Well, Joe Trippi just spoke for an hour here at the “Digital Democracy
Teach-in”… I’m not going to blog blow-by-blow here (e-mail-to-blog is
pretty funky right now anyway), so I can actually pay attention to the live
event, but I’ll be filing an in-depth column tonight on the event.
Archives for February 2004
Mail to blog goof
The post below shows the result of using Radio’s “mail to blog” feature and
forgetting to turn off your e-mail “signature”. So the bad news is, my
phone line is now posted to the whole web, and I can’t edit it till I get
home. The good news is, I’m out of town and not there to take your call :-)
50th Virtual Occoquan
The 50th edition of Mark Hoback’s Virtual Occoquan (co-edited
by Paul Hinrichs) is now online — compiling good stuff from Salon Blogs
and elsewhere for years now. Pay this landmark a visit! I intend to read it
just as soon as this trip allows me…
Odds and ends (lost time is not found again)
Eric Boehlert’s Salon piece yesterday on “Bush’s Missing Year” — the strange lacunae in our president’s service records — is a must-read if, like me, you continue to wonder why this story has never quite broken out in the mainstream media the way it should. The process by which the American press collectively decides what stories have “legs” and which ones should be buried remains fascinating, bizarre and far more important to our political process than it should be. Journalism schools should be throwing their resources at this! First chronicle it, exhaustively; then teach a new generation of writers and editors of ways to bypass it. On optimistic days I share the Internet idealism that suggests this sort of “gatekeeping” is doomed; but there’s still plenty of cause for pessimism.
The Metrosexual Tarot
Tom Scoville, the guy who wrote the wonderful Silicon Follies serial for us back in the day, and who once created the Silicon Valley Tarot deck, is back with another appealingly oddball project: The Metrosexual Tarot.
SpamAssassin and Eudora
We run SpamAssassin on our mailserver here at Salon, and it’s generally done a good job of tagging the mountain of spam I receive, but lately, the wily spammers have gotten better at evading it, and on weekends I was seeing hundreds of spams again. So this week I downloaded and installed the newest Eudora (6.0) which includes a Bayesian filter that “learns” what I consider spam. The crap that eludes SpamAssassin and breaches the outer perimeter is now being mercilessly spotlit and executed before it can penetrate the confines of my inbox. (Do I sound like a crazed paramilitary freak? I guess that’s what too many years of >1000 spams per day does to you.) It’s too bad we now need a two-stage defense against spam, but at least it actually works.
At ETech
Beginning Monday I’ll be at the O’Reilly Emerging Tech Conference in San Diego. I’ll be filing a report for Salon on the Digital Democracy Teach-in there, and blogging, too (assuming my desktop box that runs Radio doesn’t miss me and decide to crash in my absence).
Intelligence breakdown
So I’ve been the victim of a hit-and-run post from one Eric Norlin, who dislikes my recent statement that “If U.S. intelligence is broken, it’s clear that the Bush White House broke it”:
Really? anyone remember when the CIA bombed the Chinese embassy on accident during the Clinton administration? Or how about when we blew up the baby food factory in Khartoum? Gimme a fucking break – the Bush administration didn’t “break” the US Intel community…..its basically the toughest job in the world — sorting through more data than any Netizen can imagine and making judgement calls as to what is actually important.
Sorry guys — if you’ve never worked in the US intel community, then you simply cannot even come close to fathoming what these people do on a daily basis. Its amazing they ever get anything right….and when shitheads talk outta line because they don’t like the current administration….well….ugh. |
Well…ugh indeed. Let’s ignore Norlin’s specious notion that the fact that I’ve “never worked in the US intel community” somehow disqualifies me from understanding anything about intelligence. (By the same token, I could say to Norlin, hey, if you’ve never been managing editor of a Web site, then you “simply cannot even come close to fathoming what I do on a daily basis”! Silliness.)
