part of overpressure.com into a clearinghouse for debunking info on the 9/11 stuff. But the sheer volume of the crankery out there is stunning. For example, something brought a moonbat round to comment here. Let's just take a look at part of his spew:

12.In the late 1990s a group of right-wing nutcases (Cheney-Wolfowitz-Rumsfeld-Feith-Perle et al) called the "Project for a New American Century" or P.N.A.C. layed out their plans for what they hoped would secure American global dominance for the long term. Part of that plan was building an oil pipeline from the Caspian Sea fields across Turkmenistan, across Afghanistan to Pakistan and a port. They also unsuccessfully badgered Clinton to invade Iraq in 1998 because of its massive oil resources as the world's 2nd-largest oil producer! They even stated in a paper called "Rebuilding America's Defenses" in 1998 or '99 that the American public would not accept massive increases in defense spending and a more aggressive military posture without a large catalyzing, galvanizing event like "a new Pearl Harbor". When "W" came to power in 1998 these madmen became his top advisors. In July of 2001 they made an ultimatum to the government of Afghanistan (the only holdout in their pipeline scheme), saying "Either you accept our offer of a carpet of gold or we'll bury you under a carpet of bombs". The Afghan governemnt refused, so on 11 September of that year the C.I.A. and highest levels of the military and Bush administration carried out theri 9/11 false flag operation, blaming it on "Al Qaeda" and using it as an "excuse" to invade Afghanistan (and tried to use it as an "excuse" to invade Iraq!) and have basically used it as an excuse for everything since. For more infmation about the P.N.A.C., see:

http://www.americanfreepress.net/12_24_02/America_Pearl_Harbored/america_pearl_harbored.html
http://www.shout.net/~bigred/PHarbor.htm
http://www.antiwar.com/orig/weiner6.html
http://www.counterpunch.org/leopold02192003.html

Wow, where to even start. I mean, how can you make any headway with someone who writes "When "W" came to power in 1998 these madmen became his top advisors." 1998? That isn't right. Seems to me there was another President in 1998. And PNAC? A staple of moonbats, but here's my take on that. And this guy in his frothing didn't notice that Clinton didn't invade in 1998.

I don't even know why one would bother debunking with these people. Their minds are made up, or deranged, or both. No amount of evidence, or showing how silly they are, will fix it.

I mean, I know people who saw the plane go into the Pentagon, I know people who were in the recovery that day and saw the children's luggage in the wreckage, and saw big burly firemen breakdown when they saw that luggage.

But, hey, Howard Dean is the head of the Democrat Party, and he seems to think this kind of thing is good.

Here's Yon's full story on the fight in Mosul where LTC Kurilla was injured.

Wow. Now that's some reporting.

Glad to hear Erik is okay. Well, as okay as someone shot 3 times can be.

Once again, Jim Geraghty over at TKS sparks me into writing about it. Last time, I argued that Geraghty's predicition that it would be huge was wrong. Now, he is noting that there are a lot of "issues" here. He does a good job explaining "what we know." And he has a paragraph that I think is key:

The Gorelick “wall” is a bit of a side issue for now. (First let’s figure out exactly what Able Danger knew, when it learned it, and how the process of trying to contact the FBI went.) On the one hand, as a Justice Department official, Gorelick’s directives should not have been seen as the last word at William Cohen’s Department of Defense. On the other hand, as Ed and William Tate noted, her infamous memo was also directed to the DOJ Counsel of Intelligence Policy and Review, which advises the Attorney General, CIA, FBI, the Department of Defense and State on “questions of law, regulation, and guidelines as well as the legality of domestic and overseas intelligence operations.” In other words, both that memo and the attitude from the top made the priorities clear in the Clinton administration: Don’t foul up our prosecutions by using inadmissible intelligence gathered by foreign sources. In many cases, that is wise policy – you don’t want a criminal or terrorist walking free because the prosecutor was relying on inadmissible evidence. But the problem is, that puts a higher priority on a clean prosecution than arresting these guys before they commit their criminal act. If the act is counterfeiting, that’s not such a big deal. But if the act is crashing airliners into skyscrapers, then any court case is moot.

I wrote 2 years ago:

I also read The Cell: Inside the 9/11 Plot, And Why the FBI and CIA Failed to Stop It, by John Miller and Michael Stone. Just read it. I don't know why we bothered with a 9/11 commission, the whole story is right there.

