Condi, Clarke and the Millennium Plot

Something Condoleezza Rice mentioned in her appearance this morning before the 9/11 commission caught my attention:

It's also the case that I think if you actually look back at the millennium period, it's questionable to me whether the argument that has been made that somehow shaking the trees is what broke up the millennium period is actually accurate -- and I was not there, clearly.

But I will tell you this. I will say this. That the millennium, of course, was a period of high threat by its very nature. We all knew that the millennium was a period of high threat.

And after September 11th, Dick Clarke sent us the after-action report that had been done after the millennium plot and their assessment was that Ressam had been caught by chance -- Ressam being the person who was entering the United States over the Canadian border with bomb-making materials in store.

I think it actually wasn't by chance, which was Washington's view of it. It was because a very alert customs agent named Diana Dean and her colleagues sniffed something about Ressam. They saw that something was wrong. They tried to apprehend him. He tried to run. They then apprehended him, found that there was bomb-making material and a map of Los Angeles.

Now, at that point, you have pretty clear indication that you've got a problem inside the United States.

I don't think it was shaking the trees that produced the breakthrough in the millennium plot. It was that you got a -- Dick Clarke would say a lucky break -- I would say you got an alert customs agent who got it right.

And the interesting thing is that I've checked with Customs and according to their records, they weren't actually on alert at that point.

So I just don't buy the argument that we weren't shaking the trees enough and that something was going to fall out that gave us somehow that little piece of information that would have led to connecting all of those dots.

Juan Cole has already discussed in depth how "the Millennium plot" arrests tended to undermine the Bush administration's pooh-poohing of Richard Clarke's damning critique of Bush's "war on terror":

What Clarke's book reveals is that the way Ressam was shaken out at Port Angeles by customs agent Diana Dean was not an accident. Rather, Clinton had made Clarke a cabinet member. He was given the authority to call other key cabinet members and security officials to "battle stations," involving heightened alerts in their bureaucracies and daily meetings. Clarke did this with Clinton's approval in December of 1999 because of increased chatter and because the Jordanians caught a break when they cracked Raed al-Hijazi's cell in Amman.

I haven't seen the passages in Clarke's book yet detailing this matter, but Cole leaves the impression that Ressam was caught because Clarke put border officials on high alert -- though this was not in fact the case. In fact, just as Rice asserted today, Ressam was captured primarily through the work of a Customs agent who was simply doing her job as she might normally. (The Seattle Times had a riveting account of the arrest as part of its excellent series on the Ressam case.)

However, that's not the entire story, either.

I checked with Mike Milne, the PIO for Customs in Seattle -- which oversees the Port Angeles bureau where Ressam was caught -- and he confirmed that there was no "high alert" for his agents in December 1999.

"There wasn't such a thing back in those days as elevated alert levels or terrorist-watch kinds of issues within U.S. Customs at that time," Milne said. "What this was was a case of inspectors just doing their jobs as they normally would.

"I've sat through with Diana Dean on a number of occasions when she has done interviews with national, international and local media, and she would just tell you that she was doing her regular line of questioning, trying to determine if this person was somebody that could just be released, whether they required an additional secondary examination. In this case, what piqued her interest was the circuitous routing -- you know, he was going to Seattle via Victoria and Port Angeles. You know -- you can just drive down I-5 if you want to drive from Vancouver to Seattle."

After the Ressam capture, however, Milne said, "We in Customs Service went into an immediate change of how we did operations along the U.S.-Canada border."

So Rice is technically correct. But her "context" for the case omits the bigger picture -- which tends, in fact, to corroborate Clarke's version, and moreover paints Rice and her Team Bush cohorts in a decidedly incompetent light.

The bigger picture includes what happened next: Namely, FBI agents and the Clinton counterterror team, headed by Clarke -- realizing the enormity of what Ressam represented -- sprung quickly into action and soon uncovered most of the rest of his co-conspirators. Ressam, it must be remembered, was scheduled to bomb L.A. International Airport. However, there were at least three other millennium plots, all outside the U.S. but against mostly American targets. (As far as I know, the speculation that the Space Needle was targeted has been mostly discredited.) More to the point, investigators began uncovering a much broader assortment of Al Qaeda terrorist cells operating within the U.S.

This happened largely because of Clarke's "battle station" status for officials in Washington. The Seattle FBI agent investigating the case, Fred Humphries, was quickly brought under the wing of John O'Neill, Clarke's counterterrorism chief (and himself a victim of 9/11, having been forced out by the Bush administration). And O'Neill, as Clarke explained in a PBS interview last year, used Ressam to springboard into a broad swath of terrorist cells -- and because of that, the other components of the Millennium Plot were stymied:

What happened in the millennium plot was that we found someone who had lived in Boston who was the leader of the planned attack at the millennium in Jordan. We found someone who lived in Canada who was planning a simultaneous attack in Los Angeles. When we started pulling on the strings, what we found was there were connections to people in Seattle, Boston, Brooklyn, Manhattan and other cities throughout the United States.

Every time we looked at one of these individuals who looked like an Al Qaeda person, they lead us to someone else who was an Al Qaeda person -- probably, somewhere else in the United States.

So I think a lot of the FBI leadership, for the first time, realized that O'Neill was right -- that there probably were Al Qaeda people in the United States. They realized that only after they looked at the results of the investigation of the millennium bombing plot. So by February 2000, I think senior people in the FBI were saying there probably is a network here in the United States, and we have to change the way the FBI goes about finding that network.

The work needed to make that change, as Clarke has made clear in his testimony, is a significant part of what he tried to bring to the attention of Bush administration officials shortly after being sworn into office in January 2001. It was the chief reason he asked for a Principals meeting then -- though Rice and the Bush team now contend he was supposedly focused solely on dealing with Al Qaeda abroad. As we all now know, that Principals meeting did not occur until Sept. 4.

Even more significant is the fact that -- just as the Aug. 6 Presidential Daily Briefing that is now the focus of the post-testimony controversy apparently suggests, according to 9/11 commissioners Bob Kerrey and Tim Roemer -- the same warning signs that had alerted officials to the Millennium Plot -- were replicating themselves.

As the Center for American Progress details in its rebuttal to Rice's testimony:

Page 204 of the Joint Congressional Inquiry into 9/11 noted that "In May 2001, the intelligence community obtained a report that Bin Laden supporters were planning to infiltrate the United States" to "carry out a terrorist operation using high explosives." The report "was included in an intelligence report for senior government officials in August [2001]." In the same month, the Pentagon "acquired and shared with other elements of the Intelligence Community information suggesting that seven persons associated with Bin Laden had departed various locations for Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States." [Sources: Joint Congressional Report, 12/02]

That wasn't all. Just as one of the key conspirators -- namely, Ahmed Ressam -- had been caught in 1999, leading Clarke, O'Neill and the counterterrorism team to break up the rest of the Millennium plot, so had one of the 9/11 conspirators evidently already been captured on Aug. 15: Zacarias Moussaoui.

Did Bush's counterterrorism team spring into action and catch the rest of his co-conspirators? Well, no. But then, we all knew the answer to that.

As the conclusion of the Seattle Times series details:

This case involved a suspect in custody in Minnesota: Zacarias Moussaoui, a French national of Moroccan descent. Moussaoui was a student pilot who had frightened flight-school trainers in Minneapolis by insisting on learning to steer a jumbo jet while showing no interest in learning to take off or land.

FBI agents in Minneapolis had questioned Moussaoui on Aug. 15 and asked to read files on his laptop computer. He refused to let them.

The agents needed probable cause to persuade a judge to issue a search warrant to seize the laptop. They contacted Ghimenti in Paris, asking him to find out what the French intelligence service might have on Moussaoui.

From the French, Ghimenti obtained a substantial dossier: The French had been tracking Moussaoui since 1995. He had links to al-Qaida. He had journeyed to Afghanistan several times and had trained at a terrorism camp.

Ghimenti passed the information along to Coleen Rowley, chief division counsel in the Minneapolis FBI office, and it went to the counterterrorism section at headquarters.

Rowley and other Minneapolis agents were convinced Moussaoui was a terrorist threat. So was the veteran Ghimenti. But for reasons still unclear, the counterterrorism section in Washington would not seek the warrant.

As Joe Conason put it in today's Salon:

The public testimony of Condoleezza Rice before the 9/11 commission had a strategy and a structure, to use terms that she favors. The obvious strategy was to swathe every answer to a challenging question from the commissioners in "context" that did more to obfuscate than clarify.

They keep saying, you know, that Sept. 11 was "the day that changed everything." I'm not so sure about that.

But there is one thing I know changed that day: The Bush administration's grotesque incompetence, and its devastating consequences, were laid bare for all the world to see. It's just taken this long for the smoke to clear -- and not even Condi Rice's fresh layer of fog can hide it any longer.

Disturbing the peace

Sidney Blumenthal has an excellent piece up at Salon about how Condoleezza Rice not only botched the war on terrorism, she also managed to sabotage negotiations for peace in the Middle East: [registration req'd]

In January 2002, Rice launched a serious effort to restart the Middle East peace process between the Israelis and Palestinians. She hired Flynt Leverett, who was a professional foreign service officer on the policy planning staff of the State Department, as director of the initiative on the National Security Council. Rice told him and those assigned to work with him that she understood that the absence of peace process was hurting the war on terrorism and that Leverett should propose any and all measures he thought necessary, regardless of potential political controversy. "She told us we should go for the long bomb, using a football metaphor," Leverett recalled to me.