Norlin is saying that the CIA made mistakes before Bush ever came into office. Of course. My post wasn’t suggesting that somehow a hitherto flawlessly functioning intelligence agency was wrecked by Bush. The argument, one more time for Mr. Norlin’s sake, is specifically with the mendacity of the Bush team’s sequence of statements about U.S. intelligence regarding Saddam’s WMD. Let’s recap:
(1) Before the war, the Bush hawks complained that, though they knew for certain that Iraq was sitting on big WMD stockpiles, tipped off as they had been by their own informants among the Iraqi exile community, the CIA (along with fellow-traveler wimps at State) refused, out of wimpiness or stubbornness or who knows what, to confirm what they knew. So Cheney, Rumsfeld & co. bypassed standard CIA procedure and “stovepiped” a variety of reports that the CIA’s own analysts had deemed untrustworthy: That means they took these reports out of context and fast-tracked them to the Oval Office. They said to the CIA, “Why can’t you deliver the intelligence we need to support our policies? We don’t trust your skepticism here. We know Saddam has WMD, and we’re overruling you.” Seymour Hersh’s reports in the New Yorker painstakingly and devastatingly chronicled this process, and today’s Salon column by Sidney Blumenthal offers yet more detail.
(2) Now that the WMD have failed to turn up on schedule, just as the CIA tried to tell the Bush hawks, the administration has the chutzpah to say that the whole WMD fiasco is the result of an “intelligence failure.” It was the CIA’s fault, see? This exercise in finger-pointing is an absurdist scandal. It was abuse of U.S. intelligence for political ends, not failure of intelligence-analysis capability, that led to this mess. That’s what I meant by arguing that, if you want to view the failure to gauge Iraq’s possession of WMD accurately as an indication that U.S. intelligence is broken, then you have to accept that it was the Bush administration that did the breaking.
Incidentally, if you are following my argument here, you will notice that it displays considerable respect for the men and women working at “the toughest job in the world,” as Norlin puts it — more respect than Bush’s crew showed by ignoring their own intelligence agency’s “judgement calls as to what is actually important” and insisting that the world was the way it had to be in their war plans.
Kicking Radio
Periodically I get email from new Salon bloggers who’ve downloaded Radio Userland and tried to post to their new blog, only to find themselves thoroughly confused by Radio’s innovative but initially hard-to-fathom “desktop webserver” approach.
Recently, rather than try to fumblingly explain what’s really going on myself, I’ve just been pointing people to this chapter of Rogers Cadenhead’s book “Radio UserLand Kick Start,” which explains how to start a Radio blog.
There’s more about the whole book here. By putting that chapter online Rogers has performed a great public service (since the documentation from UserLand is not as extensive as it could be). Thanks!
In an amusing side note, Cadenhead, who also has long maintained the “alterna-Drudge” site Drudge Retort at the “drudge.com” domain name, reports that his server was brought to its knees Monday by crazed Web surfers desperately turning to Drudge for their fix of Janet Jackson’s breast-flesh.
The art of finger-pointing
So President Bush will now back the creation of a commission to investigate intelligence failures preceding the Iraq war. But look closely and you’ll find that the administration’s game-plan is an astonishingly Machiavellian exercise.
Before the war, Bush’s Iraq hawks, dissatisfied with the weasely intel they were receiving suggesting that Saddam Hussein was not an imminent threat, browbeat the CIA and zeroed in on a passel of dubious reports that indicated the dictator in fact possessed weapons of mass destruction. All indications suggest that the intelligence agency’s best people looked on in horror as their procedures for vetting and verifying information were ignored by the war-or-bust crowd, and impossible-to-verify accounts were touted as gospel. (Seymour Hersh’s New Yorker pieces on “stovepiping” provide the most thorough background here.)
With the WMD having failed to turn up, Bush and his men now have the gall to turn on the CIA and say, “Well, maybe we do have a problem here. We were misled by bad intelligence before the war. Better start an investigation into why our intelligence services screwed up so badly.”
If U.S. intelligence is broken, it’s clear that the Bush White House broke it. Any investigation that fails to have a full mandate to explore not only the failure to collect intelligence properly at the C.I.A., but the failure to make appropriate use of it at the White House, is castrated from the starting line.
For more good detail, Josh Marshall is blogging up a storm.