That is all I wrote about the book. So let me point you to an Amazon review:

This eye-opening investigation into anti-American terrorist activities would have been even more shocking if information hadn't already started to dribble out about the inadequacies of the FBI and CIA in tracking and preventing such activities. But every page of this information-packed report seems to announce ineffectual actions, missed opportunities and frustrated agents on the ground blocked by the FBI hierarchy, turf battles and political lack of will. Even by the mid-1990s, when al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden were well known to U.S. authorities, strong action wasn't taken because, one State Department official says here, their acts hadn't exceeded an "acceptable level of terrorism."

The Cell describes exactly that attitude - "Don’t foul up our prosecutions by using inadmissible intelligence gathered by foreign sources." But it didn't come from Jamie Gorelick, or certainly not from just Gorelick. It also came from career law enforcement people in the FBI and the NYPD, as well as career prosecutors in the Justice Department.

The key then was that terrorism was considered a law enforcement. And it was not an unreasonable position at the time - I mean, even the inestimable Glenn Reynolds had this to say:

my pre-9/11 view was that we were best off treating Islamist terrorism as a law-enforcement matter, but otherwise trying to ignore it until it collapsed under the weight of its inherent idiocy. That was wrong, but it's hard for me to blame the Clinton folks for seeing things the way that I did -- except when, occasionally, they pretend otherwise.

Here's my admission - I thought exactly the same thing. 9/11 did indeed change everything on that. Law enforcement wasn't getting it done. The President ordered Attorney General Ashcroft to change from a focus on prosecution to one of prevention. In a prevention world, ignoring Able Danger was a bad idea. But what, exactly, would the FBI have done with the information? They couldn't have arrested Atta then - what would have been the charge?

So Able Danger is important only if we choose to learn from it. And as I point out, even post 9/11, the Republican controlled Congress has chosen to prevent the DoD from doing what Able Danger did. But I hope that some organization is doing that kind of datamining and acting on it.

Cindy Sheehan's mother and Senator Harry Reid had strokes.

Obviously, I wish them quick and full recoveries

But how long until someone suggests that Rove is behind it?

When I was at West Point, there was a poster up that read "The history we teach was made by those we taught," and it had pictures of Grant, Lee, and Macarthur. Kinda cool, seeing that. A touchstone to the past. I never thought that those around me would be history makers.

Michael Yon is in Iraq, blogging away. Instapundit points to his dispatches quite often, where we get stories that you don't read anywhere else. Part of the reason for that he explains in today's dispatch. The link was at Instapundit, I dutifully followed. And read to the bottom, where I read this:

The operation has begun. The Commander of Deuce Four, LTC Erik Kurilla, was shot three times in combat yesterday in front of my eyes. Despite being seriously wounded, LTC Kurilla immediately rejoined the intense and close-quarter fight that ended in hand-to-hand combat. LTC Kurilla continued to direct his men until a medic gave him morphine and the men took him away. I was right there.

Full stop. I know Erik Kurilla - we were - are - classmates. As the commander of Deuce Four - a Stryker Battalion up in Mosul - he's gotten frequent mentions in Yon's dispatches. Yon's account doesn't surprise - that he was there in the thick of it, and that he was still leading his troops after being shot three times.

Godspeed Erik - I pray for the best.

No Task Too Great!

Occasionally, I know some legal types and reporter types read the stuff here. I am looking for some help on FOIA requests. Many months ago, I submitted a FOIA request to the Department of Energy, asking for the results of the tests of the mortars found by the Danish EOD folks. (About those here and here.) We saw the reporting that said that advanced testing said that these were not chemical filled shells. So the question remains, what was in those shells. So I asked for the test results. They were tested at Idaho National Laboratory, a part of the Department of Energy complex. Anyone have any resources that can be helpful, here?

An old post on North Korea:

I've put a lot of thought into this whole North Korea situation, and I've got the solution. I haven't changed my mind on removing our troops from South Korea. But for those who argue that this would be a destabilizing disengagement from the region, we replace those troops with something else.

We send 37,000 environmentalists to North Korea. This is a plan with so many wins and positive side effects that it is an absolute no brainer. UN inspections are notoriously incapable of stopping nuclear weapons development programs. Under the UN inspection regime, Pakistan and North Korea have become nuclear powers, and Iraq pretty darn close - twice. But in the United States, environmentalists have been totally effective at shutting down development of new nuclear power plants (we haven't put a new reactor on-line in over a dozen years), as well as shut down all US plutonium processing for at least a decade. They have a real track record of success.