Leverett then developed a plan on final status dealing with security, Palestinian political reform and Jerusalem; the core of the plan was essentially the same as President Clinton's ultimate proposal. Rice rejected it; her own mandated team had come up with something she judged as "unworkable" and politically untenable for Bush, who would have been forced to confront Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to enact it.

On April 4, Bush delivered a speech calling for a "two state" solution, but without any details, and sent Secretary of State Colin Powell to the region. Leverett traveled with him. Powell gained agreement for the basic outline of the original plan, but just as he was to announce his breakthrough in a press conference Rice intervened, instructing him not to discuss any political process and that the whole burden of accountability must be put on the Palestinians and none on the Israelis. In private, Powell seethed but did not fight Rice.

Rice had crumbled in the face of internal political opposition from the neoconservative armada. "In the end, the neoconservatives in the Pentagon and the vice president's office, plus Karl Rove's political shop, prevailed," Leverett told me.

As longtime readers may recall from this post, this is not the first time that Republican neoconservatives have wrecked the hopes for a negotiated peace in the Middle East. They interfered with Bill Clinton's efforts as well:

Richard Perle sabotages peace talks

Richard Perle, a veteran cold war warrior and former assistant secretary of state, urged the Israeli prime minister, Ehud Barak, not to agree to any settlement which left the future status of Jerusalem unresolved, according to the New York Post website.

The website quoted a message received by Mr Barak yesterday from two of his emissaries, Yoram Ben-Ze'ev and Yossi Alpher. The two men said Mr Perle "asked us to send a clear message" to Mr Barak that it would be a "catastrophe" if the Jerusalem question was not dealt with, and urged him "to walk away" from the Camp David negotiations if faced with that outcome.

Elliott Abrams, who seems to be the chief culprit in the Rice matter, is of course a Perle protege.

Restoring honor and dignity

White House spokesman Scott McClellan has been caught once again pretending that up is down (while of course admonishing reporters to do likewise), in this report from USA Today's Mimi Hall:

Dealing with criticism that national security adviser Condoleezza Rice wouldn't testify in public before the 10-member commission investigating the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, White House spokesman Scott McClellan complained last month that when she testified in private, "only five members showed up" to hear what she had to say.

What McClellan didn't tell reporters was that on Nov. 21 -- long before Rice met with the five commissioners in February -- the White House counsel's office had sent the commission a letter saying no more than three commissioners could attend meetings with White House aides of Rice's rank.

Given that demand, "we are a little surprised that the White House has repeatedly implied to the public that commissioners were uninterested in attending these meetings," commission spokesman Al Felzenberg said Tuesday.

Susan Strahan at CJR Campaign Desk has more, pointing out that it took Hall -- who at least had the gumption to check out a basic fact -- a whole month to do so:

Unlike McClellan, Felzenberg didn't do his own lecturing to the media about "context." Or even about that little trick they teach you in Journalism 101 -- get both sides of the story. As in: Pick up a phone.

By now, the picture should be clear to everyone in the press room: This White House will lie without compunction. Everything it says needs double-checking. It's a simple matter of integrity.

Bob Somerby at The Daily Howler has been documenting for years now just how abysmal the Washington press corps has become. This is yet another crystalline example of just how lazy and propaganda-prone the journalism coming out of D.C. is these days.

Ralph and the right

Ralph Nader's campaign -- which just took a shot to the groin from Oregon voters, who declined to put show up in sufficient numbers at a Nader rally to get him on the ballot -- keeps getting stranger and stranger. From the Hartford Courant (registration required):

Nader Seeks Strange Bedfellows

WASHINGTON -- Ralph Nader, while vowing his presidential run is as an independent, is embarking on a new strategy that, come Election Day, may find him running as an independent, a Green, a Populist and a Reform Party candidate all at once.

In recent days, he has met and exchanged letters with third-party officials to negotiate what he says is a pragmatic strategy that would help him gain access to all 50 ballots.

"I would still be an independent candidate, I would just appear on their ballot lines," Nader said this week.

But such a hodgepodge of party affiliations threatens to muddle his message of pure independence, not to mention giving critics more reasons to attack his politics. Already, it is creating controversy within third parties. And it has some fans wondering whether this pragmatic approach is at odds with the central idealism of his candidacy.

"It's weird," said John B. Anderson, the 1980 independent presidential candidate. "That, to me, would shred the credibility of his effort."

We've already noted Nader's transparent willingness to form alliances with right-wing extremists in the pursuit of the presidency. That propensity, however, may create some problems down the road:

If Nader's strategy works as well as La Follette's, he may face a prospect of flatly contradicting one of the parties he represents.

On immigration, for instance, the Greens' current platform says: "We must accept the contributions and rights of our immigrants." The Reform Party national chairman, in an interview this week, described a different stance: . "We are sick and tired of this country being flooded by immigrants," he said.

For now, Nader said, he agreed with most points on both platforms.

I think it's similarly safe to agree that Nader is rapidly representing everything he's supposed to stand against.

Willie Horton, Texas style

The ghost of the "Willie Horton" campaign of 1988 is hovering over the congressional race in Texas between Democrat Martin Frost and Republican Pete Sessions.

An outside group unaffiliated with the Sessions campaign -- specifically, the anti-immigrant Coalition for Future American Workers, one of John Tanton's front groups -- has begun running smear ads that present false "facts" about Frost' record, and do so with a not-so-subtle appeal to racist sentiments:

The ads, purchased on four Dallas television stations, are full of details about Frost's positions on upcoming legislation. However, Frost claims the ads' claims are flat-out wrong.

"His bill will import 250,000 more workers to take jobs and drive down wages," the ad intones.

"They just want to make a statement that I support 250,000 more foreign workers annually, when that is President Bush's position, not mine," Frost said.

Plus, the ads feature many pictures of dark-skinned immigrants. Frost calls them racially divisive, and claims the coalition behind them gets money that is tainted.

"They got $1.4 million from the Pioneer Fund, which is a white supremacist group -- clearly documented," Frost said.

As the Dallas Morning News story [registration req'd] on the matter makes clear, Sessions' campaign is claiming no association with the ads:

Sessions campaign manager Chris Homan said Mr. Sessions has no knowledge of the organization sponsoring the advertisements, the Coalition for the Future American Worker, and no involvement with them.

"We're not going to engage groups like this in any capacity," Mr. Homan said.

The CFAW continues to claim that it's attacking Frost for his record, but their claims have no relation to reality:

Mr. Frost said that no bill he is sponsoring or co-sponsoring will ever give amnesty in Texas to hundreds of thousands of undocumented workers.

"I have no idea what they're talking about, quite frankly," Mr. Frost said. "I'm for the freedom of the press. I'm for the First Amendment. But I'm not for people to lie with impunity."

As many of you may recall, the Horton ads (which played a big role in sinking Michael Dukakis' 1988 presidential candidacy) were ostensibly the creation of an "independent" group called Americans For Bush -- though, as Joe Conason later reported, the ad's real creators were GOP operatives Floyd Brown and Craig Shirley.

The Texas ads, likewise, have the smell of Tom DeLay all over them. Just like his fingerprints are all over the use of Treasury Department employees to analyze John Kerry's tax proposal.

Terror and the war in Iraq

Jessica Stern, whose previous work I recently cited, weighs in at Salon with an important analysis of the Bush administration's "war on terror":

How the war in Iraq has damaged the war on terrorism

The false idea that the United States is engaged in a crusade against the Islamic world is a critical component of the Islamist nihilists' worldview, and spreading this idea is critical to their success. The unprovoked attack on Iraq, followed by an occupation that is widely perceived as inept and arbitrary, even by our British ally, has confirmed this view among potential sympathizers. Every time American troops shoot into a crowd, even in self-defense, the image of America as a reckless, ruthless oppressor is highlighted. Televised pictures of American soldiers and their tanks in Iraq are a "deeply humiliating scene to Muslims," explained Saudi dissident Saad al-Faqih, who calls the war in Iraq a "gift" to Osama bin Laden. Unsurprisingly, terrorist recruiters are using the war and the continuing occupation to mobilize recruits -- not only inside Iraq but outside as well. Intelligence officials in the United States, Europe and Africa have reported that the new recruits they are seeing since the war became imminent are younger, with a more menacing attitude.

... The war in Iraq has split the allies, not the terrorists. It has turned Iraq into a Mecca for international terrorists, and mobilized local Shiite and Salafi jihadist groups that had previously posed a minimal threat. It has facilitated connections between terrorists and those with formal military experience in Saddam's army, the lethal nightmare that the invasion was supposed to have thwarted. Antipathy toward the United States, not only in Iraq and throughout the entire Islamic world, but in Europe as well, has become a dangerous trend exploited by terrorists. Even as we tout our successes in rounding up al-Qaida terrorists, the broader movement inspired by bin Laden and ignited by the invasion of Iraq is recruiting new nihilist minions throughout the world. The war in Iraq has not only been a distraction from the war on terrorism; it has strengthened our enemies in ways that continue to surprise and horrify us. Where will we be surprised next?

If Stern is right, Ramadi is just the first of those surprises.

A Denial

[Graffiti at an abandoned business in West Seattle, April 1994]

Come dowsed in mud, soaked in bleach
As I want you to be
As a trend, as a friend, as an old memoria

Ten years ago today I was riding my bike to work -- it was a little after 11, I think -- when I rode past Kurt Cobain's home, which was along my daily route. And I knew something was up.

The house was one of the many mansions situated along Lake Washington Boulevard. The estate sits in a little depression of sorts, right next to a tiny green place called Viretta Park, which has mostly a lot of steeply sloped lawn, a couple of trees and a bench.

The gated entrance to the estate, though, was crawling with police. Inside the gate I could see an ambulance, and outside were several cruisers. I kept riding, since I was still nearly an hour away from work.

At the time I was still the news editor of the Journal American, the Bellevue-based newspaper that has since transmogrified into the suburban King County Journal (I stepped down from the job shortly thereafter). When I pulled up to the newsroom a little after noon, I notified our police reporter and entertainment editor of what I had seen. Just about then, video began arriving over the local news stations from the scene. We sent our reporters out to chase the story, and they shortly confirmed the initial reports: Kurt Cobain had been found dead inside, the victim of an apparent suicide by gunshot.

In the ensuing days we partook, almost by necessity, of the media circus surrounding his death. There were the necessary profiles and biographies, the photos from the scene and from his career; the columns and letters tut-tutting the latest rock n'roll suicide.

I kept riding my bike that week past the place, and for the first few days it was a circus there, too -- TV trucks and teenagers and gawkers. My return ride took me past the place late at night, and for several days there were steady candlelight vigils.

Viretta Park, which is not much more than an acre in actual size (part of the park is a wooded slope), became the center of the Cobain mourners. Even after the circus settled down, the park attracted a steady trickle of daytime visitors. The center of it all was the solitary bench, which not only collected a wealth of graffiti, but also became a message center for parents trying to reach their runaway teens. Here is a shot of the bench about a month later.



I went to the memorial service at Seattle Center and watched the young people climbing on the fountain, and listened to Courtney Love's strangely self-serving eulogy. I watched the TV specials, listened to the Nirvana sets on the radio, even listened to Rush Limbaugh's revealingly inhuman rant against Cobain on his radio show (""Kurt Cobain was, ladies and gentleman, I just -- he was a worthless shred of human debris...").

I was oddly disconnected from it all, partly because I hadn't ever had a chance to see Nirvana live or meet Cobain. I wanted to feel something, but all I had was regret. I'd had a chance to see Cobain just a few months before -- at the MTV taping at Pier 48, and had missed it, thinking, well, they'll be around a few years. I can see them sometime. When I go to my grave, it will be one of my real regrets.

I was 20 and living in Idaho in 1977, the year punk broke. Though at the time I was a devotee of more mainstream fare -- the usual, you know: Led Zeppelin, Yes, Genesis, The Who -- I had developed a taste for more obscure fare as well, from Bruce Springsteen (before he hit it big; I hated Born to Run as a sellout, and to this day think that The Wild, the Innocent and the E Street Shuffle is his best work) to Roxy Music.

The first punk album I ever heard was the first Ramones album, which threw me for a complete musical loop and hooked me all at once. Within a few months, I was gathering up all the Sex Pistols and Damned and X-Ray Spex and Buzzcocks and Clash albums I could find. In Idaho, as you can imagine, this was a feat.

Good punk only lasted a couple of years. It split off into hardcore -- some of which I liked, some not -- and New Wave (likewise) and who knows what else. But it never really made it big, except among people who had the ears to hear. We were like a secret club. Me especially -- I was working straight jobs and looked straight, and it threw people off when I played punk for them. I always gravitated to other people who liked punk.

One of these was my friend Tim, who ran the record shop in Missoula where I would scout out albums to review for the local paper. Tim always had great taste, and had forgotten more about music than most people know, and he loved punk. We used to both talk about how we liked to put on "Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols" first thing in the morning.

Another kid who liked to hang out in Tim's record shop was this basketball player from Big Sandy who played bass in local bands and eventually moved to Seattle to make it big. His name was Jeff Ament.

I followed out to Seattle a couple of years later (in 1989), and when I began checking out the music scene, was pleased to see Jeff doing well. He played in one of the city's seminal punk bands, Green River, and then making waves with a much more straight-up rock band called Mother Love Bone. But MLB's lead singer, Andrew Wood, died of a heroin overdose, a tragedy that made big headlines locally. It was a precursor of the doom that seemed to hang over the Seattle scene.

It was in this time frame that the movement everyone called "grunge" seemed to come together, and better rock journalists than I (notably Charles Cross) have admirably charted its course. It seemed to have three or four real internal factions, bringing together under one "sound" bands that in fact inhabited very different universes: Soundgarden, which was more in the mold of a straight-up heavy metal band; Pearl Jam -- to which Tim's friend Jeff Ament gravitated -- who played mainstream guitar rock; and angry punks, like Mudhoney and Screaming Trees.

But the best of the punks, without question, was Nirvana.

They played punk the way it is supposed to be played: Loud, fast, pissed-off. And on top of that, they wrote great fucking songs. (It's difficult enough to produce a single album on which all the cuts, if not great, are really good; and Nirvana made three of them.) And because they were punk, I loved them. The other bands were good, they were interesting; but you only had to listen to Nirvana once to know they were great.

However, because I wasn't writing about music much my first few years in Seattle, I was lackadaisical about seeing them. I hung out at local music bars on the nights I could get away -- I was doing evening shifts at the JA -- but it wasn't often enough. I caught Mudhoney and Soundgarden and Alice in Chains, the Posies and Screaming Trees, but somehow never was in the right place at the right time to see Nirvana.

I had that one last chance, in December 1993, to see them, when I was offered a press pass to go the Pier 48 performance. But I had some duty or other pressing upon me and gave it to another reporter instead, a middle-aged fellow who surprised me by coming back and raving about what a great show it had been. I was jealous.

The truth was, though, that the rot was already setting in around the grunge scene then. It had become a cliché of the local comedy show that record executives were descending on the city and trying to scout out and sign anyone who could pass themselves off as a Seattle band. And many of them were crap, but knew how to play off the grunge image. Sad, but all too true.

Cobain's death was the stake that plunged right through the heart of an already dying moment in music. It marked the end of "grunge" -- and just as well. Many of the big-name acts just crumbled; others, like Alice in Chains, succumbed eventually to the same doom. The surviving bands -- notably Pearl Jam -- still are capable of turning out music with integrity, but it isn't vital anymore, not the way it once was. Or maybe that was an illusion.

I've read Cobain's diaries and tried to understand what it was that tormented him so. I wonder if it wasn't quite literally fame that killed him. Cobain seems to have been acutely aware that the music business is built on hype, so even a real artist can never know if what he's doing really matters.

The massive popularity that hit Nirvana seems to have undermined the very integrity of his own sense of who he was. The cognitive dissonance of feeling like the same loser he had been for all those years, while being assaulted by the fake adulation that comes with a No. 1 album, seems to have driven him to want to destroy it all. Most suicides kill themselves not because they feel sorry for themselves or are simply depressed, but because they are in unending psychic pain, and after awhile, suicide seems like the best way to relieve it. Cobain, in the end, seems to fit this mold.

Cobain's suicide also underscored the rampant phoniness in the grunge scene. For a music whose image is all about artistic integrity, the flow of money proved to be poison for the community well. Egos were inflated and then burst. Once-good bands began miring down in mediocrity. And drugs, particularly heroin, were just killing both the artists and the artistry.

By 1996 or so, it was clear grunge was gone for good. Seattle moved on. Its music scene has become healthier in recent years -- more diverse, but not cohesive either -- and culturally, everyone seems to have forgotten Nirvana and what they once meant.

Except for the young kids. I still see a lot of Cobain T-shirts. Every year, on the anniversary of his death, Viretta Park hosts a gathering of them to listen and remember. This year, the 10th anniversary, was no different.

What was a little different -- besides the larger crowds at Viretta -- was that this year the media remembered. On previous anniversaries, little has been said or observed; but this being the 10th, they checked in with the dutiful memorials. Both the Seattle Times and the Post-Intelligencer carried remembrances this weekend. But it all has a hollow ring to it.

The reality is that Seattle has had a great deal of difficulty dealing with its fallen stars over the years, regardless of how significant their contributions. Perhaps it is, as Cobain seems to have suspected, the curse of Frances Farmer.

Certainly, Jimi Hendrix -- who met a similarly troubled death -- inhabited the same sort of limbo for years as far as the city was concerned. Sure, he may have been the greatest rock guitarist of all time, but the civic and business leaders recoiled at the very idea of honoring someone who had died because of a "drug overdose" (or so went the myth; Hendrix actually died of asphyxiation, not an OD).

For years, the only Hendrix memorial to be found anywhere in Seattle was a brass plaque imbedded in a rock at the Woodland Park Zoo, donated by a local radio station. You could always drive down to Renton and visit his grave (completely nondescript, except for the Stratocaster engraved in the granite). Nowadays, of course, we have the Experience Music Project, the ugly-but-cool rock museum built around a great Hendrix collection; but it took Paul Allen's clear philanthropy (the thing loses money like a sieve) to get it built, which in itself raises all the usual conflicts about corporate money's role in rock. Ah well.

Likewise, there has not, to my knowledge, been any serious discussion of a Cobain memorial. Seattle has moved on, and no one seems to want to remember.

The little A-frame house where Cobain killed himself is gone now. It was a guest house on the estate, and in fact was quite visible from the park, including the upper room where the suicide occurred:



Courtney Love had it torn down before she sold the place and moved off to Malibu (where her sellout career has recently been reaching new heights). After she moved away, the main mansion itself was torn down and completely replaced as well.