Additionally, we could significantly reduce the number of tree sitters and trashcan-through-the-window-of-Starbucks throwers during the World Bank meetings. And these guys will get a true taste of living in a Stalinist hellhole Worker's Paradise. This could be a real Kumbayah Brigade, and be a "national service" project for the youth. And if they don't get 37,000 volunteers, Charlie Rangel could draft the graduating classes of UC Berkeley and Stanford and move on through the Ivies until the Brigade is fully rounded out. Then we'd for sure have some rich kids with some skin in the game.

What's not to like?

UPDATE: This post over at Cold Fury points out another positive side effect - the North Koreans can be reminded that all that fuel oil they want supports terrorism, so they can just drop that demand too!

No reason why this won't work for Iran, too. Get them working on a hydrogen economy!

I thought that Saddam was all cool and stuff. Iraqi intelligence guys involved in terrorism?

According to the Washington Post, there are military people blogging from Iraq!

Jim Geraghty at TKS is declaring the Able Danger story "huge." It is an interesting point - but I doubt it will be huge. (In case you've never heard of Able Danger, it is reported that US Special Forces did some data mining in 1999 or 2000 and developed information that there was an Al Qaeda cell in the US, and that Mohammed Atta - by name - was in that cell.).

I doubt it will be huge. First, it cannot be used as a club against President Bush, since it did not happen during his Presidency, but rather some other Presidency. And though it might look like a big "I told you so," on the whole "wall" of separation between intel and law enforcement, I don't see that there is any satisfaction to be gained. If 9/11 hadn't happened, and the story came out that the US military was doing domestic spying, the cries for someone to be jailed - probably military - would be deafening. Even after 9/11, datamining of public sources by the Defense Department to identify terrorists was ridiculed out of existence.

I have to say that even I am not entirely comfortable with the idea of the US military doing domestic spying. I am not going to go all EFF here, but I'll just say that there are plenty of good reasons why it shouldn't be done, even if it does identify Mohammed Atta beforehand.

At the same time, I think that terrorists are identifiable through open sources, and that law enforcement folks - not military - should do it here in the US. And even then, Able Danger isn't going to convince people that it should happen. There have been plenty of people who have used open sources to identify terror cells in the US. Steven Emerson has been tracing these folks in the US since 1992 - it isn't like NPR turned to embrace him. He had identified Sami al-Arian by name - but it took years, and Bill O'Reilly's exposure of the story, to get him off of the public payrollin Florida.

This story is not huge - it happened the way we wanted it to happen. We don't want the military spying in the US, we don't want to identify terrorists through open sources.

Remember in the mid-90's, all those "patriot groups," the Michigan Militias, the Freemen, etc.? Now, do you remember anyone going on TV then to say "dissent is the most patriotic thing you can do," then?

I am not trying to say that those guys were cool, or anything, just wondering if there were newspaper editorials praising them for standing up to the administration.

Zing.

I can't remember what "That was a shot" is from. Some show or movie, and a guy wasn't sure if the girl was joking or really criticizing. She would be like "You are really an idiot," and the guy would be like "That was a shot." Home IMprovement or something?

Earlier I posted about how the whole concept of the "slogan" Global War on Terror being pushed aside for Global Struggle Against Violent Extremists was made up news. Well, the New York Times notes that, you know, the administration isn't actually doing any such thing. Is this a sign that the venerable New York Times was wrong? The question, she answers herself, no?

Of course the NYT wasn't wrong. The President didn't change his wording because he is now at war, or in a struggle, depending on how you look at it, with his own Administration. Over grammar. Seriously, what are the odds of that?

It's the political silly season.

For those needing a reminder, here is our National Security Strategy. Published in December, 2001. See if you can find any indication that the idea of the war on terror being bigger than just sending troops to fight is something brand new.

At 84. Well, this should be interesting.

Some wag said a while back, before the election, that you can really tell the economy was doing better because the media were no longer calling it the "Bush economy."

Here's an indicator - Sebastian Mallaby, a columnist in the Washington Post is damning George Bush for his (good) luck:

When it comes to economic policy, George W. Bush has all the luck. He's like a drunk who wanders across a six-lane highway and somehow never quite gets smushed.

Now let's ignore all of the unfortunate aspects of that opening paragraph, and look at the column - Mallaby is confounded that Bush economic policies are working, because, you know, tax cuts never work! He wants Bush to be "punished" for his policies - meaning that he wishes a worse economic outcome for you and me.

But that's fine. This is the only way that the Democrats can address good news - begrudgingly.