The only really fitting memorial to Cobain is in his hometown, Aberdeen, a depressed logging center near the Washington Coast. If you go just outside the city limits, there is a bridge over the Wishkah River that is a place Cobain used to inhabit when he was a homeless teenager. Underneath it is a marvelous collection of graffiti, most of it in Cobain's honor.

But Cobain -- who actually only lived here for a year and a half -- deserves better from Seattle. The circumstances of his death can't obscure the fact that he was one of those momentous figures in music history, just as Hendrix was. As Vernon Reid observed in the recent Rolling Stone that placed Cobain among rock's 50 greatest icons (he'd probably be in a Top 10, for that matter), "Cobain changed the course of where the music went."

Then again, one can just imagine Cobain cringing at the very idea of a memorial. It's hard to imagine what shape a fitting tribute could possibly even take. Maybe the whole concept of memorializing someone is anathema to what Nirvana was about.

Oh well, whatever, nevermind.

Oblique threats

Stinging Nettle is reporting that anti-abortion activists are driving around Raleigh, N.C., today in large trucks adorned with photos of aborted fetuses and the word "Choice" in block letters across them:

If these guys were dark-skinned and bearded, they'd have been pulled out of their trucks on suspicion of terrorism.

But they are not. When they kill doctors, it's not terrorism, in fact it's actually debated whether or not they were committing justifiable homicide. When they blow up buildings, it's not terrorism - no, they retreat to the mountains and become folk heroes.

Now, these guys are implicitly threatening the population of downtown Raleigh, and no one pays any attention. Really, what other message is conveyed by repeatedly stopping a large moving van right next to the auxiliary Federal Building/U.S. Courthouse? Oklahoma City is the implicit threat. Do you doubt what would happen if the trucks had ten foot high letters saying "Allah'u Akbar!"?

I'm sure Glenn Reynolds would be all over it, in that case.

Bringing It On

[From Without Sanctuary]

It is no great surprise that the photos from Fallujah last week of the burned corpses of American "contractors" being strung up from a bridge while their murderers celebrated evoked all kinds of strong feelings, across a pretty broad range. Some of these -- notably Daily Kos' -- have in turn evoked extremely powerful counter-responses, and further counters to these.

Images like these always evoke real horror -- especially, for Americans, if the corpses belong to their countrymen. When that happens, the lust for revenge comes rushing alongside.

I was struck, however, by how similar these images were to those from the lynching era, when black men were routinely killed by mass mobs in the most horrifying ways imaginable -- including torturing them by flaying and dismembering them while still alive, setting them aflame, and then finally raising them aloft, often with a chain. The image above of the 1916 lynching of Jesse Washington in particular was reminiscent -- not merely for the horror of the corpse itself, but the horror of the smug satisfaction on the faces of his lynchers. This was the same horror, I think, most people felt watching those children celebrate by mutilating American corpses.

Of course, Billmon, in a marvelously insightful post, has already remarked on much the same, observing:

I'll leave it to others to decide whether the Iraqis who celebrated the deaths of their enemies today by decorating a local bridge with their remains are worse, better or equal to the lynchers of early 20th century America, who decorated trees and streetlamps with the victims of a segregationist reign of terror. At a minimum, though, history suggests the connection between "terrorism, culture and barbaric scenes" isn't quite as tight as some of our cuture war idealogues seem to think.

Predictably, this view has been attacked as a "blame America first" mentality, which is the smear du jour for any attempt to take a thoughtful approach to what occurred in Fallujah. This is not terribly surprising, because Billmon was making a subtle point about the nature of violence that cuts deeply against the grain of jingoist reactionarism.

Perhaps the reason the pictures from Fallujah are so disturbing is that, as Billmon suggests, they hold up a mirror to us. The violence we visit readily on others is waiting to be visited on us in return; the continuously self-begetting nature of violence just spirals onward and upward.

"Bring it on," we say. The mob in Fallujah does so -- knowing full well that retribution awaits, and shouts by the horror of its act its own defiance: "Bring it on."

America the Bringer of Death is well known to Iraqis. They first encountered it in the 1991 Gulf War. They came to be on intimate terms with it during the invasions, especially the bombings. But they are not alone.

The Native Americans who populated the land first knew it well. It is hard to say where the cycle of violence began first, but by the time its spiral had completed for them, the American government had mercilessly rubbed them out.

The people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki know it well too. As did, of course, black Americans in the South.

I have discussed previously the nature of the systematic lynching of thousands of black people in America between the years 1880 and 1930.

There are many postcards that recorded these lynchings, because the participants were rather proud of their involvement. This is clear from the postcards themselves, which frequently showed not merely the corpse of the victim but many of the mob members, whose visages ranged from grim to grinning. Sometimes, as in the Lige Daniels case, children were intentionally given front-row views. A lynching postcard from Florida in 1935, of a migrant worker named Rubin Stacy who had allegedly "threatened and frightened a white woman," shows a cluster of young girls gathered round the tree trunk, the oldest of them about 12, with a beatific expression as she gazes on his distorted features and limp body, a few feet away.

Indeed, lynchings seemed to be cause for outright celebration in the community. Residents would dress up to come watch the proceedings, and the crowds of spectators frequently grew into the thousands. Afterwards, memento-seekers would take home parts of the corpse or the rope with which the victim was hung. Sometimes body parts -- knuckles, or genitals, or the like -- would be preserved and put on public display as a warning to would-be black criminals.

That was the purported moral purpose of these demonstrations: Not only to utterly wipe out any black person merely accused of a crimes against whites, but to do it in a fashion intended to warn off future perpetrators. This was reflected in contemporary press accounts, which described the lynchings in almost uniformly laudatory terms, with the victim's guilt unquestioned, and the mob identified only as "determined men." Not surprisingly, local officials (especially local police forces) not only were complicit in many cases, but they acted in concert to keep the mob leaders anonymous; thousands of coroners' reports from lynchings merely described the victims' deaths occurring "at the hands of persons unknown." Lynchings were broadly viewed as simply a crude, but understandable and even necessary, expression of community will. This was particularly true in the South, where blacks were viewed as symbolic of the region's continuing economic and cultural oppression by the North. As an 1899 editorial in the Newnan, Georgia, Herald and Advertiser explained it: "It would be as easy to check the rise and fall of the ocean's tide as to stem the wrath of Southern men when the sacredness of our firesides and the virtue of our women are ruthlessly trodden under foot."

The lynching campaign drew on many of the nation's darker wellsprings -- particularly its taste for violence -- but it served one primary purpose, the subjugation of the black population:

There were, of course, other components of black suppression: segregation in the schools, disenfranchisement of the black vote, and the attendant Jim Crow laws that were common throughout the South. But lynching was the linchpin in the system, because it was in effect state-supported terrorism whose stated intent was to suppress blacks and other minorities, in no small part by eliminating non-whites as competitors for economic gain. These combined to give lynching a symbolic value as a manifestation of white supremacy. The lynch mob was not merely condoned but in fact celebrated as an expression of the white community's will to keep African-Americans in their thrall. As a phrase voiced commonly in the South expressed it, lynching was a highly effective means of "keeping the niggers down."

Of course, the threat of the rape of white women and other pretenses for lynching presented handy pretexts for these horrors. As always, the violence was predicated on a fear of future violence; lynching was excused as a preemptive act.

Yet in reality a black person could be lynched for literally no reason at all -- in some cases, simply for defending himself from physical assault, or for just being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Lynching laughed at the notion of blacks advancing through hard work; moderately prosperous blacks who managed to do so were often the first targets of angry lynch mobs intent on dealing with "uppity" blacks.

And God have mercy on any black communities who tried to stand up to this violence. When this happened, the result was commonly known as a "race riot," but what these typically comprised were wholesale lethal assaults on black communities by whites. They became particularly prevalent during the "Red Summer" of 1919, when the riots broke out in some 26 American cities.

The most notable of these race riots occurred in 1921 in Tulsa, where a prosperous black population was literally bombed out of existence over two days of complete lawlessness. The rioting was set off by a black youth's alleged assault on a local white girl that later turned out to be harmless consensual contact. The youth was promptly arrested without incident, but the local press played it up with garish headlines that ignored the real nature of the incident, and one Tulsa newspaper publicly called for the young man's lynching.

This attempt, however, met with real resistance from the black community. When a group of local blacks attempted to ward off a lynch mob by meeting them at the jailhouse, the fighting broke out. Soon the entire district was swarmed over by gun-wielding whites who began mowing down black residents at random, setting fire to homes and businesses, and looting, raping and maiming. There are reports that an airplane flew over the black community and dropped incendiary bombs. By the time the violence had subsided, as many as three hundred black people were believed killed, many of them buried in a mass grave, and thirty-five city blocks lay charred. The death toll has never been properly calculated, largely because of the ways the bodies were disposed of, but some counts reach as high as 300 or more. And Tulsa's African-American community, at one time known as the "Negro Wall Street" because of its prosperousness, was never the same. Most of the survivors simply left.

We all like to think of America as a peace-loving and "civilized" nation, where freedom and justice reign supreme. But our history tells us otherwise.

And the point, of course, is not to suggest that what happened in Fallujah was some kind of response to the harm inflicted on black Americans a century ago. Rather, what it suggests is that we do not so easily escape our history by such simple distancing mechanisms as saying -- as the right is wont to do -- that hey, that happened a hundred years ago, and I didn't have anything to do with it.

The reality, however, is that there is a dark side to our preferred self-image as a beacon of hope and light to the rest of the world -- that alongside whatever democracy America has created, it has also imposed its will ruthlessly and bloodily, mainly through our seemingly endless capacity for violence. This capacity has never gone away; it has merely changed its face. In 1916, it came with rope and fire and chains. In 2004, it comes with incendiary bombing attacks delivered with the push of a button from high in the air. Either way, we produce hundreds of charred corpses, thousands of personal tragedies, and bottomless wells of hatred for our nation.

This is not to "blame America" -- it is to recognize a reality about how the rest of the world sees us, and more importantly, how the spiral of violence works. To the extent that America conducts its business with the rest of the world without resorting to violence, then we probably are a beacon of hope for democracy; but when we unleash the dogs of war -- especially when, as we have in Iraq, we do so under false pretenses -- then we open up the Pandora's Box of evil that colors both our history and our present in shades of red and black.

It's become much easier, thanks to technology, for us to indulge this violence, almost thoughtlessly. "Bring it on," says the president, with a smirk resembling those on the faces of Jesse Washington's lynchers. And his cheerleaders indulge the same arrogance of will -- vowing, as we always have, the most terrible and unending violence for anyone who dares stand in our way, or most of all, stand up to us, to threaten to visit upon us the same violence we have just visited upon them.

Justifying everything under the banner of the terrorist attacks on America on 9/11 -- attacks which, as we now know, the people of Iraq had nothing to do with -- we sit in our comfy chairs typing away on computers and urge our leaders to "nuke Fallujah," as Kathleen Parker so judiciously suggested the other day. Bill O'Reilly can broadcast to the nation his belief in a "final solution" to how we deal with Fallujah. Little Green Footballs and the Anti-Idiotartian Rottweiler likewise fulminate about leveling the city, and Instapundit nods approvingly. The ghosts of those Tulsa newspaper editors live on.

So there is no small irony in the blustering of these same right-wing bloggers over Daily Kos' remarks, particularly his callous dismissal of the fate of four contractors. If you believe, as I do, that each man's death lessens us, then there can be no condoning such sentiments. But they pale in contrast to the monstrous indifference to death that has been a major component of the "warblogger" contingent since well before the war. And it must be noted that not only is this kind of callousness out of character for Kos, he has apologized for making it -- better than could ever be said of his tormentors.

These are people who, after all, have regularly described Muslims in the most degrading terms available, often depicting them as mere vermin or, metaphorically, as diseases to be exterminated. They even sneer at the deaths of their fellow Americans, such as Rachel Corrie, if they happen to be of the wrong political persuasion. Instapundit is hardly immune from making outrageous and cruelly thoughtless remarks -- including those directed at Hispanic organizations, or soft-pedaling the internment of Japanese Americans in World War II; no one on the right, it must be noted, has ever held Reynolds accountable for this commentary.

The whole Kos dustup, in this context, is just nakedly fraudulent. Their outrage at Kos' callousness is not based on any respect for human life -- it is, as Matt Stoller makes clear, a "gotcha" game whose sole purpose is to score political points and derail the liberal blogosphere's rising influence. Kos was wrong (at least in terms of his sentiments; his factual point about the comparative treatment of American GIs was an important one to make); this does not make them right.

Particularly not when it comes to their proposed "final solution" for Fallujah, a city of 250,000, only a handful of whom participated in the recent atrocities. These acts, it should be understood, were a classic terrorist provocation, taken directly from Mao's tactics in the Chinese civil war. The entire purpose is to get American forces to overreact and take punitive action against the general populace. This turns the populace against the occupiers, making the terrorists' work that much easier, since they are no longer seen as extremists by the public but widely accepted and sympathetic freedom fighters. It also makes for fertile recruiting ground among the victims of the inevitable ensuing tragedies.

This is how the cycle of violence works, and it starts when we visit violence preemptively upon people we believe, often without real reason, threaten us. They fight back, and we visit more violence upon more of them as a way of "sending a message." And at each step, we create more hatred, and more future acts of violence. We can nuke Fallujah, sure; but when we do so, we sow the seeds for a thousand more Fallujahs, and a hundred more 9/11s.

There is another, better way, and that is to respond proportionately -- reserving retribution simply for those who committed the atrocities, and finding ways to mitigate the festering sympathy for terrorism that pervades the Iraqi countryside. We should pray, for the sake of all our souls, that our leaders in Iraq find it.

Because, as the looming civil war makes clear, their time is running very short.

Bring it on, indeed.

The Duke factor

Did the remants of David Duke's white-supremacist voting contingent help elect a white Democrat to the Louisiana Governor's mansion?

It appears they did indeed:

New study suggests bias, ex-Duke voters key to Blanco's 2003 win

Unexpected support from the so-called "David Duke vote" was decisive in Democratic Gov. Kathleen Blanco's victory, the detailed statistical analysis by two government professors at Hamilton College in Clinton, N.Y., suggests.

White voters who had backed former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke in 1991, and who normally vote Republican, instead turned away from Jindal in the 2003 race, according to the analysis by Richard Skinner and Philip A. Klinkner. "Duke voters," particularly in north Louisiana, were enough to provide the new governor her margin, Skinner and Klinkner suggest.

However, before conservative partisans go pointing fingers about this case, it's perhaps worth noting that far more often, the racist vote in the South, and Louisiana specifically, usually favors Republicans:

In two other recent governor's races, for example, pitting a conservative white Republican -- Mike Foster -- against liberal black Democrats Cleo Fields and William Jefferson, the white's big win could arguably have been attributed to the political conservatism of the Louisiana voter.

Also worth noting:

The new study appears to confirm the fears of the Republicans who turned away from Jindal. "This analysis provides a solid case that Jindal's ethnicity was the reason a substantial number of voters who normally vote Republican, voted against Jindal," said LSU political scientist Wayne Parent. He called it the "last word" on the role Jindal's ethnic origins played in the 2003 vote.

"They applied sound political science methods to the election results and uncovered some voting patterns that should give us pause," said Lance Hill, executive director of the Southern Institute for Education and Research at Tulane University. "Jindal's Indian ethnicity played a greater role in the outcome of the election than pundits accorded it."

So, how long do you think it will be before we see another minority candidate for higher office in the South being nominated by the GOP?

Mel's movie

You may remember that I previously discussed the nature of the anti-Semitism that is likely to emanate from such films as Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ, namely, a more "attitudinal" change that would eventually condone various kinds of violence, including those against liberals generally as well as Jews.

There have been, as noted then, at least a couple of incidents in the Denver area that suggest this violence is taking concrete form -- though it must be noted that since then, things have remained fairly quiet. However, a report in today's Washington Post makes clear that the film has in fact affected attitudes about Jews in America:

The percentage of Americans who say Jews were responsible for Christ's death is rising, particularly among blacks and young people, according to a nationwide poll taken since the release of Mel Gibson's movie "The Passion of the Christ."

The poll released yesterday by the Pew Research Center in Washington is the first statistical evidence that the movie's box-office success may be associated with an increase in anti-Jewish feeling, although social scientists cautioned that cause and effect are not clear.

... The increase was especially pronounced among two groups. The portion of people younger than 30 who say Jews were responsible for killing Jesus has approximately tripled, from 10 percent in 1997 to 34 percent today. The portion of African Americans who hold that view has doubled, from 21 percent to 42 percent.

The original report from Pew makes for fascinating reading:

The increasing sense among some groups that Jews were responsible for Christ's death comes amid controversy over the Mel Gibson movie "The Passion of the Christ." A relatively large proportion of people who have seen the movie (36%) feel Jews were responsible for Christ's death. However, this is also the case among people who plan to see the movie (29%), suggesting people who are drawn to this movie may be predisposed to this opinion more than others. By comparison, just 17% of those who have no plans to see the movie believe that Jews were responsible for Christ's death.

Also noteworthy: Evangelical Protestants are easily the film's biggest audience, constituting 25 percent of those who've seen the film (compared to 20 percent for Catholics and only 11 percent for mainline Protestants).

In the meantime, the final word on The Passion may belong to South Park, which satirized the film as cultural event hilariously in last week's episode:

Kyle finally sees "The Passion" and is forced to admit Cartman has been right all along. Meanwhile many of the film's hardcore fans band together under Cartman's leadership to carry out its message.

Cartman, for those interested, dons Nazi regalia and persuades the South Park townsfolk to march down Main Street chanting for the elimination of Jews in German.

In the meantime, Stan and Kenny go to the movie and reach the same conclusion I did: "That movie sucked." They travel to Malibu to get their $18 back from Mel Gibson himself, only to discover that, as the episode's final line puts it, "Mel Gibson is a wacko loser asshole."

In a career full of amazingly offensive (yet still hilarious) satires, it's one of the most vicious -- and funniest -- South Park episodes yet.

Crumbling supremacy

Some of you may recall the World Church of the Creator, the far-right "religion" of white supremacists based in East Peoria, Illinois, who made headlines back in 1999 when one of their members, Benjamin Smith [PDF file], went on a shooting rampage in the Midwest against various minorities, includiing Jews, blacks and Asians, leaving one man dead and four wounded.

A few years ago, the WCOTC -- which had a foothold in Montana dating back to the mid-1980s -- attempted to move its operations out West, with one faction attempting to set up shop in Wyoming, while others tried to make a go of it in Montana. The Wyoming move evaporated, and now -- with Matt Hale, the group's Peoria leader, in prison for allegedly ordering a hit on a federal judge -- the Montana faction is on its last legs.

This was detailed in a recent two-part series by Allison Farrell of the Lee Newspapers' Montana bureau, the first of which, "Down to Two," describes how the WCOTC is now literally on the brink of extinction because its main source of funds -- the library of texts by its founder, Ben Klassen -- is now in the hands of civil-rights groups:

But before he left, Carl used his key to the group's storage shed in Superior and took all of their remaining publications, some $41,000 worth of books written by the group's founder, and sold them to the Montana Human Rights Network for $300. The network monitors the radical right and other hate groups.

Carl said he wanted to hamstring the group's fund-raising ability. The books, which sell for $10 apiece, were the group's major source of income.

Carl also turned over boxes and boxes of the church's internal documents and e-mails that were stored in the shed. Page after page details the group's strained alliances, infighting and petty bickering.

The documents record Deardorff's brief contact with both the National Alliance and the Ku Klux Klan, and they highlight Hale's ego. The vast majority of the documents, however, paint a picture of paranoia and organizational chaos.

The extent of the group's decline -- already long apparent, as this backgrounder makes clear -- has finally reached the point where a movement that many thought was nearly extinguished back in 1992, when Klassen committed suicide, may finally disappear into the black hole from which it emerged. As the second part of Farrell's series explains, the lingering remnants are truly pathetic:

"I think they were really overrated in terms of their size and danger,'' Balch said, adding that the rendezvous he attended was 'tiny.' ''

"Mostly, it was people hanging out and talking and eating really bad food, like Kentucky Fried Chicken and doughnuts,'' Balch said. "Nothing much went on.''

Still, this is a group that was well on its way to oblivion once before. Klassen -- who founded WCOTC in the 1970s, based in no small part on the fortune he made by inventing a kitchen applicance -- had been in declining health since the mid-1980s, and his designated successor in the early '90s was a Montana extremist named Rudy Stanko, who happened to be in prison at the time for selling rotten meat for consumption by schoolchildren (Stanko blamed his conviction on the ever-popular massive Jewish conspiracy to enslave the world). Stanko obtained much of Klassen's library, but then declined the WCOTC leadership when released from prison in 1991. Hale then stepped up to the seize the reins of the WCOTC after Klassen's 1993 suicide. Hale was largely responsible for its apparent revival in the late '90s.

As the story observes:

"The World Church of the Creator very nearly collapsed once before in 1992 after its founder, Ben Klassen, committed suicide,'' said Mark Potok, editor of the Intelligence Report, a quarterly investigative magazine the Southern Poverty Law Center publishes on the American radical right. "Really what allowed the group to come back to life was the store of old Klassen books.''

The remnants of that library, as the recent stories explain, is now in the process of being transformed into a piece of art. As Farrell explains in a followup report, two Montana artists intend to make a kind of educational piece of artwork out of the material and put it on display for the public, sort of like encasing fossils in amber.

This, in turn, has those last surviving remnants of the species to voice their displeasure in the only way they know how: By issuing not-so-oblique threats:

Another e-mail posted to the group's Web forum at www.creativityohio.com lists Holmes' home address and phone number, while another declares that Holmes' project "is one of many declarations of war against our religion.''

"We will remain legal in the face of corruption, but once all legal means are denied, a war will be unavoidable,'' the e-mail warns, in seeming contradiction to the group's Web pledge to seek merely legal redress.

The e-mail sent to Holmes calls him a "Jewish boot licker,'' and informs the Helena artist that "more (creators) will be in contact with you.''

It should be noted, of course, that a number of Montanans are already all too familiar with these kinds of threats, particularly the publication of home addresses and Web-based harassment (but then, so are some left-wing bloggers). It may be a cold comfort that WCOTC's remnants for the most appear to be so incompetent and impotent as to be incapable of doing anything other than blowing a lot of smoke.

Unfortunately, there is also the lingering example of Benjamin Smith, even now. A dying scorpion can still pack a nasty sting.

Now there's an idea

Here's a fresh right-wing meme. Look for it in upcoming GOP platforms ... rescindable, of course, upon the (heaven forbid) election of any Democrat to the presidency ...

Unfounded Accusations Against Presidents Should Be A Felony

There needs to be a law passed where any person who disrespects the "Office of the Presidency" by making false accusations and spreading deliberate rumors about the president, should be charged with a felony or at the very least a high misdemeanor.

Damn, if this had been the law in 1998, every Freeper on the planet -- and about half of Congress -- would have been behind bars.

Short memories

Oh, and speaking of media whores ...

Mickey Kaus recently took exception to one of the more astute of Josh Marshall's already keen insights, in Marshall's recent post on Clarke and Condi:

Perhaps it goes without saying, but let's say it: It was as obvious four years ago as it is today that the most potent threats to America are asymmetric threats, particularly forms of attack that cannot easily be tied back to particular states which we can punish with our conventional military superiority. [Emphasis added.]

To which Kaus dimly responds:

Huh? Clearly the Bush administration failed, as WaPo's Robin Wright puts it, to "take seriously enough the danger from al Qaeda." (Duh!) They should just admit it. But to say this sort of threat was as obvious four years ago as it was after the World Trade Center was destroyed is idiotic, and reflects a counterproductive, bloggish anti-Bush intellectual overstretch.

Evidently, Kaus never heard tell of the Oklahoma City bombing.

You know -- the event that, before Sept. 11, was far and away the most significant terrorist attack on American soil. An event that, in fact, heralded to world the fact that the modern face of terrorism comprised "asymmetric threats, particularly forms of attack that cannot easily be tied back to particular states which we can punish with our conventional military superiority."

But then, we already knew that Bush and Co. don't take domestic terrorism seriously either.

The Horse, of course

I know a lot of people have been wondering what's going on with our old friend, Media Whores Online, the spunky Web site that for the past several years has been striking terror in the hearts of the sell-out Kewl Kids of the Beltway.

"Out to pasture"? Does that mean -- gulp -- that The Horse is no more?

People have to appreciate just what MWO accomplished in a few short years. Operated simply by a regular citizen, it became the first liberal activist Web site to attract a mass audience -- one, it must be noted, that responded to its pleas by sending out thousands of scathing (and, evidently, sometimes nasty) e-mails to various media miscreants.

MWO demonstrated the power of free speech in an open democracy, and in many ways paved the way for the development of the liberal blogosphere. I know that many of us now in the blogging biz were first able, by watching MWO, to see just how much could be accomplished by simply disseminating important information and working it out of the vast wormholes that the nation's corporate media have become.

Call it the democratization of the media, if you will; the Web has become an important way for important information to be kept alive when it might otherwise be buried. The traditional media did not like it, particularly those from the conservative realm. Tucker Carlson to this day makes rueful references to Media Whores Online.

And the big mystery, of course, was Who's really behind MWO? Because it couldn't just be an ordinary pissed-off citizen. That would cede waaaay too much power to ordinary people. The very concept blew Beltway minds like so many overinflated balloons. (Remember the limp but snide profile in Salon that attempted to answer the question, and just wound up embarrassing itself?)

In any event, MWO has been taking increasingly long vacations in the past year or so, culminating in the most recent hiatus announcement. A lot of people are wondering if we've lost the valued MWO voice for good.

I happen to have a long-running correspondence with the person primarily responsible for MWO's content, and so I wrote and inquired about what was up. The answer, to put it most simply, is that real life outside the Web intruded on MWO's online career, as it does for most of us.

Without revealing too much of what was explained to me in confidence, I think it's safe to say that MWO's editor became unable to post as often one might have liked to be effective. There is also a bandwidth issue, but putting out a tin cup is not on the agenda.

The editor explained to me that MWO hopes to return before the election, bigger and badder than ever, weighing in when it counts most. It may return as early as May ("at the rate the admin is going with their lies and corruption!").

Let's all hope so. That may be a horse of a different color, but it's the one many of us rode in on.

Credibility gap

More corroboration for Richard Clarke:

Top Focus Before 9/11 Wasn't on Terrorism: Rice Speech Cited Missile Defense

I guess now we'll be hearing that the Washington Post just wants to sell newspapers.

Maybe this will explain that seven-month gap -- you know, the time between Clarke's first request for a top-level meeting on al Qaeda and the actual meeting. Missile defense came first.

Josh Marshall has more.

The true shape of terrorism

One of the significant points made by Richard Clarke -- and largely obscured in the detritus of the ad-hominem attacks on his testimony -- is that the Bush administration, both before and after Sept. 11, has displayed an abysmal failure to grasp the real nature of terrorism.

It started off well enough, attacking the one state (Afghanistan) that was known to support al Qaeda and harbor their camps. But that military orientation in the "war on terror" obviously dominated the Bush strategy both before and after 9/11, and led ultimately to the adventure in Iraq that has proven not only to be an ever-deepening quagmire with a increasingly mounting toll in American lives, but has, as Clark asserts, actually weakened the real fight against terrorism.

A military orientation, as I discussed recently, almost perforce orients the "war on terror" to formulating attacks on those states -- the "axis of evil" -- that support terrorism. And the reality, as I've explained at length, is that terrorism as a phemonenon is not likely to be defeated under those terms.

The reason is what I've called the "corpuscular" nature of modern terrorism -- it does not need a state for support, and in fact can, as in Oklahoma City, manifest itself simply as a hostile entity within a given state. Home-grown right-wing extremists are every bit a manifestation of the same phenomenon as al Qaeda, and in fact not only share a great deal in common with them ideologically and strategically, but have in many cases (as in the anthrax attacks) clearly piggybacked off of al Qaeda terrorism to create an "echo" effect.

A fascinating piece by terrorism expert Jessica Stern, published in the respected journal Foreign Affairs in July/August 2003, was recently brought to my attention by a colleague because it provides some disturbing details about the rising likelihood of an actual coalescence of American right-wing extremists and Islamist right-wing extremists, including al Qaeda:

The Protean Enemy

Stern points out that there have been several indications that American terrorists are now commingling with Middle Eastern extremists in, of all places, the no-man's land of South America:

The triborder region of South America has become the world's new Libya, a place where terrorists with widely disparate ideologies -- Marxist Colombian rebels, American white supremacists, Hamas, Hezbollah, and others -- meet to swap tradecraft. Authorities now worry that the more sophisticated groups will invite the American radicals to help them. Moneys raised for terrorist organizations in the United States are often funneled through Latin America, which has also become an important stopover point for operatives entering the United States. Reports that Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez is allowing Colombian rebels and militant Islamist groups to operate in his country are meanwhile becoming more credible, as are claims that Venezuela's Margarita Island has become a terrorist haven.

As these developments suggest and Tenet confirms, "mixing and matching of capabilities, swapping of training, and the use of common facilities" have become the hallmark of professional terrorists today. This fact has been borne out by the leader of a Pakistani jihadi group affiliated with al Qaeda, who recently told me that informal contacts between his group and Hezbollah, Hamas, and others have become common. Operatives with particular skills loan themselves out to different groups, with expenses being covered by the charities that formed to fund the fight against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan.

Not only that, but al Qaeda is apparently modeling its own structure on the one adopted by American right-wing extremists in the 1990s -- namely, "leaderless resistance," the splitting up of organizations into a remote network of terrorist cells, so that if one cell is apprehended or stymied, the others remain intact.

Al Qaeda seems to have learned that in order to evade detection in the West, it must adopt some of the qualities of a "virtual network": a style of organization used by American right-wing extremists for operating in environments (such as the United States) that have effective law enforcement agencies. American antigovernment groups refer to this style as "leaderless resistance." The idea was popularized by Louis Beam, the self-described ambassador-at-large, staff propagandist, and "computer terrorist to the Chosen" for Aryan Nations, an American neo-Nazi group. Beam writes that hierarchical organization is extremely dangerous for insurgents, especially in "technologically advanced societies where electronic surveillance can often penetrate the structure, revealing its chain of command." In leaderless organizations, however, "individuals and groups operate independently of each other, and never report to a central headquarters or single leader for direction or instruction, as would those who belong to a typical pyramid organization." Leaders do not issue orders or pay operatives; instead, they inspire small cells or individuals to take action on their own initiative.

This form of resistance often devolves from the larger five- to seven-person cell to smaller, intensely active spin-offs, ultimately manifesting itself in the form of "lone wolf" terrorists like Buford Furrow, Benjamin Smith or Richard Reid.

Lone-wolf terrorists typically act out of a mixture of ideology and personal grievances. For example, Mir Aimal Kansi, the Pakistani national who shot several CIA employees in 1993, described his actions as "between jihad and tribal revenge" -- jihad against America for its support of Israel and revenge against the CIA, which he apparently felt had mistreated his father during Afghanistan's war against the Soviets. Meanwhile, John Allen Muhammad, one of the alleged "Washington snipers," reportedly told a friend that he endorsed the September 11 attacks and disapproved of U.S. policy toward Muslim states, but he appears to have been principally motivated by anger at his ex-wife for keeping him from seeing their children, and some of his victims seem to have been personal enemies. As increasingly powerful weapons become more and more available, lone wolves, who face few political constraints, will become more of a threat, whatever their primary motivation.

The Internet has also greatly facilitated the spread of "virtual" subcultures and has substantially increased the capacity of loosely networked terrorist organizations. For example, Beam's essay on the virtues of "leaderless resistance" has long been available on the Web and, according to researcher Michael Reynolds, has been highlighted by radical Muslim sites. Islamist Web sites also offer on-line training courses in the production of explosives and urge visitors to take action on their own. The "encyclopedia of jihad," parts of which are available on-line, provides instructions for creating "clandestine activity cells," with units for intelligence, supply, planning and preparation, and implementation.

The obstacles these Web sites pose for Western law enforcement are obvious. In one article on the "culture of jihad" available on-line, a Saudi Islamist urges bin Laden's sympathizers to take action without waiting for instructions. "I do not need to meet the Sheikh and ask his permission to carry out some operation," he writes, "the same as I do not need permission to pray, or to think about killing the Jews and the Crusaders that gather on our lands." Nor does it make any difference whether bin Laden is alive or dead: "There are a thousand bin Ladens in this nation. We should not abandon our way, which the Sheikh has paved for you, regardless of the existence of the Sheikh or his absence." And according to U.S. government officials, al Qaeda now uses chat rooms to recruit Latino Muslims with U.S. passports, in the belief that they will arouse less suspicion as operatives than would Arab-Americans. Finally, as the late neo-Nazi William Pierce once told me, using the Web to recruit "leaderless resisters" offers still another advantage: it attracts better-educated young people than do more traditional methods, such as radio programs.

And, as Stern observes, there have been other documented examples of an increasing overlap between right-wing extremists and Islamist radicals:

Focusing on economic and social alienation may help explain why such a surprising array of groups has proved willing to join forces with al Qaeda. Some white supremacists and extremist Christians applaud al Qaeda's rejectionist goals and may eventually contribute to al Qaeda missions. Already a Swiss neo-Nazi named Albert Huber has called for his followers to join forces with Islamists. Indeed, Huber sat on the board of directors of the Bank al Taqwa, which the U.S. government accuses of being a major donor to al Qaeda. Meanwhile, Matt Hale, leader of the white-supremacist World Church of the Creator, has published a book indicting Jews and Israelis as the real culprits behind the attacks of September 11. These groups, along with Horst Mahler (a founder of the radical leftist German group the Red Army Faction), view the September 11 attacks as the first shot in a war against globalization, a phenomenon that they fear will exterminate national cultures. Leaderless resisters drawn from the ranks of white supremacists or other groups are not currently capable of carrying out massive attacks on their own, but they may be if they join forces with al Qaeda.

The important upshot of this is that terrorism is best attacked as the highly amorphous, incredibly volatile thing that it is -- and that a strategy that aims for the root causes both abroad and at home is fundamental to winning the "war." A military-driven operation will seek to attack states where it is believed to be nurtured, with the likely effect being to only drive more and more individuals into the radicalized camps:

In countries where extremist religious schools promote terrorism, Washington should help develop alternative schools rather than attempt to persuade the local government to shut down radical madrasahs. In Pakistan, many children end up at extremist schools because their parents cannot afford the alternatives; better funding for secular education could therefore make a positive difference.

The appeal of radical Islam to alienated youth living in the West is perhaps an even more difficult problem to address. Uneasiness with liberal values, discomfort with uncertain identities, and resentment of the privileged are perennial problems in modern societies. What is new today is that radical leaders are using the tools of globalization to construct new, transnational identities based on death cults, turning grievances and alienation into powerful weapons. To fight these tactics will require getting the input not just of moderate Muslims, but of radical Islamist revivalists who oppose violence.

Besides countering the milieu in which terrorism arises, winning also means adopting flexible strategies that rely primarily on intelligence and the rule of international law, with an emphasis on eliminating their ability to obtain effective weapons of mass destruction. This means breaking up networks and infiltrating their ranks, the approach that appeared to work for law enforcement in its dealings with the American extremist right after 1995:

Especially important is the need to continue upgrading security at vulnerable nuclear sites, many of which, in Russia and other former Soviet states, are still vulnerable to theft. The global system of disease monitoring -- a system sorely tested during the sars epidemic -- should also be upgraded, since biological attacks may be difficult to distinguish from natural outbreaks. Only by matching the radical innovation shown by professional terrorists such as al Qaeda -- and by showing a similar willingness to adapt and adopt new methods and new ways of thinking -- can the United States and its allies make themselves safe from the ongoing threat of terrorist attack.

The Bush strategy, in fact, has failed in nearly all these regards. Richard Clarke's point, ultimately, underscores the extent to which the Bush administration has failed to adequately confronted the reality of terrorism: "When the president starts doing things that risk American lives, then loyalty to him has to be put aside. I think the way he has responded to al Qaeda, both before 9/11 by doing nothing, and by what he's done after 9/11 has made us less safe."

Condi Rice and the Great Bush Power Grab

It's hard to tell whether the White House is simply playing a kind of shell game, but it's clear that a larger agenda beyond even covering up its failures to protect the nation from terrorist attacks is at play in the refusal to let National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice testify under oath before the commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks.

Closer examination, in fact, reveals that the agenda at work is an unprecedented expansion of presidential powers, so that it becomes in effect unanswerable to any power other than the voters every four years.

Rice herself was rolling in the obfuscation this weekend on CBS' 60 Minutes when she explained why she just couldn't testify before the 9/11 commission:

"Nothing would be better, from my point of view, than to be able to testify. I would really like to do that. But there is an important principle involved here: It is a long-standing principle that sitting national security advisers do not testify before the Congress."

As Atrios points out, there are multiple problems with this explanation, not the least of which is that the 9/11 commission is not specifically a creature of the Congress -- it was created as an independent body with key members named by the president himself. The traditional understanding of executive privilege is that it extends only to congressional inquiries.

Executive privilege, in fact, deals only in situations in which presidential advisers are compelled to testify before Congress. Of course, national security advisers have in fact testified before Congress on multiple occasions -- but they rarely are compelled to do so.

In other words, Rice is not only arguing against being compelled to testify. She is arguing that any kind of appearance, compelled or otherwise, before the commission might endanger the executive privileges of the president. She's making the preposterous claim that the White House must refuse an invitation to appear -- even though, in her words, they would like to testify [yeh, right] -- because doing so would undermine its power to resist subpoenas at a later date.

What is clearly happening in the Rice case is that Bush administration is seeking to expand the principles of executive privilege to the point where it simply has no accountability to anyone other than the voters. It marks, in other words, a radical rearrangement of the constitutional separation of powers. This is not a new agenda -- and in fact, it has been one of the consistent operating principles of this administration since the day it took power.

In a way, it marks the revenge of the Nixonites -- because at its core, it is a campaign to overturn the Watergate-era precedents and subsequent reforms that placed certain executive-branch functions under the potential purview of the Congress.

The core of these is the Supreme Court's ruling in United States v. Nixon, which first established the limits of executive privilege:

However, neither the doctrine of separation of powers, nor the need for confidentiality of high level communications, without more, can sustain an absolute, unqualified Presidential privilege of immunity from judicial process under all circumstances. The President's need for complete candor and objectivity from advisers calls for great deference from the court. However, when the privilege depends solely on the broad, undifferentiated claim of public interest in the confidentiality of such conversations, a confrontation with other values arises. Absent a claim of need to protect military, diplomatic, or sensitive national security secrets, we find it difficult to accept the argument that even the very important interest in confidentiality of Presidential communications is significantly diminished by production of such material for in camera inspection with all the protection that a district court will be obliged to provide.

As it happens, none other than Bush's Solicitor General, Ted Olson, played a central role in the subsequent struggles in the early 1980s between Congress and the Reagan administration over the ramifications of this ruling. As I mentioned recently (and detailed in a 2001 Salon piece), Olson was so eager to test the issue of executive privilege that he forced EPA administrator Anne Burford to assert it over documents which, it later emerged, were not covered by the law.

Olson also filed a civil lawsuit that was promptly dismissed by a federal judge, as recounted in this 1998 article about executive privilege (in the context of Bill Clinton's attempts to assert it):

In a case known as United States v. The House of Representatives of the United States, the Reagan administration sought in 1982 to clarify and bolster the doctrine of executive privilege in light of a congressional subpoena of environmental policy documents.

U.S. District Court Judge John Lewis Smith Jr. would have none of it. The case, he concluded, demanded a political accommodation rather than a new body of case law: "Courts have a duty to avoid unnecessarily deciding constitutional issues."

Olson, in the course of congressional testimony that attempted to nail down the nature of his fatally flawed advice to President Reagan, was so egregiously evasive that he shortly thereafter became the subject of an independent counsel's investigation of him for possible perjury. The counsel later exercised real prosecutorial restraint when she decided that, though Olson's testimony was "misleading and disingenuous," it did not rise to the level of criminally prosecutable perjury. (Olson's cohort Kenneth Starr, of course, was never accused of such restraint later in his dealings with Bill Clinton.) It also helped that the IC's investigation had been sharply limited by the narrow referral from Olson's superior (and Federalist Society colleague) Edwin Meese.

What was most noteworthy about the investigation, however, was that Olson sued to stop it, arguing that the independent-counsel statute itself was unconstitutional. The case -- known as Morrison v. Olson -- made it all the way to the Supreme Court (with some help from Olson's Federalist Society comrade, Laurence Silberman,), where it was handed an ignominious 8-1 defeat.

However, the lone dissenter was Antonin Scalia -- and his dissent clearly reflects the core thinking of the current administration's views regarding executive privilege, resurrecting even Olson's old arguments in the 1982 civil lawsuit. Scalia essentially argues from an absolutist view of the separation-of-powers doctrine, giving the executive branch unimpeded purview over its realm.

Is it unthinkable that the President should have such exclusive power, even when alleged crimes by him or his close associates are at issue? No more so than that Congress should have the exclusive power of legislation, even when what is at issue is its own exemption from the burdens of certain laws. … No more so than that this Court should have the exclusive power to pronounce the final decision on justiciable cases and controversies, even those pertaining to the constitutionality of a statute reducing the salaries of the Justices.

This was a clear attack on the currently standing principle of the separation of powers, established in 1952 in Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer, allowing noncompartmentalization of powers, and a certain amount of overlap. Justice Jackson in his concurrence voiced the underlying principle: "While the Constitution diffuses power the better to secure liberty, it also contemplates that practice will integrate the dispersed powers into a workable government. It enjoins upon its branches separateness but interdependence, autonomy but reciprocity."

Scalia, however, contends that his absolutist approach is what the Framers had in mind, while announcing his disdain for the evolved body of law in the interim:

The ad hoc approach to constitutional adjudication has real attraction, even apart from its work-saving potential. It is guaranteed to produce a result, in every case, that will make a majority of the Court happy with the law. The law is, by definition, precisely what the majority thinks, taking all things into account, it ought to be. I prefer to rely upon the judgment of the wise men who constructed our system, and of the people who approved it, and of two centuries of history that have shown it to be sound. Like it or not, that judgment says, quite plainly, that "[t]he executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States."

The Bush administration -- particularly under Olson's guidance as Solicitor General -- has hewn closely to this reasoning throughout its tenure, particularly when claiming that the records of Vice President Dick Cheney, in his meetings with energy-company officials while plotting out the nation's energy policy, are off-limits.

The Bush legal and PR team, in defending Cheney, cites the well-established principle behind executive privilege, namely, that (as Warren Burger put it in U.S. v Nixon) "the President's need for complete candor and objectivity from advisers calls for great deference from the court." However, Cheney's claim of privilege runs head-on into the same ruling in its insistence that "when the privilege depends solely on the broad, undifferentiated claim of public interest in the confidentiality of such conversations, a confrontation with other values arises."

As John Dean observes in this recent piece in FindLaw about the Cheney case -- which now looms before the Supreme Court -- the Bush legal team is in fact seeking an unprecedented expansion of presidential powers, to the point of being nearly unaccountable:

What are the implications if Cheney does win this case, and Scalia's bright-line rule prevails? For a sense of them, it's useful to look to Judge Sullivan's well-reasoned opinion (and remember, Judge Sullivan has been nominated to judgeships by two Republicans -- as well as one Democrat).

Judge Sullivan wrote that "The implications ... are stunning," for Cheney's position is "untenable." He gave a few key examples of what accepting the bright line rule would mean:

Any action by Congress or the Judiciary that intrudes on the president's ability to recommend legislation to Congress or get advice from Cabinet members in any way would necessarily violate the Constitution. The Freedom of Information Act and other open government laws would therefore constitute an unconstitutional interference with Executive authority. Any action by a court or Congress that infringes on any other Article II power of the President, for example, the President's role as Commander in Chief of the armed forces and the national security concerns that derive from that role, would violate the Constitution. Any congressional or judicial ruling that infringes on the President's role in foreign affairs, would violate the Constitution.

The result, Judge Sullivan argued persuasively, would be to "eviscerate the understanding of checks and balances between the three branches of government on which our constitutional order depends." In other words, it would be to forever change the government, and the system our Founders envisioned.

What is noteworthy about the Bush power grab is that the administration has leveraged the "war on terror" specifically as a tool for expanding its powers. As I've explored previously, its assertion of military powers for arresting and controlling civilians suspected of abetting the "war on terror" under the guise of its "enemy combatant" status and military tribunals is based on a similar worldview -- namely, that the executive branch's powers under wartime are virtually illimitable, and not accountable to any civilian court.

Recall, if you will, Olson's logic in defending the secret court system underpinning the Bush 'war on terror', as recounted by the Washington Post, in which he described the criteria that would be applied in determining who's an "enemy combatant":

"There won't be 10 rules that trigger this or 10 rules that end this," Olson said in the interview. "There will be judgments and instincts and evaluations and implementations that have to be made by the executive that are probably going to be different from day to day, depending on the circumstances."

And what's to restrain the president? Only the prospect of losing re-election:

Administration officials, however, imply that the main check on the president’s performance in wartime is political -- that if the public perceives his approach to terrorism is excessive or ineffective, it will vote him out of office.

“At the end of the day in our constitutional system, someone will have to decide whether that [decision to designate someone an enemy combatant] is a right or just decision,” Olson said. “Who will finally decide that? Will it be a judge, or will it be the president of the United States, elected by the people, specifically to perform that function, with the capacity to have the information at his disposal with the assistance of those who work for him?”

The obdurate handling of Rice's testimony before the 9/11 commission is part and parcel of this power grab: Bush, Cheney, Olson and Co. all see any concession of testimony before any other body, congressional or otherwise, a concession of its constitutional powers.

It's all about the Imperial Presidency. The principle -- just as it was for Nixon -- is the power of the president and his advisers to lie, fumble, and even break the law without consequence. Just because he's president.

The concern that Americans might have about getting to the truth of how 9/11 happened, especially in the way of preventing its recurrence, must take a back seat to such principles, evidently.

And who knows? They may even have a leg to stand on, legally speaking, in denying Rice's sworn testimony to the committee. Politically speaking, it's more difficult, given that Rice has been out there on every network imaginable running down Richard Clarke and spreading, well, intriguing explanations about just why she can't testify.

You'd think that a team as politically savvy as the Rove Squad would recognize that drawing a highly visible distinction between what Rice is saying publicly and what she might be forced to say on a witness stand is not exactly a good idea.

After all, don't you wonder why she can explain it all on national TV -- but not under oath?

[Cross-posted at The American Street.]